Sun's N1 Strategy Tied To Blade Servers, Grid Computing

N1 is Sun's vision of how widely distributed computing resources, including servers, storage, software and networking, can be virtualized and provisioned as a single system, rather than managed as separate systems.

The N1 architecture consists of four parts, said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 and management systems at Sun. They include foundation resources such as servers, blade servers and storage devices; virtualization to turn those resources into computing pools; provisioning, which allows services to be provisioned to the pools of resources; and telemetry, which allows setting of policies to manage the services rather than the individual components.

Sun's November acquisition of Terraspring, a privately held, Fremont, Calif.-based developer of technology that automates the deployment of software across multiple servers, along with its acquisition in September of Pirus Systems, an Acton, Mass.-based developer of heterogeneous storage virtualization technology, form the core of the phase one rollout of N1, which will come with the new blade server line, said MacKay.

Sun executives have not publicly released many details about the new blade servers. However, Ashley Eikenberry, group manager for blades product marketing at Sun, said Sun expects to introduce enterprise blade servers in the first or second quarter of 2003.

These blade servers will come in two flavors: a SPARC-based version supporting the Solaris environment and an x86-based version supporting the Linux environment. The blades can be managed at the blade level, the chassis level and the rack level, the latter encompassing hundreds of blades at a time, and will come with plugins for enterprise management tools such as Sun Management Center, BMC Patrol, HP OpenView and CA Unicenter, Eikenberry said.

The new blades will support N1, but Eikenberry would not say whether that support will be built into the servers on they day they are introduced.

Sun's current blade server line is targeted at carrier-grade applications.

Thanks to the virtualization component, N1 is expected to cut the cost of provisioning services significantly, said MacKay. While clients say they can manage 15 to 30 servers per administrator, they should be able to manage hundreds under N1, he said. "With N1, we're not talking about a 5 percent or 10 percent improvement," he said. "We're talking about a breakthrough in improvement."

Customers prefer thinking about billable services rather than servers and storage boxes, MacKay said. "They don't want to think, my four-way server can process 17 gazillion transactions a day if the moon is full."

Sun's N1 vision is related to the company's grid computer initiative, said MacKay, who is responsible for both. Like N1, grid computing has an element of server provisioning, he said. However, while N1 is aimed at simplifying the provision of a wide range of services, grid computing is typically aimed at provisioning for single application, especially one related to scientific computing, he said.

Peter Jeffcock, group marketing manager for Sun's Grid Computing Group, said there are already 6,500 computer grids in place worldwide, with about half of them in the United States, and that number is growing by about 70 grids per week.

Sun's grid computing efforts will be linked to N1 going forward, said Jeffcock. "Grid is a component for part of the data center workload that is transaction-intensive," he said.

As a result, Jeffcock said, the company has recently unveiled programs aimed at helping European channel partners get involved in grid computing, and plans to introduce a similar program to its U.S. solution providers in the first half of 2003. "We are increasingly relying on partners for grid computing," he said. "Grids are usually heterogeneous. They are typically started for a single project. But then there are other projects. Then the projects get together, and eventually the grid becomes heterogeneous."