Mandriva Linux, formerly Mandrake Linux, on Sept. 14 will ship a major upgrade to its business server-oriented Linux distribution. The company claims that Mandriva Corporate Server 4 is fully compliant with the LSB (Linux Standard Base), and therefore should have interoperability with products from other LSB-compliant vendors.
Mandriva was once best known for its popular community-driven Linux. Since 2005 though, CEO François Bancilhon has been pointing the company towards the business market. This release of Mandriva Corporate Server 4 is the French-company's first major business server. It's meant to compete with the likes of Red Hat's RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Novell's SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).
The new Linux server is built on top of a 2.6.12 Linux kernel. It also includes OpenLDAP 2.3 for its directory server; Kerberos 5 for network authentication; and both MySQL 5.0 and PostgreSQL 8.1 as its databases. For Web server use, it comes with Apache 2.2 and SQUID as its proxy server.
For file and print services, Mandriva Corporate Server 4 provides NFS 3 and 4, Samba 3.0.22, and CUPS 1.2. For mail services, it includes Postfix 2.2, Sendmail, Cyrus-IMAP 2.2, and Courier-IMAP 3.0.
Developers will find that the Server comes ready to work with PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, and C++. It also comes with the Jonas and Tomcat JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) application servers.
The new business distro also comes with the latest release of Mandriva Pulse. This is an open source provisioning and configuration management tool that's similar to Tivoli or Novell ZENworks. Like them, it can be used to manage both Linux and Windows workstations and servers.
Mandriva deals with the troublesome question of which virtualization technology to support -- Xen, OpenVZ, or VMWare -- by supporting all three of the major Linux VMs (virtual machines). The company claims that Mandriva Corporate Server 4 is the only distribution that offers the entire technology range in its standard version, making it uniquely adapted to respond to enterprise-level requirements.
For business customers, Mandriva states that it will support this distribution for five years. It will also sell customers web and phone support on an annual contract basis. Pricing for these contracts was not available by publication time.
Mandriva is also continuing to support its end-user Linux -- Mandriva Linux. This distribution is now available as Mandriva Linux 2007 RC1. It is primarily a desktop distribution.
