Billed by the vendor as a "Solaris and Linux life cycle management tool," the Sun Connection collection of products includes patch management, provisioning, and now inventory utilities specifically for Linux and Solaris environments. The (currently) three tools available in the product suite are offered as "Channels," which customers can subscribe to; and include the Sun Connection Update channel, the Sun Connection Provisioning Channel, and the new Sun Connection Inventory Channel.

The products are offered and deployed in Client (for updating individual systems), Web hosted (hosted by Sun, with managed systems downloading packages across the Internet), and "Satellite Server" versions (where the downloaded packages come from a server deployed within the organization). Proxy servers can be added to the deployment for scalability. As of this writing, only Sun Connection Update for Solaris 10 is available in all three models (Client, Web hosted, and Satellite); with all other platforms requiring a Satellite server subscription. The new Sun Connection Inventory channel is initially available only through the Web hosted model.

The Satellite Server, the Satellite Console, and the Satellite Agent components each require Solaris 8/9/10 (SPARC), Solaris 10 (X64/X86), Red Hat RHEL 4 AS/ES, or SLES 9.

Sun Connection Update provides the patch management arm of the product suite, supporting policy-based, centralized patch management capabilities and features including scheduling of patch deployments (one-time or recurring); support for local knowledge extensions for the definition and incorporation of customer rules for patching locally sourced and 3rd party apps; multi-state rollbacks; new patch notifications; "PatchFinder" searching and Patch-at-a-time downloads; and patching of virtual environments.

For provisioning, the product suite offers the Sun Connect Provisioning channel; with which, the vendor states, customers can provision Solaris, Red Hat, and SuSE machines from bare metal using "copy and paste" methodology from existing systems. Applications and configuration files can be provisioned; and the deployment and management of configuration files can leverage built-in profiling capabilities of the service.

Finally, the new Sun Connect Inventory channel--a free offering to any Sun customer (even those who downloaded a free OS)--provides one-click discovery, organization, and asset management/reporting capabilities. Information tracked includes such metrics as product type, version, licensing, registration status, and support contract ID number; and access is via a Web-based interface. Custom, user-defined asset tags are also supported, as are searching capabilities.

The Sun Connect Inventory Channel is available free to all Sun customers. The Sun Connect Update Channel Client-side model is free for Solaris 10 with registration, while the Web hosted version and the Satellite version (also Solaris 10) is included with the Sun Service plan. The Sun Update Channel for all other platforms, and the Sun Provisioning Channel require a subscription purchase ($150 per agent per year, each).

Contact Sun Microsystems for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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