Sun tends to get things right when backing new technology trends,
but its latest strategy is basically a re-invention of the grid
services model.
You have to feel sorry for Sun's chief executive Scott McNealy. In
some ways, he is someone who almost got everything right - the
central role of Unix, the shift towards networked computing, the
increasing importance of platform-independent software - and yet
has failed to reap the rewards of his
acuity.
This track record means that the major strategic initiatives of his
company are always worth looking at, and the latest is no
exception. Its announcement formed the heart of the
SunNetwork 2002 conference. There is an accompanying
press release and
company
feature on the subject.
The rather uninspired name for Sun's new vision is N1; it has a
home
page, a short
FAQ
and a
white
paper. There are also some
essays,
though with the honourable exception of
Yousef Khalidi's, these are frankly rather thin.
The contrast between the fanfare that accompanied the project's
announcement and the paucity of detailed information about it makes
N1 a vapourware announcement that even Microsoft would be proud of.
Nonetheless, it seems clear that Sun's great N1 breakthrough - what
it rather pretentiously describes as "unifying all the resources in
a compute fabric" - amounts to little more than a re-invention of
the grid services model discussed in this column six months ago.
That is, N1 seems to be about allowing all kinds of computing
resources - processing, storage, etc - to be allocated in a dynamic
and seamless way to tasks as and when they arise. Done properly,
this would allow a company's IT infrastructure to be utilised far
more efficiently - one of the driving forces behind the N1 project
- as well as providing for easy scalability, which is an important
consideration in the context of e-commerce.
But Sun arrives at this particular party rather late.
Grids
have been around for a number of years, and are already entering
the
mainstream.
Moreover, a big question mark hangs over N1: the extent to which it
will embrace rival platforms. Sun's chief technology officer Greg
Papadopoulos talks of
"open architecture", but this can mean anything, as
Microsoft's frequent invocation of the phrase demonstrates.
The openness of the N1 architecture is crucial. If it is not
completely platform-independent, as grid services are, then Sun is
merely offering a proprietary version, with all the unacceptable
lock-in that this implies. However, if it is truly open, Sun will
be faced with the fact that users will inevitably opt for the
best-value back-end platform on which to run the N1 superstructure.
And that means GNU/Linux, as just about every large-scale grid
project shows.
If N1 is to stand a chance, Sun must fully confront the GNU/Linux
challenge that so far it has only tiptoed around. There are already
signs that Sun is seeking some kind of accommodation with this
rising star. After acquiring
Cobalt in 2000 without even mentioning the dreaded L
word, it has recently come out with a new GNU/Linux-based server,
LX50, and even - heresy of heresies - something called
Sun Linux.
But with N1, such half-measures will not be enough. Sun must
embrace GNU/ Linux as whole-heartedly as IBM: if it doesn't, N1
will either flop or be run on largely non-Sun hardware and
software, with all that this implies for the company. Let's hope
McNealy gets it completely right this time.