We were recently updated on Lotus Foundations. In a nutshell:
- Designed to host prepackaged Linux (and later this year, prepackaged Windows) applications.
- Aimed, initially, at Lotus collaboration offerings (Domino, Sametime, etc.) and vertical market applications.
- Designed to be drop shipped to a remote location (SMB or branch office).
- Unpacked and connected to the Internet by local personnel.
- Flash memory-based Operating System (OS) performs:
- Disk partitioning and formatting;
- Copies itself to a partition on each disk; and
- Calls home.
- Completely configured, monitored, and managed remotely by a VAR, or corporate IT department.
- Automated, incremental backup, to externally accessible, hot-swappable, disk-based, unit.
- Local personnel must rotate backup units on a scheduled (daily, weekly, etc., as appropriate) basis.
- Launched in January 2008.
- Based on technology from IBM's Nitix acquisition.
- Target market to be extended this year from SMBs to enterprise branch offices.
- Support for prepackaged Windows applications also coming this year.
- Prepackaging = preconfigured Windows Server OS + preconfigured Windows application in a VMware image.
- VMware host support of clean/dirty block markers on VMware virtual disks (VDs),
- To allow for incremental backup of Windows file system blocks by Linux host.
Pricing:
- Software list prices: $299 base server. CALs including Domino, anti-spam and anti-virus, are $149 each. Software assurance is around 20%.
- Hardware list prices: $2,409 for base system; 3,279 for high-end system with Intel X3330 2.66GHZ Quad Core Zeon processor, 500GB, 1TB backup drive.
... David Ferris and Nick Shelness