A day after further protecting its users
against potential IP infringement,
the world’s leading Linux distributor is offering enterprise customers network-based provisioning tools.
Red Hatannounced Wednesday a new provisioning module that will be deployed as part of the Red Hat Network (RHN).
RHN is Red Hat’s updating tool that allows subscribers easy access to patches and updates from either the command prompt or through a GUI. It has been a fundamental part of all Red Hat distributions since 2000.
It has also been the mechanism by which legacy users were informed of the end of life statement for their older versions of Red Hat Linux.
The new Provisioning Module further extends the update-ability and
management features of RHN to allow Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
customers to dynamically deploy, configure, and manage multiple new or
existing Linux systems.
“It enables customers to provision new systems from scratch so that they are consistent,” Red Hat spokesperson Leigh Day told internetnews.com. “You can do it all from one GUI, which saves tones of time, and you can also reconfigure them for different workloads.”
The Provisioning Module is Red Hat’s latest initiative driven from its Open Source Architecture strategy announced back in September. The strategy defines Red Hat’s roadmap towards a full open-source architecture that integrates platform, infrastructure and management technologies.
“With more than 5,000 unique Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers under
management, Rackspace needed need a tool by which we could efficiently
provision, patch and rebuild servers,” Dirk Elmendorf, chief technology evangelist and co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting said in a statement. “Our ability to provision a customized built-to-order server in a matter of
hours and our ability to quickly fix problems day or night is key to
our customers’ experience.”
Red Hat’s Day said the provisioning module is designed to help ease the process of provisioning. “This is a tool to help them scale their business and also to remove the ‘guru-factor,'” of needing a Linux expert for the process, Day said.