Open Country announced the release of OCM Provision 4.0, the latest version of Open Country’s comprehensive provisioning solution. Among its many enhancements, OCM Provision 4.0 can remotely install the Windows operating system, create clones of Windows and Linux systems and significantly improve business continuity with its new disaster recovery capability. Targeting Windows-only, Linux-only and mixed Windows/Linux environments, OCM Provision 4.0 allows IT personnel to simultaneously provision thousands of Linux and Windows desktops, servers, blades and appliances.

OCM Provision 4.0, a component of Open Country’s award-winning OCM Universal Systems Management Suite that can also be purchased separately, is the most flexible system provisioning, cloning and business continuity solution on the market today. Running on both Windows and Linux, OCM Provision can perform both native installations and cloning installations of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows 2000, in addition to more than 20 Linux distributions including offerings from Red Hat, Novell, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Asianux, Red Flag, Haansoft, Co-Create, CS2C, Miracle Linux, Turbolinux, and Mandriva.

“Open Country recognizes that organizations today need to support a wide range of systems. We've always offered our customers the widest choice in the industry for Linux systems management solutions, and we have expanded our product line to provide Windows-based provisioning and cloning as well,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO of Open Country. “We now offer the most comprehensive provisioning, cloning and disaster recovery solution in the industry.”

OCM Provision is the ideal solution for system builders (VARs, integrators, appliance builders, and OEMs) because it offers both hardware-independent OS installation capability as well as cloning for the rapid deployment of complete system images to identical hardware. OCM Provision makes hardware and software testing and QA labs more cost effective by facilitating the rapid repurposing of physical and virtualized environments, and allowing for tested configurations to be captured and redeployed at a later time, reducing labor costs and elapsed time to repurpose an entire lab.

Corporate IT departments also face increasing challenges when it comes to configuring and deploying new systems in a distributed environment. Having a deployment solution in place that enables administrators to use a standard configuration for a new PC or server can significantly decrease errors and support costs. OCM Provision 4.0 enables rapid and consistent network-based, bare-metal provisioning of target systems.

System downtime can cost thousands of dollars an hour. OCM Provision 4.0 provides key features for system recovery that minimize downtime. With OCM Provision 4.0, systems administrators can quickly and easily create exact disk images (clones), including operating systems, applications, and configurations and store them off premises. After a system crash, OCM Provision 4.0 can be used to perform a full bare-metal system restore from an image or install the operating system onto replacement hardware. Combined with OCM Webmin Plus’ enterprise grade backup and restore capability, Open Country offers the most comprehensive business continuity solution on the market today.