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Tired of Managing Multiple Subscription Payments and Updates for Red Hat?

by Mike Karnes, CompuCom Red Hat Product Specialist

It may be time to look at co-terming your Red Hat agreements or deploying the Red Hat Network platform.

Agreement co-terming can be a wonderful thing. It saves time by allowing you to manage one annual payment, and it saves money by enabling you to get a higher volume discount. Most companies are doing this for larger lines like IBM, Citrix, Microsoft and Symantec, but they must have gone through the exercise for Red Hat.

If you’re like most clients, you’ve probably been buying your Red Hat subscriptions “one-server/user” at a time. This has created a myriad of subscription agreements that are sprawled throughout your company. Depending on the size of your organization and the level of decentralization/globalization, trying to corral all your current subscription agreements can seem like a daunting task. But co-terming is worth the effort. Not only will you get off the weekly renewal treadmill, but you will also:

  • Maintain compliance by ensuring that you have the appropriate number of subscriptions for each location and server
  • Save money by ensuring that subscriptions don’t expire and by potentially qualifying for a higher volume-discount level
  • Take advantage of the Red Hat Network Satellite Program
Co-terming is not just for large organizations. Most small businesses and state and local governments can benefit from it as well. Typically, smaller companies and agencies have fewer resources to utilize. With such scarce resources, managing multiple subscriptions as a single co-term frees up those resources for other important tasks. Additionally, government agencies often have budget and time constraints. The worst thing that could happen is for your IT director to find that a subscription has expired and there is no budget left to renew. But with co-termed subscriptions, you always have that visibility and can be worry-free.

A Co-Term deal has to have at least a 12-month overall term, but it cannot be more than 36 months. A Co-Term order can be either:
  1. Additional units for an end user, which should align with the existing installation
  2. The extension of existing subscriptions to align all to the same termination date
  3. Red Hat has created a co-termination calculator to facilitate the process.

CompuCom is here to help you co-term your existing Red Hat subscriptions. We’ll also help you determine if the Red Hat Network Satellite platform may be a good fit for your organization.


Red Hat Network Satellite (RHN)

Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite server is an easy-to-use, advanced systems management platform for your Linux infrastructure. RHN Satellite server provides simple tools to efficiently manage the life cycle of systems on your network. This includes provisioning new systems, managing their updates and configuration changes, monitoring system performance and eventually redeploying the systems for a new purpose. Administration and management of your systems can be distributed based upon your organizational requirements.

A key capability of RHN Satellite Server for many organizations is the ability to manage and track all of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions. RHN Satellite 5.4 introduces capabilities that make managing your RHEL subscriptions easier and more thorough, including:
  • FlexGuest Entitlement Support
  • Subscription Reporting
The focus of RHN Satellite is to provide the best systems management experience for RHEL customers. RHN Satellite 5.4 continues to deliver on this mission and builds upon previous releases by offering improved capabilities around:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 support
  • Compliance
  • Content Management
  • Subscription Management
Your business benefits from increased productivity, reduced system life-cycle costs, greater administration consistency and enhanced security. RHN Satellite lowers deployment, configuration and management costs. Your security posture is improved through a single centralized management tool, secure connection policies for remote administration, standardized machine configurations and digitally signed content.