Benefits of RPMManager

No one will deny that having all your systems at the same patch level and running homogeneous software proves the easiest for support staff to manage. RPMManager has a strong role to play in reaching this Nirvana. It is easy to control and manage upgrading to the baselines represented in your channels. This is controllable across servers in development, release and production environments.

In the complex enterprise, there are many caveats and constraints, particularly those due to third-party software vendors and the core software versions they're prepared to support honouring their SLA commitments. It's sometime difficult, often impossible to address these, but RPMManager does give you options.

It's becoming more and more important to control what software is on your systems, particularly your desktop environments. Unlicensed and illegal software is an obvious example of which unexpected fees and fines have pecunary implications.

There are many more reasons as to what software is prescribed and proscribed according to your business needs and risk profiles.

Each channel represents the implementation of your corporate policy of approved software. Approved because of functionality, security profile, or any other reason.

Of course, it's rather beauracratic for end users to have to submit requests to Security and Risk for software inclusion. RPMManager is a collaboration tool and it allows granular roles to be ascribed to users such that they can manage much of this themselves, including review should that be required. For example, your organisation's disparate WebSphere users could collaborate around a channel dedicated to this associated products to share, manage, and agree release strategies around this software and their applications that depend upon it.

Do you want to be stuck on your vendor's operating system release cycle? Alternatively, do you want to be stuck with a legacy OS until that piece of hardware dies? Why should you even care about an OS when it's the business systems atop of it that is important? How do you deal with vendors who take two years to (officially) support the latest OS?

RPMManager provides a buffer and a coordination portal to help manage this and affect positive outcomes.

RPMManager does user authentication (and system recognition where it can) on all download clients. If the user doesn't have authorisation, they do not get access to the software. You can set that policy as granularly as you choose - at the package, channel, or RPMManager.

Everything happens at the single RPMManager site. Administrators will post the latest OS and vendor software on development channels and verify these against test servers or virtual machines. Development Release Managers will do likewise for your inhouse systems. User and subscription management is also performed here, as are actionables queued against the machines registed in your RPMManager service.

A cornerstone component of RPMManager is that on registration, each machine uploads a complete hardware and software profile of itself. These can also be updated on demand.

With this information, we know exactly what hardware drivers are required to be supported. We can isolate systems containing particular components, and we can cross reference serial numbers etc with other sources. We know which systems have which software package and when they had received it.

We use the RHNSD infrastructure where each client system polls our central server every four hours for action requests. These can range from updating their hardware profile on the central server to downloading new packages. This is an extensible framework and it's easy to create new actions and to deploy these to servers.

RPMManager is agnostic - it does not care about where your packages come from, nor whether or not they're encumbered. There is absolutely nothing to stop you deploying your vendor's product with RPMManager. RPMManager even makes licencing audits by vendors trivial.

However, we feel there is much to be gained by using freeware RPM-based operating systems, and should you choose to do so, substantial savings can be achieved.

Every organisation has a different risk profile, levels of software development maturity, and ongoing relationships with vendors and software partners. We are happy to discuss what is practicable for you.

Just as RPM has proved very durable in deploying commodity operating system software, it is not a difficult matter to use this as the system of choice to deploy inhouse software. It is fantastic at dependency management and the rigour of this and the excellent automation tools around it provide unprecented quality for mass deployment.

We've already touched upon it, but RPMManager uses a sophisticated role-based access control model specifically designed to empower users whilst meeting organisational internal control and compliance objectives.

RPMManager is all about collaboration amongst all of the vested interests in your organisation's software.