Open source and Linux provider Red Hat , Tuesday announced expanded enterprise offerings for its popular Red Hat Network service that will allow organizations to manage increasingly in demand Linux deployments over the Internet.
The unveiling of the new services took place at the LinuxWorld conference in New York City. It is the first release in a line of new managed services to be rolled out in the coming months, the company said.
“What we’re really doing is gearing Red Hat Network towards the enterprise,” Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of Engineering, told InternetNews.com. “The new … services offer the enterprise-class capabilities that these businesses require to easily oversee large, complex Red Hat Linux deployments while keeping administration costs down.”
Red Hat Network is a Web-based systems management service that includes configuration and asset management for Linux installations. There are more than 400,000 systems connected to Red Hat’s management network, Cormier said. And this is the leverage Red Hat will use to break into the enterprise market, he added.
The new services are intended to help enterprises conserve IT resources by managing thousands of Red Hat Linux Systems through a single Web interface.
“Now that we’re moving into the enterprise, we think we are capable of managing any size enterprise network,” he said.
In addition to the standard features of the existing basic service, such as errata alerts, centralized remote management and system profiling, the new release includes functionality such as system grouping, where administrators can group workload-focused systems and support of multiple administrators.
New security features include the ability to deploy proxy servers at customer locations and to use a satellite server behind the corporate firewall to manage other servers. This gives IT managers the ability to custom configure their network management chores and the way in which they connect to Red Hat’s services.
“Satellite Server is really full capability including package management and profile management behind the corporate firewall,” Cormier said. “This allows people to choose when and where and in what medium to get software updates, for example.”
The company also expects to showcase a beta version of its Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, an operating system optimized for mission-critical enterprise application deployments, at LinuxWorld. Based on the Red Hat Linux 7.2, Red Hat Linux Advanced Server will incorporate core performance and scalability enhancements, as well as high availability and load balancing features through the Red Hat Cluster Manager.
