Sun fleshes out N1 with storage system

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems will unfurl a laundry list of new products at a press conference here Tuesday morning including the N1 Data Platform, a system for managing storage resources that forms the second part of its N1 data center management initiative.

Also to be launched are the first members of a new midrange storage lineup that come bundled with Sun's management software, two low-end servers that use its long-awaited UltraSparcIIIi "Jalapeno" chip, and a handful of software products intended to help IT managers build more security into their computing environments, Sun officials said.

Sun is moving to a system where it ships all its products on a quarterly cycle, hence the long list. Its pitch is that it can simplify life for customers by releasing the products together. The move also helps Sun position its hardware and software as a single, more tightly integrated environment, said David Freund, an analyst with Illuminata in Nashua, N.H.

"What Sun is trying to do is present a product line and a message that's built around the whole concept of a 'network computer,' as they  call it," he said.  "A system as we've come to understand it has changed. It's now made up of disparate parts that you put together in the network. It's hardware and software and network components, and Sun wants to provide as many of those as it can."

Sun Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy is due to present the products at a press conference here Tuesday morning.

N1 will be a family of products intended to let customers manage their data centers more efficiently and cost-effectively, by making better use of resources such as storage and computing power. To be rolled out gradually over the coming years, N1 competes with similar initiatives underway at IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The N1 Data Platform aims to let customers manage multiple storage arrays as if they were a single large system, allocating disk space to applications and databases as needed. The system being announced Tuesday is still in the pilot stage and includes only some of the capabilities eventually promised. It sits between a company's servers and storage equipment and includes software for grouping disks into logical units, dividing them into secure zones, and taking snapshots for data protection, said James Staten, director of marketing for Sun storage.

The system supports Fibre Channel but does not yet support Ethernet connections. It also does not yet do automatic provisioning or policy-based automation, which will allow additional storage to be assigned automatically to important programs when it's needed. Those capabilities are planned for future versions.