Sun`s N1 to debut on blade servers

Sun Microsystems will give users the first look at its N1 hardware and software management technology on new blade servers that should arrive by the first quarter of next year. InfoWorld reports that Sun will retool software that it acquired through its recent purchase of Terraspring to form what it calls the N1 Control Plane.

The product will serve as a management portal that looks out over servers, storage systems, switches and software in a network. Sun plans to sell the Control Plane product with various hardware packages but will ship it first on a new set of blade servers due in the first quarter, says Steve MacKay, VP of N1 at Sun.

N1 is the overarching term for Sun`s "virtualisation" technology, which provides customers with a large-scale view of all the hardware in a network, be it from Sun or another vendor, and then makes it easier to install operating systems, applications, updates and other software on those systems. Software components such as Control Plane will work in unison with specialised hardware to give a view of how many processors, how much disk space and what types of bandwidth are available throughout the network.

While Sun has been touting N1 for several months, the Control Plane software comes out of its acquisition of Terraspring which was completed last month. MacKay refused to answer questions yesterday about whether Sun had already been working on a similar type of technology in-house. [InfoWorld]

CBROnline reports that sources within HP say the company is getting ready to debut a 64-way version of its high-end Superdome server using the "Madison" Itanium 2 processor. The Superdome is expected to be released in the middle of 2003. The company has also apparently slipped a few weeks on its expected ship dates for the dual-core PA-8800 processors.

These two machines will be the cornerstone of HP`s enterprise server strategy, and are the weapons that the company will use against IBM`s 32-way Power4 and Power4+ pSeries machines, Sun Microsystems` biggest Sun Fire machines (the 36-way Sun Fire 12000 and 72-way Sun Fire 15000s), Fujitsu Siemens` 128-way PrimePowers and Unisys` 32-way ES7000 Intel-based machines.

The deliveries of Madison-based Superdome servers are predicated on Intel getting them out the door on time. The Madison chip is expected to run at 1.3GHz (probably with 3MB of L3 cache) and at 1.5GHz with 6MB of L3 cache memory. Madison will have 374 million transistors but because it is built on the 0.13 micron process, it will still have a 374 square millimetre die size, which means it can plug into slots that currently hold McKinley Itanium processors. [CBROnline]

The International Electron Device Meeting held this week in San Francisco is expected to feature a number of announcements. Most notable is IBM`s planned announcement that it has created the world`s smallest transistor. The 6 nanometer transistor was created using enhanced 248 nanometer lithography, which is used to craft today`s chips.

Although few details of the transistor are available, it appears that the device is not a standard bulk CMOS field effect transistor, but rather some form of a 3D device. IBM says more work is needed to control power and increase performance.

"The ability to build working transistors at these dimensions could allow us to put 100 times more transistors onto a computer chip than is now possible," says Randy Isaac, IBM`s science and technology VP. [Geek.com]

Microsoft yesterday announced a new set of Visual Studio-based tools to help developers build business solutions based on the next version of Microsoft Office, code-named Office 11.

Known as Visual Studio Tools for Office, the new offering is a set of tools, frameworks, Office integration solutions and customer-assistance solutions from Microsoft. The technology includes classes and libraries for Visual Studio .Net languages - such as Visual Basic .Net and Visual C++ .Net - and .Net Framework.

Company officials say Visual Studio Tools for Office will be available with the release of Office 11, scheduled for mid-2003.

Office 11 features enhanced XML support and also supports user-defined XML schema definitions (XSDs). XSDs enable users to structure their data to fit their business needs, allowing companies to create customised office solutions in documents that interact with other XML-based Web services. [Eweek]

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