Red Hat Ships Satellite 5.3 Management Tool

Red Hat on Sept. 2 announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, the latest version of the company's "on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring" across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

At its Red Hat Summit conference in Chicago, Red Hat announced that RHN Satellite 5.3 is available as of Sept. 2 and will be automatically delivered to customers with an RHN Satellite subscription. The availability of RHN Satellite 5.3 marks the first release based off the open-source project Spacewalk, announced in June 2008, the company said.

Spacewalk is an open-source Linux systems management solution project that enables users to inventory their systems, install and update software on their systems, collect and distribute their custom software packages into manageable groups, provision their systems, manage and deploy configuration files to their systems, and more.

"The growing enterprise role for Linux-based servers and applications brings an increasingly strong requirement for Linux system management. Linux is increasingly subject to the same system management requirements as other operating environments," said Tim Grieser, program vice president for Enterprise System Management Software at IDC.

"Red Hat Network Satellite customers we spoke with indicate that use of the product saves time for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, reduces downtime and allows more servers to be managed with existing staff," Grieser said.

According to Red Hat's statement:

Virtualization is a key requirement in many IT environments today, and with Red Hat Network Satellite, a systems administrator only needs one console to update, provision and monitor both their physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Red Hat Network Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 supports both KVM and Xen virtualization technologies. Red Hat Network Satellite abstracts virtualization technology from administrators, freeing up their time to focus on higher value-add projects.

"We were excited to play a role in the Satellite 5.3 beta program to help optimize the latest Satellite technology," Daniel Kinon, senior systems administrator for Choice Hotels International, said in Red Hat's news release. "As a longtime Red Hat customer, we see great value in open-source technology and have benefited from the new open-source Cobbler provisioning and overall scalability enhancements that are featured in Satellite 5.3."

"Red Hat is committed to meeting the needs of our customers," said Katrinka McCallum, vice president of management solutions at Red Hat. "With Satellite's ability to further enable expanded productivity and cost reduction for customers managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, we continue to deliver the technologies and corresponding benefits that our customers have demanded. We will now be able to deliver even greater systems management value to Red Hat customers with the ability to incorporate cutting-edge open-source management technologies in this release of our product."