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LinMin Envisions Cheap Provisions
By Alex Handy

May 14, 2008 — The bigger the network, the more often someone needs a fresh install. And after a while, it just doesn’t make sense to even go near the machine being installed. The ideal setup shouldn’t require such trips away from the ops desk.

Now there’s a new option on the provisioning scene, one from Redwood City, Calif., startup LinMin. The company’s focus is on an affordable provisioning server that can capture both Linux and Windows installations.

Once captured, said Laurent Gharda, founder and CEO of LinMin, each disk image can be customized and squirreled away for later use. Since the retinue of supported remotely installable operating systems includes Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, LinMin can handle production, deployment and end-user installations.

“On the client side, the user gets presented with a list and then chooses what to install,” said Gharda. Thus, if an admin actually wanders down to the broken server and finds he’s forgotten the latest Red Hat DVD, he’s not stuck walking back to the office or downloading a questionable image online.

For servers, individual Linux and Windows installations can be tweaked to include the various server components needed, such as Apache Tomcat, JBoss Application Server or PostgreSQL. LinMin will support Windows Server 2008 at launch, said Gharda, and is an Ubuntu 8.04 silver partner.

LinMin can also suck down the contents of a system, given its MAC address. For crashed systems, this can provide the quickest road to recovering the data that’s gone sideways.

Gharda openly brags that his company’s pricing scheme is designed to pull the rug out from under the provisioning software market. “The pricing structure is pretty radical,” said Gharda. “It comes out to around US$3 a system, compared to $100 a year to $500 a year per system” others charge, he said.

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