A new API is supposed to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 into environments that haven’t been able to do bare metal provisioning of Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines before. The rev also features single-command installation.

The start-up imagines web hosting and dedicated server hosting companies using it so their customer signup and billing software automatically provisions systems with the customer’s choice of operating system and applications. It says corporate data centers need a way to enable their load balancing, monitoring, discovery/availability or systems management software to repurpose available systems. And cloud computing environments need to automate the provisioning of the “commodity hardware infrastructure layer” and its subsequent repurposing for optimized demand elasticity.

CEO LinMin Laurent Gharda says customers can use the new API to optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, “not the other way around.”

“LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments,” he said. “Automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system is provisioned, these agents identify themselves to their respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other applications that then take control of the system. This is IT application integration at its best”

The API offers both a GUI that can be integrated into other web-based applications and a traditional programmatic interface.

Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning roles (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows web server or Ubuntu office desktop) and assign them to specific physical systems or virtual machines, along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is priced at $250 for up to 10 client systems, $1,000 for up to 100 client systems and $1,875 for up to 250 clients systems. Annual subscriptions are also available for $100, $400 and $750 respectively.