Linuxcare Reincarnated as Levanta

ches_grin writes "BusinessWeek is running a nice profile on Levanta, the former dot-com poster child once known as Linuxcare. From the article: 'It's not that Matt Mosman has an easy job. As Linux continues its march deeper into Corporate America's racks and racks of servers, his small Silicon Valley company, Levanta, is one of many trying to help companies install and manage all those servers--a big, complex problem that's not being solved very well right now. Still, Mosman has one thing going for him: He can't do much worse than his predecessors.'"

but what we all really want to know is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...does Ceren Ercen [spilth.org] still work there?!

Re:My doctor said Levanta

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't the original company get in trouble with the law fornot paying employees and various other dubious practices. Also wasn't it originally based in St. Louis, or am I thinking of a different company?

How it works

[ThinkingInBinary]

For those who, like me, are wondering about how the Levanta Intrepid (the actual box) can remotely manage servers with such "precision"... I looked it up on their website.

Basically, all of the servers that are managed by the Intrepid are set up to network boot, and use network disks. So the Intrepid controls the kernel they boot with and their filesystems. This gives it the ability to install or uninstall software behind-the-scenes, as well as make byte-level backups of servers and transition them to other machines (simply by switching around which server boots to which disk).

To me, at least, this seems quite clever.

Re:"Levanta" is Portuguese

[Phaid]

I'll name my US-based Linux company "Rise". Or "Elevate". Or just go for broke and name it "Superlative". Because those all obviously indicate that it is a Linux support company, unlike "Linuxcare", the meaning of which I can't even begin to fathom.

This is not an endorsement

[anothy]

this is about the stupidest thing i've heard out of a business-oriented rag in a while:

Still, Mosman has one thing going for him: He can't do much worse than his predecessors.

that's not anything "going for him". first of all, sure he can. don't challenge the universe like that; it doesn't like it. it likes to prove you wrong. further, the fact that someone else did miserably doesn't make you any likely at all to do well. even worse, in a smallish niche market (3rd-party linux support), high-profile failures are a significant detriment.
doing better than an unmitigated disaster does not make you successful.

Re:Jesus.

[FooAtWFU]

What on Earth is wrong with naming a company something like "Stand Up!"? That's the sort of thing a marketer loves in a name- something motiviational and cool-sounding at the same time. Stand up, rise to the challenges, yaddayaddayadda....

I used to work for LinuxCare...

[ezrec]

I used to work for LinuxCare, from January 2000 to Sept 2003. I have to say, to was a wild ride. At the 'LinuxCare' phase, I mostly did contract work to write Linux device drivers for 3rd parties. (Including some absolutely evil stuff like a C++ stub for kernel modules, and a 'look like NT' wrapper for a MPEG encoder kernel module.) In early 2000, we moved into our 'new' offices (we took up the entire basement of the huge converted warehouse building we were in), and had 'The Worlds Ugliest Mural' done by a local graffiti artist. The entire floor was carpeded with the LinuxCare 'X' logo. Yes, custom logo carpet. Around 2001, the support business collapsed. The Founders left, except for Art, but we picked up a new CEO, some really smart IBM guys, and started working on what was to be the Levanta project. Originally targeted for IBM z/390 mainframes, it used the z/VM operating system to provide multiple 'on-demand' Linux-on-390 'partitions'. (z/VM is the mainframe equivalent to VMWare, but 20 years old !) Akmal Khan came on board after Levanta was in full swing, and immediately took a dislike to the the distributed nature of our development group. There was Pittsburgh, doing the primary backend database; Ottawa was doing the web GUI and z/VM interface; Las Vegas handled the web infrastructure; project management in Atlanta; and San Francisco was sales and marketing. Except for SF and Ottawa, most sites telecommuted, so no 'office overhead' for those areas. It became apparent pretty quickly that Akmal was the micromanaging type. By spring 2003, A.K. had collected his own group of technical people (very good ones, by the way) in SF, diverted all development of 'Levanta-on-Intel' to SF, and started making it pretty clear to the managers that all sites except SF would be going away. That fall of 2003, the axe arrived for Ottawa, and I walked away from Levanta and the political mess that had developed. I'm glad to have worked for LinuxCare, and had a ton-of-fun working on Levanta-on-z/390.