Sun
Announces Storage Features For N1
Last
week was a very busy one for Sun.
At its Partner Meeting it rolled out a number of
partner-centric announcements as well as its product announcements
for the next quarter (Remember, Sun has committed to making its
product announcements once a quarter now.)
An
important part of that cycle was new storage announcements (Sun has
been busily adding products in this area throughout the last year or
so) and – much more interesting to us – an addition to its N1
Data Center management offering, the N1 Data Platform.
This is a software product for managing storage resources,
both Sun’s and other vendors.
The
N1 Data Platform provides storage pooling and consolidation through
virtualization, allowing customers to flexibly allocate both
existing and new storage resources on demand.
Storage can be allocated from a central console. This allows
customers to buy less storage capacity, since they can make better
use of their existing capacity.
This, of course, would lower their cost of ownership.
The
N1 Data Platform is intended to let
customers manage multiple storage arrays as if they were a single
large system. The
system can therefore allocate disk space to applications and
databases, based on priorities and policies.
Sun
acquired the N1 Data Platform last year from Pirus Networks. It is expected to be available by year-end, depending on the
success of initial pilots.
The
N1 Data Platform is part of Sun’s larger N1 systems management
initiative which is designed, like the IBM Autonomic Computing
Initiative and HP Adaptive Computing to reduce complexity by
permitting servers and storage to be managed less expensively and
with higher degrees of automation. Sun expects to offer higher degrees of proactive automation,
such as provisioning, later this year and into next year as the N1
product line continues to roll out.
These
will be reflected in our Reducing Complexity roadmaps for Sun, IBM,
HP, and Microsoft which we will be sharing with you soon.
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