[Beowulf] Announce: quattor 1.0.0 is out

[Rafael Garcia Leiva]

Dear all,

After more than three years of hard work, tests, and production usage at CERN 
computing centre (Geneva), we are confident to make a public, widely 
available, release of the quattor toolsuite (see http://www.quattor.org).

Quattor is a tool suite for the automatic installation, configuration and 
management of computer fabrics and clusters based on Linux. Among the benefits 
of quattor we can mention the following:

* Centralized management of configuration information: with the help of a new 
configuration description language (called Pan.)
* Configuration information validation: the configuration information is 
validated before its deployment, minimizing the errors due to 
misconfiguration.
* Automatic installations: the only thing we have to do with new machines is 
to define them in quattor, and they will get automatically installed and 
configured through the network.
* Configuration components: today with quattor we can configure a wide range 
of services on our client nodes (user accounts, grub, iptables, NFS, SSH, 
etc.) including Grid services.
* Software packages management: with the use of a managed software repository 
(administrators, ACLs, multiple platforms, ...), and with the new powerful 
software management tool SPMA (equivalent to yum or apt-get but with the 
possibility to install any version of software packages, and with support for 
software downgrading.)
* Many other facilities: SQL-based queries of configuration information, 
rollback of configuration deployments, highly modular, based on well known 
standards, etc.

Quattor is being distributed under the European Union DataGrid license (an 
OpenSource license). Source code and binaries can be freely downloaded from 
the quattor web page: http://www.quattor.org, together with the "quattor 
installation and user guide".

Typical use cases of quattor are: installation and management of Linux fabrics
(servers, workstations, personal desktops, ...), installation and 
configuration of clusters, management of Grid environments, and so on.

Quattor is being used today in many production environments: CERN IT (more 
than 2000 machines managed), UAM University in Madrid (desktop management), 
LAL Orsay-Paris (Grid computing), NIKHEF Amsterdam, CNAF-INFN, CC-IN2P3, DESY 
Zeuthen and DESY Hamburg, Poznan Supercomputing Center, Forschungszentrum 
Karlsruhe, UCS-CESGA, LIP Lisboa, etc.

Best regards.

Rafael

-- 
Rafael Angel Garcia Leiva
Universidad Autonoma Madrid
http://www.uam.es/angel.leiva