Musings from the Coast

A simple equation to be sure. If you’ve got to manage patches and configurations on Linux or Solaris machines, you should pay attention to this post.

Here’s what to consider:

Baselines – Create groups of changes to be applied
Automated application – Apply a single change, group of changes, and/or baseline to one or more systems
Simulation – Model proposed changes to your environment before commiting to them
Rollback – The “oops” protection, remove changes automatically
Auditing – Know who made which changes when to aid in compliance
Aggregation – Pull bits from many different places to a staging ground, mix and match the content in automated change tasks
Introspection – Don’t trust what the description says, active comparison of symbols in changes vs. claims in descriptions (metadata)
Provisioning – Deploy configurations to bare metal as workloads and demands change
Management – Be it a data center, an application service, or a grid, actively manage the assets for workload, performance, cost, and availability.
Realtime – Always up, always up-to-date. Continuous real-time content.
Electronic Prognostics – Telemetry-based prediction of what will happen based on statistical models of what has happened across a broad population segment.
Risk Quantification – Availability Risk Index (ARI) determins not only the severity negative consequence for any known risk, but also the probability of occurance in time period X.

If your vendor(s) can’t or won’t do this, come see Sun. We’ve got a solution for you…..I’ll share it this summer. Stay tuned.

Here are some hints: