The IT Department of Grifols, with whom we have worked and helped integrating Open Source technologies during the last years, needed a solution in order to assure that all of their Linux systems, with all of their services, maintained the same version of software packages, kernel, libraries, etc., among all of their environments: from development to production.
The main problem is that applying system patches inside a same service and among environments takes too much time, that is, since the beginning of a patch applying cycle in the development environment till the reaching of the production environment, weeks and almost months have gone by, which makes it impossible to maintain the same level of versions if the Internet repositories of the Linux distribution -RedHat Network in this case- are being used.
Inside BU we studied deeply this particular case and the needs of our client and we presented our proposal, which consisted in implementing RedHat Satellite 6 so the versions lifecycle could be managed and controlled in a centralized way for all the services and environments. That resulted in an implementation in different locations of Satellite Capsules in order to guarantee the availability of the service as well as an optimum performance for all of their worldwide data centers.
We decided to go for the version 6 of Satellite even though it was released in those dates (version 6.0.0), assuming the problems and errors that always go with totally fresh releases. During the project implementation, the platform was being updated and stabilized, as long as issues were being solved until we had it fully implemented and deployed in all of the systems in a stable way as we committed.
Nowadays the lifecycle of Grifols GNU/Linux operating systems is being managed with Satellite 6 in all of their data centers, reducing the amount of time needed in patch applying, incrementing the security and minimizing the maintenance windows, with a more accurate control of all of their GNU/Linux machines.
Note:
The implementation of RedHat Satellite 6 allowed us to achieve balanced and maintained landscapes among time, guaranteeing updates in a totally controlled, centralized and safe manner all along our worldwide GNU/Linux machines.
Its implementation, along with BU team, has been successful and the results show us that the decision of implementing the 6th release has been appropriate.
Fabio Ferraro (Business Platforms Area Manager)