Sun Ties N1 With Blade Server, Grid Strategies

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 separately.

The first phase of implementing the N1 architecture consists of the virtualization of resources such as servers, blade servers and storage devices to turn those resources into computing pools, said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 and management systems at Sun.

The rollout of the virtualization phase will come with Sun's introduction in the first half of 2003 of the enterprise blade servers, and will include technology from two recent acquisitions: server virtualization developer Terraspring and storage virtualization developer Pirus Systems, MacKay said.

Sun has not released many details about the blade servers. However, Ashley Eikenberry, group manager for blade product marketing at Sun, said the company expects to introduce SPARC-based versions supporting Solaris and x86-based versions supporting Linux in the first half of 2003. Eikenberry would not say whether N1 support will be built into the servers.

Sun also plans to unveil programs in the first half of 2003 aimed at getting its solution providers involved in grid computing, said Peter Jeffcock, group marketing manager for Sun's Grid Computing Group. Sun's grid computing efforts will be linked to N1, he said. "Grid is a component for part of the data center workload that is transaction-intensive," he said.

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

Hank Johnson, vice president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Stonebridge Technologies, a Dallas-based Sun partner, said Stonebridge is studying N1 to make sure it understands the technology before adopting it, but for now, he said, N1 is on the leading, bleeding edge.

"Sun has done a good job about saying, 'N1's coming,here's what you need to do to get ready,' just like they do with all new technology," Johnson said.