LCA2009: Going the Satellite route with Red Hat

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 21 January 2009 13:10

Opinion and Analysis

In times like these, it must be uplifting to work for a company that has seen revenue and profits rise while all around are scenes of doom and gloom.

The company in question is Red Hat; its revenue went up 22 percent in the third US quarter, with earnings going up by 20 percent. Those are certainly figures that no-one would sneeze at.

Hence, it was to be expected that Richard Keech, who works for Red Hat locally as principal consultant, would be wearing a grin on his face when I met him to discuss the talk he gave at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart.

He wasn't gloating but he was happy to talk to me without the normal rigmarole of going through the bureaucracy.

Keech gave a talk about managing systems using Red Hat Satellite, an extension of the Red Hat Network, which eases the job of the sysadmin quite a bit.

"It is good for large enterprises as it lets them increase the efficiency of their systems administrators," he said.

The Satellite software permits a company to apply its own standard operating environment and control it; Keech said this had special relevance in the case of the defence and security sectors which would not be happy were its own software profile exposed to a vendor.

"It makes change control more effective and scales very well," he said.

Using satellite, one can install and update software, collect and distribute custom software packages into manageable groups, kickstart systems, manage and deploy configuration files, and monitor systems.

The software runs on Oracle internally, hence it is not pure open source. Like all other projects, you can't keep the geeks out - a free clone of Satellite has sprung up called Spacewalk.

Keech said that the efficiency of Satellite could be gauged by the fact that it could allow a sysadmin to manage 10 times the machines that were being currently managed.