Red Hat Network at Work

Red Hat Network is a management tool to make your life easier as you deploy, scale, and manage your open source infrastructure. From large enterprise to individuals, from distributed POS systems to centrally located datacenter systems, from educational to government, and everything in between, Red Hat Network offers solutions for customers everywhere.

While there are many customer challenges Red Hat Network solves, the following are some of the most immediate problems it can solve today:

You need an increase in productivity because workload and infrastructure are growing faster than the budget.

Red Hat Network is designed to make your job of deployment, patch, and configuration management much easier. Many of the customers we speak with report productivity increases of 4-6x for their individual system administrators, and state that they can easily manage greater than 100 systems per administrator (depending on your workload environment, this may be much higher). This increased productivity can either be used to control costs of your department, or allow resources to be redeployed and increase your overall productivity.

Red Hat Network can be administered using either the simple and intuitive web user interface, or administrators may feel more comfortable using our CLI (Command Line Interface), especially when scripting and cron jobs are used to automate Red Hat Network functionality.

Lastly, Red Hat Network package management is based on RPM, the open source standard. Deep integration with RPM allows Red Hat Network to automatically and efficiently understand update needs of your systems, dependencies, and installation requirements, allowing you to make management of your systems easy and predictable.

Your team's response time is critical--whether deploying a new server, recovering from a failure, or installing a new security patch.

Red Hat understands how to manage open source systems--we've been running our servers, workstations, and desktop machines on Linux for many years. Red Hat Network was born out of the desire to automate this process for our internal staff and to deliver the best possible solution to the market.

With Red Hat Network, all tasks for deploying, patching, and configuring systems are automated, allowing your entire IT staff to become experts at quickly and effectively managing your infrastructure. In addition, the fact that Red Hat Network is tightly integrated with Red Hat offerings and the content stream comes directly from the distributor provides the peace of mind that comes from knowing you are receiving priority notifications and response from Red Hat.

As viruses and worms become more sophisticated, there may be cases where time is critical in deploying updates to systems on your network. Red Hat Network provides architectural solutions that allow administrators to push instant updates across their network.

Lastly, Red Hat Network's complete offering (from deployment, to updating of packages, configuration, management, and even the redeployment of the system again) allows you to rapidly and automatically respond to any of the requirements of your infrastructure, regardless of where in the lifecycle the demand presents itself.

Integration with the entire IT environment is key. You can have stand-alone, non-flexible tools.

Our customers don't run simple IT environments. Often there are custom-built solutions and processes for specific requirements, as well as other tools that must be used to deliver a complete solution. For this reason, integration is critical.

Red Hat Network delivers a complete API access layer that is well documented and easy to write to. It allows customers to integrate Red Hat Network into their existing solutions, or to expand the functionality of Red Hat Network through newly developed processes and applications. It also has the capability to manage all RPM-based content--whether third-party applications, other open sorce content, or custom applications—thereby helping to leverage the value of Red Hat Network to other areas of the IT environment.

Lastly, Red Hat understands that all system administrators will have different processes for managing their systems. Red Hat Network makes sure to employ flexible means of examining an infrastructure so that your processes define your IT solution, not the other way around.

You're consolidating and need a single platform tool to manage an entire open source infrastructure.

Red Hat Network is built for large enterprise deployments, but can be used to manage just a single system. Today, customers are effectively using Red Hat Network to manage more than 10,000 systems in their environment, and Red Hat Network continues to increase the scope of the product with every new release.

Also, because Red Hat Network uses RPM as the package format, customers can manage all of their open source content through a single tool. As easily as the OS layer can be deployed, configured, and managed, so can your own custom or third party applications, all from a single content repository.

Compliance, reporting, and security policies are increasing and are complex to administer.

In today's environment, these requirements are becoming more important than ever. While customers might have been able to get by with homegrown processes before, the growth and complexity--along with reporting requirements--demands a simple tool to help document these changes.

Red Hat Network comes with a complete audit trail, which allows the database to record all actions--who, when, what, and how. All of this information is available through a number of predefined reports that Red Hat Network delivers, or custom reports can be generated through the use of Red Hat Network's API access layer.

In addition, Red Hat Network allows full implementation of policies and permissions in order to enforce rules-based administration. This feature allows IT managers to retain centralized control over their infrastructure while decentralizing the workload to different parties for maximum efficiency.

Vendor solutions are too expensive and take too long to install.

Red Hat Network is priced and delivered to you in an easy manner that should be expected in today's environment.

Every subscription purchased from Red Hat includes the Red Hat Network Update entitlement, allowing you to easily test the initial functionality. Customers interested in increasing the systems management functionality can purchase the Management or Provisioning entitlements on a per-system basis, allowing you to scale the deployment as you demand it and the budget allows.

Further, Red Hat Network is simple to install. Running in the Hosted environment requires no installation (only registration), and a complete installation takes less than one day. For customers looking for assistance and expertise in deploying their full Red Hat Network solution, a single one week consulting engagement can be purchased that will allow your Red Hat Network solution to be optimized for your environment and your IT staff to be completely trained.

Want more information about specific questions regarding Red Hat Network? Visit our FAQ section.