Red Hat expands its Linux System Management Platform

Red Hat have announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy, the companies solution for on site systems management. The announcement was made at the Red Hat Summit currently taking place in Chicago. RHN Satellite 5.3 is the first version of Red Hat's system management platform to be based on the Spacewalk project, an open source (GPLv2) management platform for Linux systems which supports the updating of Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions such as Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux.

RHN Satellite 5.3 includes Cobbler, a provisioning system for the rapid configuration of systems on the network. Cobbler allows new systems, and virtualised installations, to be automatically configured and can assist in managing DHCP, DNS and package mirroring as systems are provisioned.

RHN Satellite has optimised the Spacewalk code base, adding better support for multiple organisations and the ability to define trust relationships between those organisations. This allows organisations under one Satellite management system to share resources where they have mutual interest in content channels. The API for RHN Satellite is now, according to Red Hat, as capable as the web interface.

RHN Satellite 5.3 is a free upgrade for existing customers. The list price for Satellite Server is $12,500 per annum, with the "smaller" Proxy Server costing $2,500.

(djwm)