Sun's Shares Its N1 Data Center Architecture Vison
Most of today's networks were built to accommodate peak loads and as a result are underutilized, said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 at Sun. In addition, most networks are built to provide specific services with upgrades requiring extensive retrofitting, he said.
ELEMENTS OF SUN N1 NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
>> Foundation for servers, storage, and blade servers.
>> Virtualization of servers and storage devices. Sun's acquistion last month of Pirus Networks gives it storage virtualization technology.
>> Services can be provisioned to the server and storage pools instead of to specific devices.
>> Policies will amnage the services and not individual servers or storage devices.
"Sun has been saying that the network is the computer," MacKay said. "It still is. N1 is the computer built out of the network. The network is the system, and the computers, storage, etc., are now components. You start managing that system, and not the components."
The N1 architecture consists of four parts that turn network systems into components of a single system via virtualization, he said.
At the heart of N1 are foundation resources such as servers, storage and blade servers. N1 can use these systems without modification.
The second part is virtualization, which creates flexible pools of resources. Sun plans to unveil a virtualization engine that can treat servers as a single pool of computing power, while storage virtualization will be handled in part by technology gained through the recent acquisition of Pirus Networks, a storage virtualization developer.
The third part is provisioning, which allows services to key into pools of resources, not to specific servers.
A fourth element is telemetry, which allows policies to be set to manage the services, not the individual components.
The first parts of the N1 architecture will come out later this year as Sun introduces blade servers with N1 awareness built in, said Adam Hawley, group manager of N1 product marketing.
In a demonstration, Sun set up a service to sell books online. Instead of grabbing server and storage resources and then building the service on top of what was available, a solution provider answers a series of questions about required average lookup time, average buy time, charge back costs for the infrastructure and other service-level information. The N1 software then immediately creates a logical map of the services infrastructure and automatically provisions the service to the network.
John Murphy, executive vice president of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider, said N1 can cut the cost and complexity of deploying new systems,especially the manpower needed for training,which will mean more business and less need for clients to outsource the work.
"As a reseller, the more things that get outsourced to [IBM Global Services, the worse for us," he said. "N1 will get customers to see that, instead of outsourcing, they can get equipment from Advanced Systems Group and use Sun to move things forward faster."
The N1 system can be used to upgrade services or build services for later deployment, MacKay said. "This is all handled by the service owners," he said. "There is no need for interaction from IT."
N1 is expected to be rolled out in three phases, Hawley said. Solution providers will be able to participate in N1 from the beginning, he said.