Solaris 9 Hints Toward Future OS

N1, which Sun first disclosed last February, offers the ability to treat an entire data center of servers, storage and network computing equipment as if it were one superserver.

The software will sit at the edge of the network and dynamically provision and manage resources such as hardware, processing power, memory, I/O and storage for distributed Web services, said Andy Graham, Sun's vice president of marketing for Solaris. Sun's flagship Solaris OS will continue to manage individual servers, he said. "First, there was an operating system for servers, and now we need the equivalent of an OS at the network level. We need to have an operating system at two levels," Graham said.

"The N1 project will be a tremendous advantage to IT organizations when it is ready," said David McDaniel, principal architect at Navidec, a Sun solution provider in Greenwood Village, Colo. "We anticipate that the speed to deploy and the simplicity to set up Sun's infrastructure will be greatly increased."

Although it could take more than a decade for N1 to fulfill its promise, the technology will be delivered as four components: the N1 Control panel and virtual compute, virtual network and virtual storage elements. The virtual storage element uses distributed storage- and file-system technology developed by LSC, which Sun bought last May.

The first N1 building blocks will be delivered in Solaris 9, due to be launched next month, Sun said.

While many view N1 as an example of grid computing, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said he sees it as the way to run the data center of the future. "We have lots of different Unix implementations," McNealy said in a recent interview with CRN. "But they're all Unix, they run the entire Sun ONE platform, and they'll all be managed by N1 as we develop that product over time."

ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.