PORTLAND, Ore., July 23, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Canonical announced today the availability of Landscape (http://www.canonical.com/landscape), its web-based systems management tool for Ubuntu servers and desktops.
Available to Canonical's support subscribers, Landscape provides a key tool for the growing number of businesses that want to take advantage of the ease of use of Ubuntu and have previously seen system administration or support as a hurdle.
"For our support customers this is a huge value-add," said Steve George, director of Support and Services at Canonical. "Landscape is an enterprise-ready systems management tool that is as easy to use as everything else built with the Ubuntu philosophy. Any business deploying Ubuntu on multiple servers or desktops can instantly benefit from increased productivity and reduced costs of management."
"I'm delighted to see Landscape being made available to Canonical's customers," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. "Canonical's support services are now at a point where anyone with serious deployment intentions on Ubuntu has the reassurance of a center of expertise to help them succeed. Landscape is a vital tool in taking Ubuntu further into the business and enterprise markets."
About Landscape
With Landscape, users can manage, monitor and maintain all of their Ubuntu machines simply by registering them with the service. Focused on being easy to deploy, Landscape is immediately available with an easy to use Web interface to common administration tasks.
Security and stability are enhanced with visibility of new security fixes and updates as soon as they're available for Ubuntu. Individual systems, or groups, can be updated making it simple and quick to keep them secure. With package management across a range of systems, the total cost of managing an Ubuntu deployment of desktops, laptops and servers is reduced.
Key features of Landscape include:
Package management: Contains all of the package management features for remotely managing a system. Quickly find installed packages, view information about them and add or remove them.
System updates: Secure Ubuntu systems quickly and easily. Instantly view packages that need updating across all systems that Landscape knows about. Install security and feature updates as they become available.
Manage groups of machines: With Landscape, manage multiple machines within a group, either acting on them all or just one machine within the group. Groups are flexible and fast to set up, whether you want to manage machines by location or function.
Semi-connected management: Safely and securely manage systems that are infrequently connected to the Internet. Landscape queues tasks for disconnected and distributed desktops, laptops, or servers. When they come on-line it carries out the queued instructions.
System inventory: Reduce the speed and cost of supporting users with the detailed information needed to resolve problems. Landscape reports on individual system hardware giving a view of all the system's components. In addition, it reports how Ubuntu sees the system, including elements like the running kernel.
Performance reporting: An organization can compare the performance of multiple systems, viewing key measurements such as system load and disk usage, enabling workloads to be managed effectively.
System history: Administrators can audit the actions on their systems improving security. Landscape provides information on the tasks it will perform in the future. The historical view shows actions it performed and those done locally on the machine.
Pricing and Availability
Landscape is available for subscribers to Canonical's support services free of charge.
About Canonical and Ubuntu
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organization headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the center of a global open source software ecosystem.
Download Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com/download. To learn about commercial support for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, please see www.canonical.com/support. For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com.
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