The company says its N1 aggregates distributed computing resources, including servers, storage, software and networking, enabling them to work as a single entity. Sun says that automating the complexity away from managing technology will allow business and IT managers to optimize the efficiency of their data centers.

"Networks are now at roughly the same stage as the telephone industry was when it still had switchboards and operators who manually connected calls," says Scott McNealy, chairman, president and CEO, Sun Microsystems. "If we don't develop a system that scales better than that -- the equivalent of automatic switching -- we'll have to train everyone under the age of 30 to work as a system administrator. The good news is we've seen this coming and with N1 we've created a dynamic system environment that will revolutionize the network."

Sun says N1 will transform traditional IT infrastructure into a more efficient computing model. The long-term strategy will involve the roll-out of N1 products starting this year through a series of phases. Phase 1, virtualization, begins in 2002 and provides the basic infrastructure for N1, says Sun, allowing customers to begin transforming individual network elements into an aggregated pool of resources. Beginning in 2003, phase 2 focuses on services provisioning, allowing administrators to specify business service definitions for services, such as e-banking. Phase 3, beginning in 2004, involves the automatic maintenance of application service level objectives by N1. Applications and their resources are managed according to business requirements and priorities.

Sun says it will be delivering N1 over time through strategic relationships with a number of ISVs, network infrastructure providers and system integrators.