Red Hat Introduces Satellite 6 

Red Hat, Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6, a comprehensive solution providing complete lifecycle management of Red Hat systems with provisioning software distribution, patch and configuration management, together with subscription management across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Red Hat Satellite 6 is organized around three key themes:

• Simplification by reducing the number of tools, increasing automation and streamlining processes necessary to manage systems across their lifecycle to increase IT efficiency.
• Scaling out to manage a large number of geographically distributed systems, across a wide variety of platforms from physical to virtual, as well to private and public clouds.
• Innovation: open source is driving innovation across all areas of IT, including systems management. Red Hat has leveraged its expertise in open source to integrate some of the best management capabilities available, spanning multiple open source communities and projects to deliver Red Hat Satellite. This enables enterprises to employ the latest open source systems management innovations in a fully integrated, supported and certified solution.

As IT environments continue to grow in complexity, the number of systems to be managed across a diverse set of platforms continues to increase. It is essential that IT organizations have the right management tools for maintaining system availability, performance and governance. Systems today are deployed on a wide variety of environments including physical systems, multiple virtualization platforms as well as private-public clouds, and using separate, unintegrated tools for each environment can increase cost and complexity and reduce administrator efficiency.

Red Hat Satellite 6 delivers a complete system management solution for managing the lifecycle of Red Hat Systems, providing a single management console and methodology for managing the tools required to build, deploy, run and retire a system. Satellite 6 provides a single Content View, a collection of RPMs and/or Puppet Modules that have been refined with filters and rules. Content Views contain both software and configuration content in one place, and are published and promoted throughout lifecycle environments, enabling end-to-end system lifecycle management. Red Hat Satellite can manage not only the lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux software and content configuration, but also the lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Certificate System, and OpenShift Enterprise.

Other new capabilities that Red Hat Satellite 6 brings to market are:

• Provisioning on bare metal, virtualized infrastructure and on public or private clouds, all from one place and with one simple process, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, VMware, and Amazon EC2.
• System discovery, enabling users to discover and search across non-provisioned hosts for rapid deployment.
• Drift remediation that enables users to automatically correct system state with reporting, auditing, and history of changes.
• Subscription management that enables you to easily report and map your purchased products to registered systems for end-to-end subscription consumption visibility.

Red Hat Satellite 6 also offers greater scalability, featuring the new Red Hat Satellite Capsule server, which is used to facilitate software and configuration content federation and distribution. The capsule server enables users to easily scale Red Hat Satellite as the number of managed systems increases in their environment, managing content locally instead of requiring network hops to ensure that each geographic location is sufficiently managed. To prevent resource overload on the capsule server, Satellite 6 provisions extra workloads over multiple servers to reduce workload from being contained on a single satellite.

Innovation in systems administration is also growing at a rapid pace in the open source community, where Red Hat Satellite and many of its upstream projects, including the Foreman project, are based. This enables Satellite users to remain close to the forefront of systems management innovation. With its open source architecture, Red Hat Satellite incorporates the latest innovation from the open source community and offers them to enterprises in a fully supported and certified solution.