The client

A large healthcare company with a network of 20 hospitals nationwide, serving over one million patients each year and supporting a medical community of over five thousand employees. 

The challenge
The organization’s RHEL-based infrastructure required labor-intensive manual patching and updates to ensure minimum security compliance, requiring the equivalent of one full-time employee. 

The results

Shadow-Soft eliminated the need for constant manual oversight by architecting an environment that enables the organization to manage 100+ servers via one centralized system.

Phase 1: Assess

Shadow-Soft engineers created an architecture plan that would enable the organization’s infrastructure to shift from manually updating resources and infrastructure to a fully automated system that identifies critical security patch updates & errata and manages entitlements & subscriptions.

Phase 2: Develop a vision and implement

Shadow-Soft engineers implemented Red Hat Satellite 6 into the organization’s existing platform to enable a secure and fully data compliant process.

During the implementation phase, Shadow-Soft engineers: 

• Created a Sync Plan that ensures repositories on all Satellite servers are automatically updated
• Implemented SDLC model, including Dev, QA, and Production environments that allow for safe deployments and rollbacks
• Created Activation Keys to automate the registration of hosts to the Satellite server
• Configured Host Collection to enable bulk operations and updates 
• Migrated subscription management from the Red Hat customer portal to the Satellite server

Phase 3: Enablement through knowledge transfer

Shadow-Soft engineers prepared the organization’s in-house team to manage their infrastructure:

• Quick start reference guide – for common Satellite server tasks and troubleshooting
• Templates – to enable quick implementation of future updates  
• Best practices – to handle patching, managing errata and rollback errata updates in the event of failure