DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / MARCH 3, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 9 ( Previous Article )   ( Table of Contents )   ( Next Article )

Systems/Enterprise:

MOUNTAIN VIEW DATA READY TO SUPPORT GRID BLADE SERVERS

This acquisition of award-winning server provisioning and management software enables Mountain View Data customers to rapidly deploy, configure and manage entire Grid racks of Linux, Windows PC servers and Grid blade servers over the network.

Mountain View Data Inc, a provider of server management software and network storage software, today announced the acquisition of TurboLinux's PowerCockpit, a leading-edge solution for deploying and provisioning software, and for managing groups of Linux and Windows PC servers and blade servers over the network and in grid computing environments.

"The acquisition of PowerCockpit positions Mountain View Data (MVD) as a leader in the emerging clustered computing market. PowerCockpit was developed by a world-class team. It truly is a software masterpiece," said Cliff Miller, the company's president and CEO. Miller co-founded TurboLinux in 1992 and served as its president and CEO until 2000, when he left to establish Mountain View Data. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"As demand increases for racks of commodity PC servers that host content, applications and services, enterprises of all sizes must be able to quickly deploy and re-deploy several types of servers -- and then manage the software on those servers," Miller said. "PowerCockpit dramatically simplifies that process. What makes Mountain View Data special, though, is the ability to combine its other software components -- such as network attached storage and real-time data synchronization -- with PowerCockpit. Nobody else has such a complete offering."

In 2002, the Boston-based Aberdeen Group published a report entitled: "An Evaluation of Linux-Based Software Deployment and Management Solutions," and PowerCockpit was ranked at the top of the available provisioning products.

"As clusters of Intel-based PC servers become commonplace in corporate America, good deployment, provisioning and management software for clusters will be in high demand," commented Bill Claybrook an analyst at Aberdeen. "Mountain View Data's recent acquisition of the PowerCockpit software and its integration of MVD's existing network storage software will broaden the scope of the product and give it even more appeal in the cluster provisioning and management software market."

The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, which cooperates with the National Institute of Health on such projects as brain tumor visualization and works with the Department of Energy on combustion and computational fluid dynamics projects, uses PowerCockpit on its clusters. Greg Jones, associate director of the Institute stated, "We have been using PowerCockpit to deploy and manage software on a 32-node cluster. We've found the software to be rock solid. PowerCockpit saves us time and hassle so that we can focus on the computing."

In the days following the acquisition, Mountain View Data reports that customers have been signing up for new orders and new partnerships have been created. MVD has licensed PowerCockpit to CoroSoft, which will embed the technology into its products and will work with MVD to develop and market PowerCockpit. According to Julian Elliott, CEO of CoroSoft, "We are very pleased to be working with MVD. PowerCockpit is the industry-leading provisioning solution, and CoroSoft Director is the leading solution for virtualizing complex datacenter infrastructures. The synergy between PWC and CoroSoft creates a new level of datacenter automation that significantly reduces IT costs and improves application service levels."

About PowerCockpit

PowerCockpit is leading-edge software for deploying, provisioning and managing clusters of Intel-based servers running the Windows or Linux operating system. It won the "Best-in-Show Product Excellence Award for best Network Server Application" at the Linux World Expo in February 2002 in New York. There are currently about 15 corporate sites and research centers that have deployed PowerCockpit, and over 50 others in various stages of evaluation.

Mountain View Data is establishing a developers program so that third parties can create PowerCockpit module applications for vertical markets.

PowerCockpit version 2.0 will be available in mid-March 2003 from Mountain View Data.

About Mountain View Data Inc

Mountain View Data Inc delivers cluster server management software and advanced storage software. Top-tier server manufacturers, telecom leaders and system integrators in Asia and the United States are integrating Mountain View Data software into their network storage products and services. Mountain View Data was established in October 2000, and has offices in San Francisco, Tokyo and Beijing.