Sun’s N1 And A New Kind Of Systems Management

Sun took the occasion of its Network conference in San Francisco last week to provide further information about its N1 System Management software, which it has been incrementally disclosing since its Analysts’ Conference in February. 

This briefing provided further insight into both the breadth and direction of the offering, and also some roadmaps (time schedules).

Think of N1 as systems management for all of the hardware, networking, and software you might be running in your entire enterprise, as well as the assets of your remote employees and connected customers, suppliers, partners, contractors, etc., etc.

It is not Sun’s intention (at least so far) to replace conventional Systems Management Software for monitoring such as CA’s Unicenter, Tivoli, or BMC, but rather to sit beside it and send and receive information from such systems.

N1 itself will be implemented on Open Standards and is intended to support not only Sun’s own products, but also the legacy and future products of competitors and colleagues so that a normal enterprise environment, made up of systems of every type and vintage, can be seen and managed from a single point of view.

This is very ambitious and Sun is quick to admit it won’t all come about at once.

Sun is currently thinking of this as a three-phase plan:

Phase 1:  Virtualization, 2002-2003

Customers will be able to use N1 technologies to transform individual computers, network elements and storage systems into an aggregated pool of resources.

Once virtualized, the system will be able to allocate, monitor and meter the usage of included resources.

Phase 2:  Services Provisioning, 2003-2004

Customers will be able to use N1 to specify the business service definition for a web service.  N1 will take care of provisioning the data center resources required

Phase 3:  Policy Automation, 2004-2005

N1 will include telemetry and metering capabilities. N1 will enable the automation of work required to maintain application service level objectives. There will be more automated policy generation, automation, ease of use and extensibility.

While one can clearly see similarities in both style and specific features between Sun’s N1 and IBM Autonomic Computing initiative, there are distinct differences:

1. IBM’s Autonomic Computing is not a product, but rather a series of hardware and software technologies which will be integrated into IBM products throughout the product lines.
    

2. Many aspects of Autonomic Computing are already implemented, especially at what IBM calls the “basic” level.
    

3. IBM’s discussion is more granular, broken into five levels, and since it’s focused on increasing automation isn’t assigned (at least so far) to specific time frames.
    

4. The Sun objectives are more general and less defined than some of the IBM objectives, which seem perfectly reasonable, given that the IBM strategy is more mature and further along.

We expect further refinement from both Sun and IBM, together with widespread interest in such strategies from business partners, from competitors who decide to field strategies of their own (e.g., we’d expect to hear something from CA, HP, and perhaps BMC), and customers who are interested in being early implementers.

An article by Amy Wohl on N1 and the subject of these high-level systems management tools will appear in the November issue of the Spectrum Middleware Journal.  We are in the process of making arrangements to make it available to our readers.

 

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