LinMin customers requested the API for different business reasons but with common objectives: automation, cost reduction, quality and business agility. Web hosting and dedicated server hosting companies want their customer signup and billing software to automatically trigger the provisioning of systems with the customer’s choice of operating system and configurations. Providers of Cloud Computing environments, be they public, virtual public or private, need to automate the provisioning of the “commodity hardware infrastructure layer” and its subsequent repurposing for optimized demand elasticity. Corporate data center customers need a way to enable their load balancing, monitoring, discovery/availability or systems management software to quickly repurpose available systems. Human Resources management systems can even trigger the provisioning of office or engineering desktops or laptops for new employees.

“IPNetZone has come to rely on LinMin for both the provisioning and imaging of servers in our various co-location sites,” said James Karimi, CTO of IPNetZone, a New York-based provider of security, monitoring and hosting services. “LinMin’s new API will enable us to offer even better responsiveness to customer requests for additional and/or differently-configured Linux and Windows servers.”

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes.  LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 release.  LinMin provisions over 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.

“Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone solution didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. With the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. “LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments: automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system comes to life, the agents identify themselves to the respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other services running in the environment. Customers like that.”

The API offers both a graphical user interface that can be integrated into other Web-based applications, as well as a traditional programmatic interface, giving customers maximum flexibility.  The example GUI can also be used as a “teaching mechanism” with the option to view in real time the API-compliant commands that get issued to and the responses received from LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning.  This enables software developers to quickly develop API calls with real-time debugging, reducing implementation times.

Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally-developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning “roles” (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows Web server or Ubuntu office desktop). These provisioning roles can be programmatically assigned to specific systems along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.

LBMP is available for purchase and download at www.linmin.com.  LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is priced at $250 for 10 client systems, $1,000 for 100 client systems and $1,875 for 250 clients systems. Annual subscriptions are also available for $100, $400 and $750 respectively.

About LinMin:
LinMin provides software that remotely provisions and images Linux and Windows on servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines.  LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP) is the industry’s only truly affordable system provisioning and imaging solution that can be implemented by IT organizations of any size with very limited budgets, while its capabilities match or exceed solutions costing fifty times more.  LinMin is based in Redwood City, CA with development and QA offices in Menlo Park and San Rafael, CA. For more information, please visit www.linmin.com. Please send media inquiries to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed