Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, the latest version of Red Hat's on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with a Red Hat Network Satellite subscription. The availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 marks the first release based off of the open source project Spacewalk, announced in June 2008.

“The growing enterprise role for Linux-based servers and applications brings an increasingly strong requirement for Linux system management. Linux is increasingly subject to the same system management requirements as other operating environments,” said Tim Grieser, program vice president, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. “Red Hat Network Satellite customers we spoke with indicate that use of the product saves time for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, reduces downtime and allows more servers to be managed with existing staff.”

Virtualization is a key requirement in many IT environments today, and with Red Hat Network Satellite, a systems administrator only needs one console to update, provision and monitor both their physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Red Hat Network Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 supports both KVM and Xen virtualization technologies. Red Hat Network Satellite abstracts virtualization technology from administrators, freeing up their time to focus on higher value-add projects.

With Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, customers are also offered bottom-line benefits through the enhancements included in the latest version of the systems management solution. These enhancements include increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups with the incorporation of more mature open source Cobbler technology in the product's underlying provisioning architecture. In addition, with Satellite 5.3, customers receive powerful open source technologies backed by the Red Hat subscription, delivering the feature-richness of the community development model combined with the commercial support to run mission-critical applications in the enterprise.

Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 also enables customers to manage large deployments more easily and with comparable performance to smaller deployments due to enhanced scalability improvements, such as code optimization, designed to enable faster execution when managing multiple systems. Customers also benefit from content sharing between Satellite servers that is now faster and provides greater consistency with the ability to share content between different organizations in the Satellite server given Satellite's improved multi-tenancy capabilities and inter-Satellite synchronization improvements. Satellite can also now be more easily and smoothly integrated into customers' existing automated processes given its improved open and extensible APIs. These enhancements in Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 can ultimately save enterprises time and money while delivering a more consistent operating environment that helps to drive down long-term operational expenses.

“We were excited to play a role in the Satellite 5.3 beta program to help optimize the latest Satellite technology,” said Daniel Kinon, senior systems administrator for Choice Hotels International, Inc. “As a long-time Red Hat customer, we see great value in open source technology and have benefited from the new open source Cobbler provisioning and overall scalability enhancements that are featured in Satellite 5.3.”

“Red Hat is committed to meeting the needs of our customers. With Satellite's ability to further enable expanded productivity and cost reduction for customers managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, we continue to deliver the technologies and corresponding benefits that our customers have demanded,” said Katrinka McCallum, vice president, Management Solutions at Red Hat. “We will now be able to deliver even greater systems management value to Red Hat customers with the ability to incorporate cutting-edge open source management technologies in this release of our product.”