Mandriva to participate in ENERGy

Press release

Mandriva to participate in ENERGy, a 12 million euros project aimed at 
creating a management tool for groups of systems with a "veille" of 
distributed security.

Paris, April 6th - Mandriva, the publisher of the popular Mandriva Linux 
operating system, with the support of the French Department of Commerce 
and Finance, today announced its participation in the ENERGy project 
with a subsidy of 287,000 euros. This two-year ITEA (a European research and 
development program) project will contribute to the improvement of 
existing and emerging technologies to cope with the requirements of 
network management automation. The other partners in the project are 
Actimage (Luxembourg), Bull (France), ERCOM (France), Thales 
Communications (France), EADS Defence and Security Systems (France), 
EVIDIAN (France), DYCEC (Spain), Robotiker (Spain), ESI (Spain) and 
Telefonica I+D (Spain).

ENERGy brings together researchers and industry representatives in 
several European countries to define and prototype a solution which will 
allow automated management and supervision of computer systems while 
assuring a high level of security.

Objectives of the ENERGy project:

To coordinate the management of services and resources: deployment and 
configuration of hardware, software and services with automatic 
configuration and self-management;
To simplify the complexity of network management: information about the 
network is accessible by all users, and the system will assist the 
manager in analysing issues and making decisions;
To supply available services all the time, ensure high quality of 
service, consistent availability of resources and a high level of security;
To control costs: any management system should keep a record of 
resources, services, users, etc.

To sum up, through coherent management of all network services it will 
be possible for all the various servers and applications on the network 
to work together with the aim of automating as many tasks as possible. 
At present, few solutions are able to provide this kind of co-operation. 
The challenge for the ENERGy project is to make it possible to develop 
and deploy a management environment which can interconnect resources and 
various separate services, supply a unified and integrated interface and 
automate the configuration and supervision of the overall system.

ENERGy will allow complete configuration and supervision of all network 
services and will simplify network management tasks. The system will be 
capable of automating management tasks areas including security, QoS, 
clustering and software updates.

"ENERGy represents the missing link in the chain of managing a large 
network, planning network monitoring. What is really innovative is the 
distributed approach to monitoring, as if "drones" were being 
co-ordinated to triangulate a threat. The granularity is remarkable," 
declared François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva.

One of the results expected from the ENERGy project is the definition 
and the implementation of a new architecture for standardising the 
implementation service management tools, based on the principles of 
management of security and an understanding of the infrastructures of 
information systems. The ENERGy project will make possible the 
optimization of service availability and the reduction of management 
costs, particularly for systems sensitive to failure and when dealing 
with software, hardware and security incidents.

About Mandriva
Mandriva, formerly known as Mandrakesoft, is the publisher of the 
popular Mandriva Linux operating system, one of the most full-featured 
and easy to use Linux systems. The company offers its enterprise, 
government educational customers a complete range of GNU/Linux and Open 
Source software and related services. Mandriva products are available in 
more than 120 countries through dedicated channels and also from 
Mandrivastore.com, the company's online store. "Born on the Internet" in 
late 1998, has offices in the United States, France and Brazil. Mandriva 
is traded on Paris Euronext Marché Libre (ISIN Code: FR0004159382/MLMAN; 
Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the US OTC market (stock symbol MDKFF).
Press Contact: Estelle Estrabeau, +33 1 40 41 17 64 http://www.mandriva.com