Sun’s N1 Distributed Computing

Don’t be put off by the unassuming name and read on especially if you’re are a system administrator or worried about spiraling IT costs in your organization. N1 is the new distributed computing architecture from Sun Microsystems that aims to integrate and put all resources available, like CPU power and storage, on a typical network into one single logical entity and then allocate it to applications and services as and when needed. The most obvious benefit of such a ‘virtual pool’ of resources is its improved manageability. No longer do system administrators have to run from one end to another to get a simple job done. There’s a single interface to this pool of resources, which allows the system administrator to make any/all changes sitting at one place. N1 aims to provide a higher view of the network as a whole, and has been designed keeping in mind the task of achieving business tasks efficiently, which means that now your business policy can govern your IT policy and not the other way round. 

N1 also aims to improve CPU utilization, give better usage monitoring, decrease system deployment time and more, thus, ultimately reducing costs.

The N1 architecture identifies four major components:



l Controlling software that oversees everything


l A virtualized network where computers are present in dynamically configurable virtual LANs


l Virtual computing resources that can be dynamically shared between applications and services as per the requirements


l Virtual storage that can be configured regardless of the physical boundaries

A typical network consists of independent servers doing specific tasks. You have your resource-intensive servers, which are multi-processor, high-performance systems with high reliability and scalability. Sun calls them V1 (vertical) systems. These systems are characterized by high to very high utilization of system resources. Database severs are a perfect example of a V1 system. Your network also has less resource-hungry servers, which are designed to run applications like caching and firewall. Sun classifies them as H1 (horizontal) systems. These systems are often left with most of their resources unused for most of the time. And therein lies the big idea behind N1.

By consolidating all resources available on the network, N1 aims to eliminate wastage of system resources, which can be as high as 70% in systems present in modern-day networks. Once all system resources have been pooled into a central place they can be allocated to tasks as per the requirements. Consider this pool as a huge mainframe, the tasks that need to be done as the processes that run on that mainframe and N1 as the OS that enables you to achieve this. For example, you could reserve 10% of your system resources for database operations and only 1% for caching, still leaving almost 90% of the resources free for use. This allocation can, of course, be changed dynamically, or on the fly, allowing you to, for example, increase the resources available to the server when it reaches its limit and later scale it down to the original value–all without any manual intervention.

This means that resources can now be shared between departments with optimum utilization and little wastage. Another advantage is the ability to monitor resource utilization in a more organized fashion. You can pinpoint accurately how much resources were used for database operations, how much for the file server, etc. This is where things start to get even bigger and interesting. Suppose there’s a large pool of resources owned by Z. He allows three companies A, B, C to use this pool to power their network–just an extension of sharing between departments within the same organization. Z can, if he wants, set limits to what is available to whom as per his agreement with the respective company. Now at the end of the month Z sends bills to A, B and C indicating their exact usage and the amount they need to pay him, as per their agreement, for his services. Sounds amazingly familiar, doesn’t it? The similarity to the electricity distribution method is not coincidental. 

N1 is designed to provide the convenience and the ‘pay-as-you-use’ model that is comfortable for everyone. So, no longer do you need to buy expensive servers only to find that you’re hardly using them to their capacity. You could soon be plugging in your bare-bones desktop clients into a socket in the wall to derive all their computational and storage power from the huge pool of resources at the other end, owned by an organization like Z above. This would be music to most ears, especially if the organization is not state owned. Imagine load shedding in this respect!

Most of the foundation technologies needed for such operation are already in place (think of N1 as an extension of the server clustering concept in a lot of ways)–large amounts of bandwidth, highly scalable systems, network aware and reliable storage systems etc. Most (if not all) of the existing software could be used on N1 systems without any changes. 

Still, considering the ambitious nature of the project it would be quite some time before we actually see all that’s been talked about here coming to a ‘feeder pillar’ near your office/home. 

Surely, Sun could have come up with a better name for a technology that could have such a major impact in the future, but, what’s in a name after all!

Kunal Dua