Discovery in the Wild Data Center

One of the core functions of a computer is organization.  Databases allow you to store, categorize and search through huge volumes of data trivially.  Mountains of data are at your fingertips on the modern network.  All of this makes it more ironic that the physical side of the modern data center can be a place of such organizational chaos.

While there are a host of high powered solutions for managing data centers, and Sun sells some of these, the lowest common denominator question an administrator can ask is: what stuff do I have?  For the past several months, we've had a team at Sun focused on making it dramatically easier to get the answer to this question.  The result is some trivially simple, but incredibly elegant "discovery" technology that we plan to build into Sun's whole range of products from servers to storage to software.

This discovery mechanism, which we call simply service tags, defines a simple framework for network-based discovery protocols.  This framework is implemented in a set of software that includes the ability to use standard discovery protocols such as Apple's Bonjour/Zeroconf and SLP to discover assets on their local networks.  Each tag contains a small, focused set of data such as the name of the product, version of the product, and a globally unique, durable instance identifier -- think of it as a software serial number.  When products, hardware or software, provide a tag they can be easily discovered on the local network which allows administrators to easily answer the question "what stuff do I have?" from a single location and have the network quickly respond with an inventory list.

We're now in the process of adding this framework to all our products at Sun.  For example, we'll be including a tag in the next release of Solaris (Solaris 10 update 4), as well as servers that use the new version of Sun's Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) hardware.  By the end of calendar year 2007 almost all of Sun's products will include this technology making it easier to for customers to manage Sun's products.

You can expect to see this technology first become available within the next month.  It will initially be distributed as a set of add-on packages for Solaris 8, 9, and 10 and will be freely available to all of Sun's customers.  In addition, we will soon open the source code that implements the technology, thus allowing third parties to leverage it in their management tools, and also allowing independent software and hardware vendors to implement it.  By opening this technology to all we expect that it will help our customers tame some of the chaos in their data centers.

Over the course of the next few months you can expect to see Sun roll out products and services that use this technology to help customers manage their IT assets.  Stay tuned, it's going to be exciting.

Posted at 06:18AM May 22, 2007 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter  |  Comments[1]