Sun Expands Preventive Services Offering

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems continues to evolve its Sun Preventive Services (SPS), and is preparing to expand its initial offering of managing Solaris systems for a selected number of high-end data center customers to offering proactive maintenance services to a broader set of customers through Sun and its iForce partner network. The expansion of the SPS offering was expected, but is being accelerated by Sun's acquisition of SevenSpace late last year.

The central concept behind SPS is elegant and simple: SPS aims to use Sun's expertise to teach companies' IT shops to run more smoothly, and then reward them with lower service fees when they get good at IT. SPS was launched at the end of May 2004, and has thus far focused on a handful of big Sun shops and their Solaris boxes. But Sun pointed to the upper decks when it made the original SPS announcement last year, saying that it wanted nothing short of managing complex, heterogeneous networks and applications that are part and parcel of the typical data center. It will, however, take SPS awhile to get there, and the people behind the offering are taking cautious steps.

The heart of the SPS offering is something called the Enterprise RAS (eRAS) business rules engine, which Sun has created to manage its outsourcing clients. The eRAS engine contains the best practices Sun has learned through its partners and largest services customers, and it is used to manage risks--specifically, the risks to IT systems that are associated with people, processes, or products. This is a very holistic view of IT systems management, and it is a concession to the idea that just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, an IT organization's uptime is only as good as the components (people, processes, or products) that make up that IT organization. The eRAS tool quantifies and helps manage the availability of servers, but it goes beyond that and quantifies all of the potential risks associated with the data center. Then, Sun helps the IT shop knock their operations into shape. Sun calls this the "get it right" phase of SPS contract. Sun has created a skills index, a process maturity index, and an operational risk index--which are leading indicators for how well an IT shop will perform--and an aggregate availability index--which is a lagging indicator that counts uptime and the number of "severity one" outages. After a data center is running smoothly for one calendar quarter, the SPS contract enters the "keep it right" phase, and Sun gives the SPS customer a discount based on the customer's ability to keep up to speed on training, absorb new best-practices techniques as they are created, and keep their indexes of performance within specified parameters.

Back in May 2004, only Sun was selling SPS 1.0, and only to a select number of customers and only supporting Sun Sparc and X86 servers running Solaris and Sun middleware, such as Java Enterprise System. The roadmap called for Sun to expand to SPS 1.1 in December 2004, allowing iForce partners to engage in contracts. (There has obviously been a few weeks slippage here, but part of that is undoubtedly due to the absorption of SevenSpace, an outsourcing company with remote management expertise that Sun paid $49 million to acquire last fall.) This spring, Sun plans to weave its N1 management products into the SPS offering. And this summer, after Sun and its partners gain enough experience with SPS, the offering will go heterogeneous, covering most popular IT platforms found in data centers. It is the expertise that Sun has gained through SevenSpace, in fact, that is a key component to its ability to beef up the eRAS expert system with Linux, Windows, HP-UX, and AIX knowledge, says Trisha Bright, director of product marketing for SPS at Sun. Bright says the heterogeneous SPS offering is on track for the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter of this year.

But in the meantime, Sun is letting iForce partners in on the SPS action, and key partners in the United States, Japan, and Germany have now been trained to sell SPS. Bright can't be specific about which partners, but Arrow's MOCA division and General Electric's Access Distribution unit are selling SPS in the United States, and Morse Group, Sun's largest European distributor, is co-delivering SPS as well as selling it. Presumably, many more partners will be brought in on the SPS opportunity. Bright would not say how many SPS customers Sun had, but 40 companies were part of the original beta test of the program last year.

In addition to the SPS expansion to partners, Sun also rolled out a new service, called Sun Update Connection, and tweaked an existing service called Sun Net Connect.

Sun Update Connection, which will be available in April, includes 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).

Sun Net Connect is a set of online administration tools that allow Sun's engineers to log into customer machines and determine what is going on inside their boxes. Obviously, you need to have a Sun services contract on your Sparc/Solaris iron to use this service. In addition to the new remote service option in Net Connect, Sun is adding 168-bit encryption, as well as the capability to stage systems patches and aggregate data about systems at the enterprise level. The intent is to help system administrators keep track of what they have and what they need to patch. Presumably Net Connect will be offered for X86 systems running Solaris, Linux, and Windows at some point in the future.

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