IBM Debuts New Volume Management Technology on Linux

IBM Debuts New Volume Management Technology on Linux

World-Class Technology Targets Enterprise Computing

ARMONK, NY - 01 May 2002: IBM today announced world-class volume management technology for Linux[r]that is designed to streamline and enhance storage management capabilities for the enterprise. The new technology is the result of extensive collaboration among developers in the Linux open community and the IBM Linux Technology Center(LTC) http://ibm.com/linux/ltc.

Operating systems manage storage and file volumes on servers by compressing them, controlling and balancing access. The new volume management system for Linux will help make Linux capable of managing more content, files and users, larger servers and at the same time making it easier to use. With the new volume management technology, Linux is more capable of supporting the enterprise level business applications customers need.

TheEnterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) version 1.0.0 is a state-of-the-art, easy to use volume manager of unparalleled flexibility and expandability. EVMS integrates all aspects of disk, partition, and volume management into a single, enterprise level design and implementation, bringing industrial strength features found in proprietary volume managers to Linux. As a result of the highly modular, plug-in nature of EVMS, customers will be able to use this technology as their companies' needs grow and change and as new technologies become available. EVMS is 100% open source, available for all community members to use, and is licensed under the GPL.

EVMS technology significantly expands the Volume Management capabilities found in Linux todayby allowing users to access data and manage volumes from virtually any operating system. In addition, when used to emulate Volume Managers found in other non-Linux operating systems, EVMS can help significantly reduce the expense and technical barriers associated with migrating to a Linux platform.

"EVMS technology is a quantum leap forward in readying Linux for the enterprise," said Daniel Frye, Director, Linux Technology Center, IBM. "When adopted in the base, EVMS will make Linux volume management world-class."

The EVMS project has its home on SourceForge ( http://www.sf.net/projects/evms) and has hundreds of downloads with every release, totaling tens of thousands of downloads received in less than one year. The community is very active and has been involved with EVMS since itsinception in January of 2001. Several Linux distributors are currently evaluating EVMS for inclusion in upcoming releases.

"EVMS technology is an impressive technological step in Linux storage management, and SuSE welcomes the additional availability and migration features," said Boris Nalbach, CTO of SuSE Linux AG. "Such technology will enable all enterprises to take even more advantage of using Linux for mission critical applications."

"The key to flexible processing power is making it easy to run Linux in any enterprise environment. And that means making it easier for enterprises to run their data centers," said Ly-Huong Pham, CEO of Turbolinux. "Like IBM, Turbolinux has a commitment to accelerate the penetration of Linux in the enterprise by implementing features like EVMS in upcoming releases of our Linux operating environments for enterprise servers and developers. EVMS shows the industry that Linux provides unprecedented degrees of interoperability and power at a very low cost."

This inclusive, extensible volume manager utilizes a plug-in system that supports all volume management capabilities found in Linux today and is flexible enough to allow for the emulation of volume managers found in other operating systems and other proprietary technologies. EVMS version 1.0.0 provides support for multiple disk partitioning schemes, mirroring (RAID 1), striping with and without parity (RAID 0, 4, 5), drive linking, bad block relocation, and volume groups.

A Volume Manager provides a virtual view of local and remote storage. This virtual view can be used to combine or divide physical storage in a variety of ways such as combining several physical disks to appear as one large disk. Additionally, Volume Managers can support various capabilities such as RAID support, Volume groups, encryption, compression and much more.

IBM Open Source Projects
EVMS is the latest of among over 70 projects that the LTC is currently engaged in with the Open Source community. A full listing, with links to project pages, can be found at http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc. The LTC is committed to working with the Open Source development community to add Enterprise and Carrier Grade capabilities to Linux. This includes work to advance: scalability, serviceability, serviceability tooling, performance, directory services, Samba, printer support, security, networking, network security, Linux Standards Base and LI18NUX standards initiatives, test harnesses and test cases, storage/IO, file systems, volume management, device drivers, reliability, documentation, embedded Linux, availability, and many other areas. The LTC also works with and supports a range of communities including the Open Source Development Laboratory, Open Source Initiative, KDE League, GNOME Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Free Standards Group, and USENIX. The LTC mission is simply to "Help make Linux better".