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 NEWSSun reveals N1 data center plan By Paul Krill September 19, 2002 8:56 am PT SUN MICROSYSTEMS' N1 computing strategy for simplified management of data centers, to be revealed at the SunNetwork 2002 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, is long on vision but short on product details at this juncture.
N1 enables automation of complexity associated with IT management and cost reductions, according to Sun. N1 transforms traditional IT infrastructures into a more efficient model, enabling utility computing, in which customers "pay as they grow," the company said. "This really is the next big innovation in the computer -- building things out of networks, managing things from a network perspective, not from a computer perspective," said Sun Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy, during a keynote speech at the conference Wednesday. "With N1 we're building an operating system for the network," said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 at Sun, in an interview Wednesday. Sun already has done virtualization of resources internally in some of its hardware, such as the Sun Fire 15000 server, and is now transferring this technology to networks as a whole, he said. Through N1, IT managers will no longer be managing underlying components but rather services on top of those components, said Zheng Yael, senior director of marketing for N1 at Sun, in Menlo Park, Calif., in an interview earlier this week. Sun's N1 will involve management of multiple platforms and not just Sun systems, she said. N1 will be delivered in three phases, Yael said. Phase one will focus on a virtualization engine, with a product due at the end of the calendar year. This phase is intended to provide for virtualization of storage networks and applications. Resource allocation, monitoring, and metering are also part of this phase. "Customers will be able to use this type of virtualization technology to basically aggregate the compute, the network, and the storage resources into one aggregated pool, and the system will be able to allocate [these resources]," Yael said. Systems administrators will be managing services and not have to be concerned with what computer is running what service, she said. The virtualization offering will feature a management interface. Phase two of N1, to be delivered in 2003 and 2004, will focus on provisioning of application resources. A provisioning engine will be released as a product by Sun in mid-2003, MacKay said. Phase three, centered on policy-driven automation, will occur in 2004 and 2005, according to Yael. Yael said Sun will roll out many products for N1 during the next several years, but she and MacKay did not have specific details on other planned new products. N1 represents "a whole new approach," said Yael. "It's a systems approach to running the data center," she said. Technologies such as Web services, grid computing, and Java will be included in the mix, she said. The Sun One Grid Engine software will be part of N1. Grid computing is a subcomponent of N1 to enable the linking of grids for computationally intensive applications. Other Sun technologies involved in N1 include NFS (Network File System), Dynamic System Domains, and Solaris. An analyst said Sun with N1 was attacking the right problem, but added that the company needs to supply product details. "My two-cent summary is this is absolutely the right problem to solve, and if the products live up to the architectural description, this should be an immensely popular product platform with Sun's customers," said analyst Richard Fichera, vice president and research fellow at Giga Information Group, in Cambridge, Mass. The lack of product details "clearly puts some uncertainty on when we can get the benefits of this," Fichera said. According to Sun, networks today are at roughly the same stage as the telephone industry was when it still had switchboards and operators manually connecting calls. Unless a system is developed to improve scaling, everyone under 30 will have to be trained to work as a system administrator, the company said. Sun customers report spending 70 percent of IT budgets on managing data center complexity, the company said. N1 will feature partnerships with companies such as Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, EDS, Deloitte Consulting, Oracle, BMC Software, and PeopleSoft, according to Sun. N1 differs from established network management platforms such as Computer Associates Unicenter and Hewlett-Packard OpenView in that N1 is geared toward managing the network itself, while HP and CA platforms manage boxes on the network, MacKay said. McNealy also said that Sun later this year plans to "drive some new economies and densities around blade servers." Additionally, an incremental update to the Sun One Studio application development platform, Version 4.1, will ship in two weeks and features support for the Sun One Application Server 7 and the BEA WebLogic Server 7 application servers, according to Drew Engstrom, product line manager for Forte for Java, at Sun. Also included in Version 4.1 is support for JAX RPC (Java APIs for XML Remote Procedure Calls). JAX RPC is a set of Java APIs for exposing code to XML-based Web services, enabling applications to participate in Web services. Within several weeks, Sun will release a free module enabling WebGain VisualCafe' developers to move applications to Sun One Studio, Engstrom said. WebGain recently has been selling off its product lines to companies such as Oracle and TogetherSoft. Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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