New Products

Open Country hops on the 64-bit bandwagon with release of the OCM Universal Linux System Management Suite, Version 3.1. This systems management application now supports Intel's Itanium 2 processor line. OCM's raison d'�re is to “help companies with widely distributed Linux investments to easily discover their entire inventory of hardware/software investments, then track installations and updates, deploy security patches, simplify repetitive management tasks, and respond effectively to changing computing needs”. Open Country further credits its Web-based architecture with optimizing expertise and reducing labor costs over traditional client-server architectures. In addition, besides the mainline Linux distributions, OCM supports many distributions less common to North America, such as Asianux, CS2C, Red Flag, Turbolinux, Haansoft and several others.

www.opencountry.com

Arkeia Software recently brought forth the release of Arkeia Network Backup Version 6, the firm's flagship data-protection solution for medium- to large-sized networks. Arkeia says that the main intent of Version 6 is to “improve backup performance and increase flexibility for distributed infrastructures such as organizations with Storage Area Networks”. Some of the specific new features include a media server for SAN option that enables LAN-free backup for SAN environments, remote drive management for LANs and WANs to centralize the management of remote servers and networks and to consolidate and share drives across the LAN, an integrated virtual tape library option to leverage the performance and flexibility of disk technology, and a disk-to-disk-to-tape option to shorten backup/restore times and to create granular tiered storage policies. A trial version is available at Arkeia's Web site.

www.arkeia.com

Okay media packrats, this one's for you. Interact-TV has just released a line of home entertainment servers, called ProTelly, which will permit you to stash your DVDs and audio CDs in the basement for good. The products range from the the baseline ProTelly Media Server that can hold up to 150 DVDs to the ProRAID, which, with 3TB of protected storage, can hold up to 600 DVDs. All ProTelly products include features such as a subscription-free PVR, video library with a “save DVD” function, as well as music and photo libraries. In addition, it has features that Interact-TV says people in the home networking and home automation fields are looking for, namely component video out with 720p and 1080i, Gigabit Ethernet and MPEG-2 video encoding. Naturally, Linux is inside, making all of the enjoyment possible.

www.interact-tv.com

The OpenVZ Project recently announced that its OpenVZ OS-level server virtualization solution, which is built on Linux, is now available for systems using Power 64-bit processors. Like other virtualization solutions, OpenVZ allows one to create isolated, independent, secure virtual environments on a single physical server in order to achieve better server utilization and ensure that applications do not conflict. However, the OpenVZ Project asserts that its advantages lie not only in its single rather than its multiple kernels but also in its “portability across different architectures since 95% of the code is platform-independent”. The OpenVZ Project is an Open Source community project supported by the firm SWsoft, which utilizes OpenVZ as the heart of its commercial virtualization product, dubbed Virtuozzo. The OpenVZ software, complete with Power support, can be downloaded from the project's Web site.

www.openvz.org