Sun plans to be first among the blades runners

Sun Microsystems' first blade servers will appear early in 2003, carrying the initial elements of the company's N1 plan to make large complexes of computers behave like a single resource.

Blade servers, which pack several slim systems into a single enclosure, are essentially a miniature version of the complex and expensive data centres where corporations house their most powerful computers and precious data. As such, they're the perfect technology for Sun to debut its N1 plan, which is designed to get as much use as possible out of those computing resources with minimal administrative costs, Steve MacKay, vice president of N1 for Sun, claimed earlier this week.

"Blades are more than just a computing box; they're really more of a microcosm of a data centre," MacKay said. "We're going to launch an N1-enabled blade system in the first part of 2003."

Sun expected its blade servers to debut in 2002, but granted itself an extension to early 2003. Dell Computer, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have different blade designs in the market, lower-end servers with one or two Intel processors.

Sun debuted its N1 plan in February. The project is the centrepiece of the company's effort to lower costs for customers of running data centers packed with computing equipment. The project is also aimed at convincing customers that Sun is ahead of competitors in its technology and vision. Sun's years-long N1 plan ultimately will let customers assign computing tasks to vast pools of servers, storage systems and network equipment, without their having to worry about which individual piece of hardware is being used.

The goal of N1 is to increase the "utilisation" of each piece of hardware - the extent to which it uses its full capacity. Today, much equipment runs largely idle most of the time; customers often must buy more capacity than they need to accommodate future growth or spikes in demand, such as holiday shopping surges on a website.

N1 competes with two other works-in-progress, HP's Utility Data Center effort and IBM's autonomic computing technology project.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com