xCAT offers complete and ideal management for HPC clusters, RenderFarms, Grids, WebFarms, Online Gaming Infrastructure, Clouds, Datacenters, and whatever tomorrow's buzzwords may be. It is agile, extendable, and based on years of system administration best practices and experience.

xCAT is DataCenter Control. It allows you to:

• Provision Operating Systems on physical or virtual machines: SLES10 SP2 & higher, SLES 11 (incl. SP1), RHEL5.x, RHEL 6, CentOS4.x, CentOS5.x, SL 5.5, Fedora 8-14, AIX 6.1, 7.1 (all available Technology Levels), Windows 2008, Windows 7, VMWare, KVM, PowerVM, zVM.
• Scripted install, Stateless, Statelite, iSCSI, or Cloning
• Remotely Manage Sytems: Integrated Lights-out management, remote console, and distributed shell support
• Quickly set up and control Management node services: DNS, HTTP, DHCP, TFTP

xCAT grew out of a need to rapidly provision IBM x86 based machines and has been actively developed since 1999. xCAT is now 10 years old and continues to evolve and now supports other IBM RISC machines.

xCAT started out as a project in IBM as developed by Egan Ford. It was quickly adopted by customers and IBM manufacturing sites to rapidly deploy clusters, grids, and recently cloud projects. IBM open sourced xCAT in 2007. Since then it has been used to manage, deploy, and support thousands of machines that run on every major hardware vendor.

What make xCat more different than other tools on the market are:

• xCAT Scales - Beyond all IT budgets. 1,000s of nodes with distributed architecture: xCAT provisions the fastest computer in the world.
• Open Source - Eclipse Public License. You can also buy support contracts.
• More Installation Options - Install to Hard Disk, Install Stateless (Diskless), Install to iSCSI (no special hardware required), Virtual Machines (VMWare, KVM, & Xen)
• Built in Automagic discovery - no need to power on one machine at a time to discover. Nodes that fail can be replaced and back in action by just powering them on

Related Solutions

HPC, HPC Starter Pack for Production and Post-production, Cloud Computing, Virtualization