Sun to reveal details on N1 initiative

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun is expected to flesh out its N1 initiative at the Sun Network conference in San Francisco next week by detailing some of the products and technologies that will play a role in the emerging architecture.

Although Sun has said little about N1, which was first detailed to analysts and select customers in February, in a Network World interview in August, Sun Vice President Rob Gingell described it as Sun's future computer architecture.

Analysts say the idea is to provide companies with software and utilities to let them create virtual pools of computing power that can be applied to business tasks as and when required. N1 will encompass many of Sun's existing products, including Solaris and the Sun One environment. Some analysts also expect third-party network and system management vendors, such as BMC Software and Computer Associates, to integrate their products into N1.

At the conference, Sun is expected to detail the role that Sun's directory services and identity management software will play in N1. Ultimately, analysts say, Sun will have to acquire some key technologies to bring it all together, such as a policy engine to create and apply rules governing the behavior of networked systems.

Donna Scott, vice president and research director at Gartner, says, "N1 is Sun's vision and strategy for the next-generation data center. It's about putting all resources together to address critical business processes." This will be achieved through centralized resource management, making it possible to identify available network resources and allocate them to new projects as needed.

In a recent Gartner research note, Scott described N1 as having four components:

• A control plane, software that sits on the network to enable abstraction, management and control of end-to-end services.

• A virtualized network whereby networked components are configured into virtual LANs to enable dynamic resource switching.

• Virtualized compute elements that allow for horizontal (Web and application server farm) and vertical (database) scaling of resources, and dynamic provisioning of the infrastructure and software stack.

• Virtualized storage that will be managed at the global file system level rather than at the block level, which will simplify application and storage management.

Scott notes that some N1 components already are available. For example, Web Start Flash - available in Solaris 8 and 9 - lets operating system and application images be archived and rolled out to new systems when needed. This makes it possible to deploy a new Web or application server in minutes instead of hours. Solaris 9 offers a higher level of automated provisioning and change management through Sun Management Center and Change Manager.

"N1 is about putting business rules in and getting network commands out," says Elizabeth Rainge, director of network management at IDC. "N1 is about putting networks in line with business rules." This can be achieved through policy-based computing, and using directory services and identity management.

Sun's Gingell said N1 would exploit the fact "that programs are becoming graph-structured things in the sense that they are a bunch of elements that are connected with different network connections, even if they live in a single box."

That gets interesting, he said, because then systems can begin "to understand applications in a way that they couldn't understand when all they saw was an executable. Now we can see the structure of an application, and we can monitor its behavior dynamically."

Ultimately, Gingell said, N1 will make it possible for an administrator to give finance priority, and the distributed network resources would be driven to accomplish that, "giving administrators the same sort of control over the network that they used to have over a single box."

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