Red Hat announced advancements that extend the Company's Linux Automation strategy by providing expanded capabilities and incorporating broadened community involvement for secure management of both users and systems across virtual and physical enterprise infrastructures.

By broadening its security portfolio with the addition of Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy and Audit (IPA) and through the opening of the Red Hat Network Satellite code base to facilitate community-driven enhancements for systems management, Red Hat aims to extend administrator control and increase user productivity in increasingly demanding IT environments.

"Delivering on the promise of any application, anywhere, anytime across both physical and virtual infrastructures requires integrated, secure management of users, systems and applications," said Katrinka McCallum, vice president of Red Hat's Management and Security business. "Dynamically allocating resources and providing efficient user access to systems and services as the IT landscape changes requires tightly integrated control systems. With Red Hat's management and security solutions spanning the operating system, virtualization, grid frameworks, middleware and SOA, Red Hat is rapidly advancing Linux Automation."

Enhanced Identity Management Solutions
Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise IPA and the related technology purchase of the code base of open source identity integration provider, Identyx. Red Hat's Enterprise IPA solution meets customer demand to cut costs and improve operational efficiency while ensuring compliance, risk reduction and business enablement. With Enterprise IPA, Red Hat provides centrally managed identity capabilities, single sign-on services, high-availability directory services, an easy-to-use access control framework and synchronization with LDAP(Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Microsoft's  Active Directory and other data stores. Customers will have an opportunity to benefit from cost savings, compliance, ease of management and avoidance of vendor lock-in.

Incorporating the Identyx code base enables Red Hat Enterprise IPA to provide virtual directory services that allows organizations to deliver a unified view of identity across multiple sources, including LDAP, NIS (Network Information Systems), Active Directory and databases. Red Hat customers can now take advantage of a virtual directory with synchronization capabilities that provide a simple path for migration from NIS.

Leveraging Community-Customer Technology Innovation for System Management Solutions
Continuing Red Hat's commitment to the open source development model, Red Hat announced the open sourcing of the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base, available under the GPLv2 license and known as Project Spacewalk. RHN Satellite is the Red Hat systems management solution that allows customers to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux content updates, including system grouping permissions and scheduling, within their firewall. The solution also performs systems provisioning, update and monitoring, across physical and virtual servers.

"I'm excited about the prospect of being able to make use of some of the RHN Satellite features above and beyond just a package repository, such as system profiling (both hardware and software), custom base channels for special projects that may have strict package requirements, as well as monitoring and reporting on systems. Additionally, at Duke University we will always have a mixed bag of distributions, like Centos, and Fedora in addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, and it's great to see that with Spacewalk, Red Hat intends to make it easy to support other RPM based distributions," said Kambiz Aghaiepour, Senior Linux Sysadmin, OIT, Duke University.

With the release of its RHN Satellite code base, Red Hat has enhanced its ability to incorporate new open source management projects into the future roadmap for its products and solutions. Examples include open source management projects like Cobbler and Koan for provisioning management, and the configuration management project, Puppet. In addition, projects like Cobbler, Koan and Puppet have already been adopted by a number of Red Hat customers.

According to Roy Haverman, Linux system administrator at Alstom, "Cobbler allows us to set up physical and virtual servers in a matter of minutes, which has helped us a lot in our dynamic server and workstation landscape. The flexible kickstart templating system of Cobbler has provided us consistent deployments to a great variety of systems, with different architectures, saving much time."