Sun Microsystems has acquired Aduva Inc. Aduva supplies a patch management tool for Linux and Solaris platforms. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company's OnStage product has been designed to apply patches to Linux, as well as Sun's own Solaris Unix operating system. The software can automate the application of patches to open source and mixed source software stacks.
For its part, Sun is acquiring Aduva not just because it wants to automate patch management on its customers' Solaris and Linux servers, but because it wants to offer an automated patch management service through the Sun Grid, the company's grid/utility computing farm. Sun will also embed OnStage in its Solaris software stack, which it is in the process of taking open source. (It seems likely that Sun will take the OnStage product open source as well, as it plans to do with its N1 server provisioning tools.)
Sun says that administrators tell it that patch management is the biggest pain point, and that the biggest security vulnerability is the inability to keep systems patched in a continuous manner.