One year ago, we announced the general availability of Ksplice Uptrack, a subscription service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux. Since then, a lot has happened!

Adoption

Over 600 companies have deployed Ksplice Uptrack on more than 100,000 production systems, on all 7 continents (Antarctica was the last hold-out). More than 2 million rebootless updates have been installed!

You see the greatest system administration time and cost savings when you use Ksplice Uptrack on all of your machines, and we've designed and priced Uptrack with this large-scale usage in mind. We've been very happy to see that our customers share this view: most of our customers either rolled out Ksplice across the board upon sign-up or have substantially expanded their usage after first purchasing for a particular environment.

We've introduced several features this year to make managing large Uptrack installations easier:

autoinstall : the Uptrack client can be configured to install rebootless updates on its own as they become available, making kernel updates fully automatic. Autoinstall is now our most popular configuration.

: the Uptrack client can be configured to install rebootless updates on its own as they become available, making kernel updates fully automatic. Autoinstall is now our most popular configuration. the Uptrack API : programmatically query the state of your machines through our RESTful API.

: programmatically query the state of your machines through our RESTful API. Nagios plugins: easily integrate Uptrack monitoring into your existing Nagios infrastructure with plugins that monitor for out of date, inactive, and unsupported machines.

Supported kernels

We continue to expand the distributions and flavors we support. You can now use Ksplice Uptrack on (deep breath) RHEL 4 & 5, CentOS 4 & 5 (and CentOS Plus), Debian 5 & 6, Ubuntu 8.04, 9.10, 10.04, & 10.10, Virtuozzo 3 & 4, OpenVZ for EL5 and Debian, CloudLinux 5, and Fedora 13 & 14. Within these distributions, we continue to support more flavors and older kernels; our launch may have been last year, but we support kernels back to 2007 and earlier!

You've always been able to use Ksplice in virtualized environments like VMWare, Xen, and Virtuozzo, This year, we've given you even more virtualization options by adding support for virtualization kernels like Debian OpenVZ and Debian Xen. Starting with Ubuntu Maverick, we support all Ubuntu kernel flavors, including the Maverick private cloud/EC2 kernel.

Thanks to some changes at Amazon and Rackspace, you can now even use Ksplice Uptrack on stock Linux kernels in Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud.

As always, you can roll out a free trial on any of these distributions, for an unlimited number of systems.

This year, we also added Fedora Desktop to our free version options, so now you can use Ksplice Uptrack on both Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora Desktop completely for free.

Reboots saved

Did you know that between RHEL 4 and 5, Red Hat released 22 new kernels this past year?

Without Ksplice, that's coordination and downtime for 22 reboots, including the hat trick of font-size: 125%; ">3 kernels in 3 weeks for RHEL 5. Gartner estimates that 90% of exploited systems are exploited using known, patched vulnerabilities, so if you're not rebooting and you're not using Ksplice, you are putting your servers (and your customers) at risk.

Looking forward

What do you want to see from Ksplice this year? What features can we add to help you deploy and monitor your Uptrack installations? Tell us what you want, and we'll do our best to deliver!