A press release from Mandriva:

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