Cross Platform Patch Management (Solaris & Linux)

This promises to be an exciting week. I'm off to Israel on Friday. Earlier this year Sun bought a small start-up called Aduva that was headquartered in Israel. This is my first visit to see the team since taking over the Connected Systems Network team about two months ago.

Aduva's technology has been folded into the Update Connection family of products as Update Connection Enterprise (UCE). UCE is designed to allow for greatly simplified patch management across hundreds or thousands of servers in a data center. It works on SPARC, x86 and works with Solaris (8, 9, and 10) as well as several Linux distros. Here's a screenshot of the admin console.

UCE uses an on-site server that sits inside the firewall at the customer data center. This on-site server acts as a local repository for patchs, and patch knowledge, for the various OS distros the customer is using. Periodically the server phones home to Sun (as well as RedHat and Novell) for updated patches and knowledge. The customer can then define automated policies for how to roll out new patches. It's really slick.

In preparation for my trip (I'm leaving on Friday) I'm going to put up a few entries focused on UCE this week. Stop back by to learn more about this nifty piece of software. Hint: it does more than simply patch management!

Tags Solaris Linux I.T. Sysadmin

Posted at 05:00AM Oct 16, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |  Comments[2]