Xandros announced “BridgeWays” – a new suite of next generation, cross-platform and cross-service, workflow-driven and rules-based, management products and integration frameworks. The suite enables data center managers and system administrators, with typical Windows administration skills, to configure and support an optimal mix of Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms, systems, and services in today's demanding and diverse computing environments. Without such sophisticated “bridging tools”, a heterogeneous computing environment can devolve into an unmanageable and costly-to-administer set of silo infrastructure components.
BridgeWays marks a milestone in Xandros’ strategy of leveraging its award-winning desktop, server, and mixed-environment-integration technologies into a complete set of Linux platforms and management products. This end-to-end product line offers powerful Linux desktop and server platforms that uniquely fit today’s IT environment, as well as the tools to centrally administer the overall mixed-platform infrastructure as a rationalized “whole”.
Some Xandros BridgeWays integration technologies made their debut in the Xandros Standard Server, which won a Best Linux Product Award last spring. These technologies included the revolutionary “Managed Community” and workflow-driven application dependency management tools that help prevent problems from arising, versus the traditional approach of depending on Linux certified engineers and support personnel to resolve problems after the fact.
“BridgeWays conjures up images of bridging an enterprise’s typical silo-oriented environments and single-point-solution management tools into a single-pane-of-glass management, deployment, and monitoring console or 'captain’s bridge',” said Andreas Typaldos, Xandros CEO. “The name further conjures up images of easy “pathways” to connect all elements in the enterprise infrastructure in a seamless and intuitive way. This allows the typical enterprise infrastructure to grow in accordance with heterogeneous business needs, without imposing the false and forced homogeneity of a single standard. At the same time, it is managed as if it was in fact a homogeneous single-platform-type whole.”
“These cross-platform, cross-service, and cross-domain management tools represent the final stage in the realization of Xandros’ end-to-end next generation Linux solutions strategy,” continued Andreas Typaldos. “This strategy seeks to leverage Xandros’ historical leadership in value-add technology and architecture, what we like to refer to as the ’Xandros technology DNA’, to facilitate server and desktop co-existence and cross-platform management in today’s typical mixed Windows and Linux or Unix enterprise environment. Platform co-existence in these heterogeneous enterprise environments has become ever more difficult, since they employ a diversity of servers and desktops (Windows, Sun Solaris, Unix, Red Hat, Oracle, Novell, and other Linux), each managed by a different tool running on a particular host (Windows, Linux or Unix). At the same time, traditional infrastructure system management tools and consoles (IBM Tivoli, Microsoft MMC, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, BMC, and others) can benefit from integration and feeds, through tools like BridgeWays that tie such silo-managed platforms into the general infrastructure fabric.”
Today’s IT organizations unnecessarily suffer from higher administration costs, inefficient business processes through lack of integration, and the inability to benefit from high-value functions like compliance, best practices, business-rules based optimization, and application-dependencies management. For these reasons, Xandros’ mission is to unify, to manage/eliminate complexity, and to highlight the business process over the physical/technical layers, so as to extract the business benefit that IT can deliver.
Slated to Begin Delivery in Spring 2007:
Xandros BridgeWays for Red Hat, Oracle, Xandros and Debian, with Windows Active Directory Integration, currently in beta, will ship in Spring 2007. These tools apply the award-winning Xandros Managed Community model and automated application-dependencies-management workflow to the set-up, configuration-management, and on-going administration of the most popular Linux servers and desktops. In addition, their sophisticated multi-tier architecture allows the management console to run on either Windows, or Linux. From that console, a Windows-trained administrator can then cross-manage servers, and cross-manage services running on those servers, regardless of the server on which the services may be running. BridgeWays supports all of the key hardware architectures, and the initial modules slated for its inaugural release are:
* BridgeWays Server Management Edition
* BridgeWays Deployment and Management Edition
* BridgeWays Systems Monitoring Edition
* BridgeWays Storage Management Edition