Interview: Sun clears away N1 clouds 

N1 is Sun's answer to the distributed computing architectures offered by rivals IBM and HP. But until this week's Network Computing 03 launch, it was more marketing buzz than product reality. Steve McKay, Sun vice president for N1, met with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mark Jones, Technical Director Tom Yager, and former Test Center Director Steve Gillmor to outline Sun's N1 value proposition.

InfoWorld: How do you define N1?

McKay: We started talking about the vision of N1 about a year ago. In September we outlined that N1 [is] the term we use to refer to a vision, an architecture, and a set of products. The vision is of next-generation systems, up-leveling the notion of system from the computer box to the datacenter. We started talking about the specific architecture we're going to use to roll that out, [which] consists of three phases. The first is virtualization, which takes the boxes in your datacenter and turns them into pools of resources that you operate on from a logical standpoint. The second phase is application- and service-level provisioning, where you map network services onto those pools of resources. And the third phase is dynamic policy management, where you basically use a set of policies to re-provision dynamically what's going on in your datacenter. The announcements that we're making [this week] are about the first sets of products.

InfoWorld: Can you tell us about the announcements you are making?

McKay: We're announcing the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, [which] is virtualization capability, based on technology that we've been developing at Sun, along with technology that we acquired when we bought TerraSpring in the fall. What the Blades Edition of the provisioning server lets you do is configure shelves of blades and install the operating system on it, configure any switches or routers that you have in the shelf of blades, and manage those shelves of blades now as a single system, as a virtual pool of resources. We're now delivering the first phase of the architecture, meaning virtualization and infrastructure provisioning in a product. 

The second announcement is that we're taking the first phase of the N1 architecture in two different directions. One is into blades, the other is into general datacenters. And we're doing that not in a set of packaged products but as a set of pilots, where customers are working with Sun from a product standpoint and a professional services standpoint to configure parts of their datacenter and to roll out the N1 virtualization and infrastructure provisioning software in their general-purpose datacenters. In particular, we're announcing that Cingular has been engaged with Sun in rolling this out in their datacenter in Georgia. In addition, we're announcing that we're starting a set of pilot deployments with an N1 data services service, which is the storage virtualization technology that we acquired when we bought Pirus Networks in the fall, for those customers who are particularly interested in storage virtualization and in data services on the storage side.