Cingular pilots Sun’s N1

Sun Microsystems unveiled the first offering in its long-promised N1 network computer operating environment this week, along with the news that Cingular Wireless is the first of several large pilot customers for the multi-platform, multi-vendor system.

N1 is a concept based on widely-distributed network computing elements such as servers, storage systems, software and network databases that come together to operate as a single systems. The N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition software, which uses blade virtualization technology to reduce the time it takes to deploy servers from weeks to hours, is the first N1 product for data center needs of Cingular’s scale.

“The analogy we use is that of a storage area network that allows better capacity management across an array of network resources, and increased up-time,” said Victor Nilson, vice president of IT enterprise architecture at Cingular. He said these specific capabilities are becoming of greater need as Cingular needs to integrate and manage new data services and devices across its network.

The N1 technology is being deployed at Cingular’s data center in Alpharetta, GA, with the Provision Server 3.0 still to be installed. That solution will virtualize the data center’s base operating system platform infrastructure so that new servers and other network resources can be dynamically provisioned as needed.

Nilson said Cingular began looking for new server computing architectures for its data center last summer as it confronted increasingly complex node management challenges.

“We made it a high-priority problem to solve,” said Nilson. “We looked at the possibility of pervasive computing and talked to several other vendors.” He said Sun’s N1 concept best represented the vision that Cingular had for how to ease its data center difficulties.