Monday January 09, 2006

N1, real or fiction?

What is N1?

When having discussions on what N1 is all about, more often than not it comes across as a topic that is difficult to grasp. Perhaps its the inherent desire of the true techies to focus on the how of the technology versus the why of the strategy. Perhaps its the lack of confidence in the existence of products coming from one vendor that support all aspects of Data Center management. Perhaps it's the way we present it, and with that in mind, let's try to come at this from another angle...

First we need to understand the goal here. The ultimate goal is to treat everything as pools of resources and keep 'people' off the machines. Either a resource is being used or it's not - period. I mean, who really cares where my service is running as long as it is available and secure. It is like the power socket in the wall. As long as I get power to use when I plug in my hair dryer or my computer, I am happy person.

Then the next level would be to check utilisation of the my resources to make sure that I am not wasting hardware. Imagine that my service is only using 10% of the hardware available since it is a highly performing machine. Then it would be smarter to seemlesly move my app to another smaller machine or just make my zone a bit smaller. This would save power and get the same job done. If you then flip the coin and need more power so then we do the same way but increase capacity, i.e. move the service to a larger machine or add resources to my zone. So this in short would be SLA monitoring and policy based decisions.

So how much of this is real and how much is fiction? I would say all of it is real. It is all about designing the architecture correctly and understanding the tools that are out there and how they can be mapped together and fitted into the business. It is not only about the tools themselves but also how the organisation works. So we have products like N1SPS for Service Provisioning that can also move applications between zones and/or servers. We also have N1SM which manages and monitors boxes, provisions the OS and handles patch management. These are just a few of our products that really exists and is ready to be used today.

So the bottom line is that these solutions really exist. This is not fluff on a piece of paper. It is more imagination that limits the possibilites.

For more information about these have a look at:
http://www.sun.com/n1

(2006-01-09 00:00:00.0) Permalink

Sunday August 22, 2004

Blogging blogging blogging.....

This is my very first (web)blog. I have no idea currently what to write since there are way too many things in my head right now after playing one hour of squash.

I will posting more in the very near future :)

(2004-08-22 02:44:04.0) Permalink