Sun's blade servers to get system mgmt. feature

Sun will give users the first look at its hardware and software management technology on new blade servers that should arrive by the first quarter of next year, executives said during a briefing last week.

Sun will retool software that it acquired through its recent purchase of Terraspring to form what it calls the N1 Control Plane. The product will serve as a management portal that looks out over servers, storage systems, switches and software in a network. Sun plans to sell the Control Plane product with various hardware packages but will ship it first on a new set of blade servers due in the first quarter, said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 at Sun.

N1 is the overarching term for Sun’s “virtualization” technology, which provides customers with a large-scale view of all the hardware in a network, be it from Sun or another vendor, and then makes it easier to install operating systems, applications, updates and other software on those systems. Software components such as Control Plane will work in unison with specialized hardware to give a view of how many processors, how much disk space and what types of bandwidth are available throughout the network. The idea is that administrators will one day be able to deploy an application by dragging and dropping the icon onto the image of this collected pool of hardware and letting the N1 technology do all the installation and administrative grunt work.

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Sun will give users the first look at its hardware and software management technology on new blade servers that should arrive by the first quarter of next year, executives said during a briefing last week.

Sun will retool software that it acquired through its recent purchase of Terraspring to form what it calls the N1 Control Plane. The product will serve as a management portal that looks out over servers, storage systems, switches and software in a network. Sun plans to sell the Control Plane product with various hardware packages but will ship it first on a new set of blade servers due in the first quarter, said Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 at Sun.

N1 is the overarching term for Sun’s “virtualization” technology, which provides customers with a large-scale view of all the hardware in a network, be it from Sun or another vendor, and then makes it easier to install operating systems, applications, updates and other software on those systems. Software components such as Control Plane will work in unison with specialized hardware to give a view of how many processors, how much disk space and what types of bandwidth are available throughout the network. The idea is that administrators will one day be able to deploy an application by dragging and dropping the icon onto the image of this collected pool of hardware and letting the N1 technology do all the installation and administrative grunt work.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard are the other major server vendors to have outlined similar technology.

Sun expects the first of its customers to begin using its N1 technology with the release of its blade servers early next year. Over time, Sun expects to sell a variety of hardware that comes preconfigured with its N1 technology. Its professional services organization also will work to sell the N1 software to Sun’s customers. The company would not provide pricing for N1 software.

Vance is a correspondent with the IDG News Service’s San Francisco bureau.

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