Red Hat beefs up identity and security management |
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By Bridget Botelho, News Writer
19 Jun 2008 | SearchEnterpriseLinux.com |
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At the fourth annual Red Hat Summit in Boston June 19, Raleigh, N.C.-based project Red Hat Inc. announced a new product for managing identity, policy and auditing of physical and virtual machines. The company also opened up its Red Hat Network Satellite systems management code base to the user community.
The new Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy and Audit (IPA) is based on the open source project FreeIPA, a security information management tool combining Linux (Fedora), Fedora Directory Server, MIT Kerberos, NTP, and DNS.
The new Red Hat Enterprise IPA is designed to help IT meet compliance regulations and reduce security risks.
Enterprise IPA results from the recent purchase of Identyx, a small virtual directory software provider in Austin, Texas. Identyx's key product, Penrose, has been integrated into Red Hat's Enterprise IPA product, McCallum said.
With Enterprise IPA comes centrally managed identity capabilities, single sign-on services, high-availability directory services, an access control framework and synchronization with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Microsoft Active Directory and other data stores.
Red Hat Enterprise IPA also provides virtual directory services that lets IT view identity across multiple sources, including LDAP, NIS (Network Information Systems), Active Directory and databases. Red Hat customers can also use the virtual directory with synchronization capabilities that provide a migration path from NIS.
Red Hat roadmap: Automation and management
Red Hat's Enterprise IPA plays into the company's new focus on automation and management. "Linux automation is the ability to standardize applications on any platform – bare-metal, physical systems or virtual servers and on-demand cloud environments," said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat. "Management from the application stack to the hardware and the virtualization layers."
Red Hat's commercial management products already included systems management for Red Hat Linux, which became available in 2001, as well as Java application management, identity management products and the virtualization management product announced at the Summit yesterday.
But unlike most other system vendors, Red Hat will call on customers and outside developers to contribute to Enterprise IPA. "As a company, we leverage open source as a development model, and this gives customers a chance to have a tight relationship [with product development]," said Katrinka McCallum, VP management solutions business.
Systems management suite also goes open source
Also, the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base is now open under the name Project SpaceWalk, so the user community can contribute to its systems management technology.
The RHN Satellite is the systems management tool customers use to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux content updates, including system grouping permissions and scheduling, within their firewall. It also performs systems provisioning, update and monitoring, across physical and virtual servers.
The RHN Satellite code base, available under the GPLv2 license at Spacewalk.
Let us know what you think about the story; email Bridget Botelho, News Writer. And check out our news blog .
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