Sun Expands N1 Systems Management Programs

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IT vendors talk a lot these days about trying to reduce the costs of using information technology through the application of information technology. All of the major players have a different name for what they call this automation--IBM calls it On Demand, Microsoft calls it the Dynamic Systems Initiative, Hewlett-Packard calls it Adaptive Enterprise, and Sun Microsystems calls it N1. At its quarterly product launch in Washington, D.C., last week, Sun moved N1 a few steps closer to making good on its N1 promises.

N1 is probably the least obvious product naming scheme in the IT industry--ok, there are probably worse, and if you know any, send me an email--but if you are a nerd who used to do math, it probably makes sense. There are two kinds of scaling when it comes to servers: vertical scaling, which means building big shared memory systems like SMP servers, and horizontal scaling, which means creating distributed systems and clusters that do not share memory but are linked in such a way that they can coordinate on work. Sun used to call vertical scaling V1 and horizontal scaling H1, and N1 is that no man's land that shoots the gap between the two. N1 is about giving the same set of tools to cover both vertical and horizontal server architectures. Now, having explained all that, Sun should promptly kill the N1 name and move on to something more appropriate that, like pornography, people will understand when they see it.

Sun introduced two new products in the N1 family, adding to its existing N1 Grid Provisioning Server 3.1 Blades Edition, which does bare metal provisioning on Sun's blade servers. (Sun has rebranded its Grid Engine grid computing middleware as the N1 Grid Engine as well, but this is not a new N1 program.)

The N1 System Manager is an expanded version of the provisioning software that Sun introduced on its blades. It is able to reach out into the network and discover bare metal servers and then provision them with operating systems and monitor and manage them from that point forward. Right now, Sun is supporting N1 System Manager of its Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers--which are the components in its Sun Grid compute utility, by the way. N1 System Manager is, in fact, how Sun is provisioning the servers in the Sun Grid, and it is able to logically group systems and provision them as a group. The software can also designate software stacks that ride on top of the provisioned servers. The interesting bit with this tool is that N1 System Manager has a combination command line and GUI interface, and when you do commands in one interface, they are shown executing in the other interface as well. A lot of system administrators hate GUIs, but at the same time, many things--like provisioning a bare metal server--can be done with a drop and drag of a mouse instead of creating and running scripts.

Right now, according to Jim Sangster, director of marketing for N1 and availability technologies, Sun can provision Solaris 10 and Linux using N1 System Manager, and it is not supporting Sparc systems today (which seems odd, but Sun is examining how to support Solaris 10 on Sparc machines using this tool). Sun is working on the ability to provision Windows using the tool, which will be provided at some future and unspecified date. The N1 System Manager software needs to run on a dedicated server, and only runs on Red Hat today with Solaris 10 in the works. Sangster is not sure whether or not Sun will support the running of N1 System Manager on Windows boxes or not, even if it can reach in and provision and manage them. N1 System Manager costs $299 per managed node.

Sun's other new management tool is called N1 Grid Service Provisioning System 5.0, which manages provisioning of services--application servers, Web servers, and databases--across a network of machines. If N1 System Manager is aimed at giving system administrators the tools to bring new servers online and keep them online, the N1 Grid Service Provisioning System adds support up the stack to allow the application and database developers who control these higher levels of the IT infrastructure to provision the software they need to their jobs. An earlier version of this product has been shipping, but it did not do operating system provision, which has been added. Service Provisioning System has much broader OS support, too, and can provision Solaris 2.7, 8, 9, and 10, and can do so on systems or inside the container partitions that debuted with Solaris 10; it also supports AIX, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2000 Advanced Server. It includes pre-built models of common software stacks, which simplifies middleware provisioning. The master server supporting N1 Grid Service Provision System can be Solaris 8 or 9 running on an X86 or Sparc machines; it can also run on Red Hat Linux 2.1 or 3 or Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server. It costs $1,400 per managed node, and is intended for managing hundreds or thousands of systems.

Sangster says that Sun enables these two tools to mesh together, and is looking at adding APIs that will allow other system management and provisioning tools to hook into them as well.

In a separate announcement, Sun said its Update Connection service, which was announced in February and was expected for delivery in April, had slipped to the end of May. Back in February, Sun said Update Connection would include a free system administration console called Sun Update Manager and a Sun-hosted portal called the Update Connection System Edition that will provide centralized patch management for Solaris 10, and eventually Solaris 8 and Solaris 9, followed by Sun's Java Enterprise System middleware stack. Over the long haul, it will do server firmware updates as well. The free thick client is for managing updates and security for a specific machine, but the priced portal offering is for centrally managing a large number of Sun boxes and with deeper patch coverage (not just security patches, but the whole enchilada).

Now, Update Connection is being pitched as part of a larger umbrella service called Sun Connection, which will be backed by the knowledge engine behind the Sun Preventive Services offering. That knowledge engine, says Mike Harding, vice president of network service offerings at Sun, has over 1 million different configurations stored in it, and it keeps track of dependencies on those configurations. Sun also now says that, based on feedback from beta customers, it will separate out fixes for bugs from feature patches, which means system administrators who use the service will be able to quickly apply patches. Update Connection will be free for security patches to Solaris 10, and will also be bundled in with for-fee support contracts for Solaris 10. Over the next few quarters, Sun is expected to roll out Sun Connection services for its Java Desktop System, Java Enterprise System, and third party products as well. The ability to update the BIOSes in machines and tight integration with Sun's N1 management tools is also expected. The Sun Connection portal is expected in September or October, and it is one of the tools that will help Sun manage the Sun Grid as well.