Sun sharpens blade vision

Sun Microsystems on Monday boosted its N1 strategy for datacenter resource unification by introducing a cadre of blade, server, and storage products.

The company’s intention with N1 is to position the enterprise network and its many components as the “network computer,” which is assembled in Lego-block-like fashion, said Scott McNealy, Sun president and CEO, during Monday’s product introduction inSan Francisco.

N1, McNealy said, will manage blades and everything in the cabinet and outward, “because everything that’s connected to the network can be managed from your N1 environment.”

Sun’s initial bump to N1 will feature provisioning for infrastructure; subsequent phases will focus on application- and service-level provisioning, according to Sun.

“[N1] is not about managing the individual box. It’s about monitoring and managing the space between the box — the network, the datacenter,” said Steve McKay, vice president of N1 at Sun, during an interview last week. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s foray into the blade arena follows on the footsteps of companies such as IBM and Dell.

To that end, Sun took the wraps off N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition software, which is intended to provide a central console for managing blade architectures and re-appropriating blade resources, according to Peter Ulander, director of marketing for volume systems products at Sun. N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition is due to ship in the second quarter of this year.

Also on Monday’s agenda was the SunFire B1600 Intelligent Shelf blade platform, which features a chassis that can hold 16 blades and can run Solaris on Sparc or x86 Intel processors or Linux on x86 chips. “It’ll be the industry’s first 64-bit blade computing platform,” Ulander said.  The system, which begins in price at $4,795, also is due this spring.

Sun’s blade rollout featured specialty blades that will focus on SSL proxy services and load balancing.

McNealy compared blades to pistons in an engine — a component. “We weren’t the first, we’re just the best to market” with blades, McNealy said. He stressed the importance of third parties developing blades for Sun’s platform, and added, “The Intelligent Shelf is the bigger announcement rather than the blades.”

Sun also introduced a pilot program called N1 Data Services for storage virtualization. It features a data-storage utilization engine based on Pirus technology and is to be delivered through Sun Services.

As opposed to network and system management platforms such as Computer Associates’ Unicenter, N1 has been constructed to provide a more unified view of a network, according to Sun.

“N1 takes all these resources [in the network] and creates a single pool of resources for an administrator to manage and deliver applications,” Ulander said.

McNealy positioned N1 as a centralized network platform. “You don’t write to Windows, you don’t write to Solaris, you don’t write to Linux,” McNealy said. “You write to N1.”

He also urged customers to use Sun’s iForce centers for application prototyping, and, as he usually does during public presentations, criticized a Sun rival — IBM in this case.

“Your other choice is to bring in IBM Global Services and let them empty your wallet like aHoover,” McNealy said.

An early user of N1, Victor Nelson, vice president of IT architecture at Cingular Wireless inAlpharetta, Ga., said his company expects improvements in utilization and availability and to automate IT tasks that now require manual labor.

Although the company’s implementation currently focuses on Solaris, Cingular is examining how its Hewlett-Packard HP-UX and Windows systems may eventually fit under the N1 umbrella, Nelson said.

“We see the low-hanging fruit as being with our Unix datacenter,” said Nelson.

On the server side, Sun introduced a line of high-end servers that feature the first 1.2Gz UltraSparc III chips. The chip, which has been added to the SunFire 4800, 6800, 12000, and 15000 servers, will increase memory bandwidth and improve I/O. The company also introduced the SunFire V1280 — a rack-optimized, 12-processor 900MHz UltraSparc III system intended for deploying applications such as those offered by SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle.

New to Sun’s storage roster is the StorEdge 3310, which has a blade form factor and is optimized for NAS, and the Sun Storage 3510 Fibre Channel array. The 3310 has a starting price of $18,995 and ships in the second quarter of this year, while the 3510 system ships at the end of this month and carries a starting price of $22,995.

Sun is enabling customers to prototype applications in Sun iForce centers, McNealy said. Additionally, Sun plans to work with systems integrators such as Accenture and Cap Gemini to help customers implement N1 systems, he said.