Sun's N1 Next-Generation OS and File System To Take On Microsoft's Yukon

Sun Microsystems

The Unix giant will take on Microsoft's "Yukon" by implementing the next-generation "qfs and SAMfs" advanced file and storage system technology acquired as part of Sun's purchase of Eaton, Minn.-based LSC last May, said Andy Ingram, Sun's vice president of marketing for Sun Solaris.

"We are now the proud owners of qfs and SAMfs, and are really making that a network-facing capability so you'll have smart network protocols and the capabilities of a higher-performance file system blended into one. But now we need a file system that sits on a pure network and is loosely coupled," said Ingram in an interview with CRN this week.

The file system, as part of Sun's N1 next-generation operating system for the network, stores metadata separately from data and will be able to handle shared reads and shared writes to a variety of storage devices connecting into the network, Ingram said.

N1, which was first discussed at an analyst meeting last March, is a set of services that sit on the edge of the network that will dynamically provision processing power, hardware, software and storage resources to distributed Web services on the fly. It will also manage the distributed Web servers that span across multiple servers and networks, while Solaris will continue to be the OS for servers, Ingram added.

As part of its official Solaris 9 launch next month, Sun will position its forthcoming N1 project as a next-generation operating system for the Web services era, similar in scope to Microsoft's "Longhorn" and longer-term "Blackcomb" efforts to transform Windows into a network service.

Sun's rare glimpse into its next-generation file system and operating system came this week as Microsoft detailed its Unified Data Storage concept and Yukon plans at Tech Ed 2002 Thursday. Sun's next-generation file system and operating system will be detailed during its official launch of Solaris 9 next month.

"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," Ingram said. "This is N1 the concept of a management object that sits above the server level and dynamically carves up [CPU, memory and storage resources into chunks and then provisions those chunks out. It is the operating system for the network. It is independent of Solaris."

The N1 service will be delivered in phases as four components: the N1 Control Panel, and virtual compute, virtual network and virtual storage elements. The virtual storage element will come from the distributed storage and file system technology developed by LSC, Graham said.

The first building blocks will be delivered in Solaris 9. For example, Solaris 9 will introduce a concept called containers that will enable "virtual" or software partitioning within system domains. The software only permits hardware partitioning today.

The Solaris 9 resource, security and fault containers, which enable virtual partitioning within domains, provides a finer granularity of partitioning so that users can partition a fraction of the CPU horsepower and a certain amount of memory for a specific Web service, Ingram said.

N1 is an effort to "virtualize" an entire data center of servers, storage and network computing equipment as if it were one superserver, he said.

Sun's partners and customers plan to exploit both Solaris and N1 to optimize the performance of Web services across the network. "The N1 project will be a tremendous advantage to IT organizations when it is ready," said David McDaniel, principal architect at Navidec, Greenwood Village, Colo. "We anticipate that the speed to deploy and the simplicity to set up Sun's infrastructure will greatly be increased," McDaniel said.

While many view N1 as an example of grid computing rather than a next-generation OS, Sun sees it as the way to manage all of Sun's software and hardware in the future.

"We have lots of different Unix implementations," said Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman and CEO, 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," McNealy said.

ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.