rPath release automation platform helps Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers reduce the time, cost and risk of system creation, provisioning and maintenance.
rPath, an innovator in automating application deployment and maintenance, today announced a management solution for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The move expands the rPath release automation platform beyond operating systems such as Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5. This provides Red Hat customers a solution for low-overhead, compliant system provisioning and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
"Enterprise IT operations have diverse operating system environments, which provides flexibility but comes at a high cost: Escalating management burdens and compliance risks due to loss of system transparency and control," said Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath and the first engineer for Red Hat. "rPath was designed to address this problem, combining flexibility and control with a solution for deep system transparency and strong versioning. The result is a release automation solution that takes time, cost and risk out of managing Linux stacks."
Red Hat Meets rPath for OS and Release Management
The rPath release automation platform automates the creation, provisioning and maintenance of complex software systems. Based on the industry’s only system version control repository, rPath manages the entire system—together with all of its components and dependencies—to provide deep transparency and control across the lifecycle of the deployed system. With this announcement, Red Hat customers can now use the rPath release automation platform to manage their systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5.
Red Hat customers can use rPath in one of two ways:
- Managing OS platforms – rPath enables OS and platform groups to easily pick and choose from certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages and errata to provision and cost-effectively maintain diverse computing environments. This provides the flexibility of diverse platforms with the scalable management of a standardized platform.
- Managing the entire software stack – rPath enables release engineers to automatically package, provision and maintain self-contained software systems that include all of their required components—from the application through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These ready-to-deploy systems are optionally constructed with policies that optimize footprint size, enforce compliance standards, and harden for maximum security.
For both release managers and operating system engineers, rPath provides:
- Automated dependency discovery and resolution
- Hierarchical system definition for platform reuse
- Strong version control of deployed systems
- Automated and incremental update of running systems
- System rollback and reproduction for troubleshooting or compliance
- On-demand provisioning of output formats for any physical, virtual or cloud target
Combining Flexibility with Control:
Many IT groups have found that a one-size-fits-all approach to OS and platform management no longer meets their needs. Applications have become increasingly diverse&mddash;with unique dependencies—and provisioning the same platform each and every time no longer makes sense.
For release managers and OS engineers, the rPath release automation platform now offers a way to provision and maintain diverse software systems in a way that is highly scalable and cost effective. For Red Hat customers, rPath imports complete RPM packages into its repository, ensuring uninterrupted supportability and allowing IT organizations to continue using the RPM format and other related tools. rPath also integrates with Red Hat Network (RHN) as an update channel. This enables users to select specific errata and incrementally update deployed systems.
In this manner, rPath offers the scalable management of a single off-the-shelf platform with the flexibility to provision many platform versions and tailored variants. This allows IT groups to extend existing OS investments with more flexibility, automation and control in how the software is deployed and maintained.
In related news, rPath announced functional and user experience enhancements to the rPath release automation platform; see "rPath Refines Release Automation Platform."
