Virtual Steve : Weblog

Wednesday May 09, 2007

What if there was an API your Data Center?

What if you could program your data center the way you program a single system? What if you could orchestrate multi-tier install actions across hundreds of servers and services and always know exactly what software if running on any given system? If this sounds interesting then N1 Service Provisioning System (N1 SPS) is for you. It gives you the ability to use an XML dialect to get total control of your IT software assets. It's not a simple tool to run a few servers, but a complete system for massive data center automation, and it's cross platform (Solaris, Linux, HP-UX and AIX).

I was meeting with a large financial services customer last month and they were describing the system they're now deploying on top of SPS. It includes 200 Solaris servers, each running about 30 Solaris Containers. It's a massive system and SPS gives them total control over how it's provisioned. You can read an example, public case study here.

Posted at 12:00AM May 09, 2007 by Stephen Wilson in DataCenter | Comments[1]

Comments:

Hi Steve, I wouldn't call "200 servers" a massive system. I've just seen a demonstration of the software, and judging by what I've seen, it's still too focused on a single system. In my experience, Sun is nowhere near ready to compete with commercial solutions such as Opsware, not that Opsware is really that good. I've seen banks runs internally developed deoployment servers that just blow both the SPS and Opsware out of the water... luckily for both Sun and Opsware, these financial institutions aren't in the software business. And they manage *tens of thousands* of systems with their internally developed software... a slightly "larger" environment, and all that with about two dozen people. Sun has some ways to go before the provisioning software really matures. From what I've seen, the zone provisioning functionality isn't even complete yet, and various non-official patches are needed to make the tool zone aware. And it's still focused on a managing "system-by-system" mode.

Posted by UX-admin on May 09, 2007 at 01:02 AM PDT #