But fear not. Help is at hand for anybody who fears that their office is about to be swamped by Playstation addicts. It comes in the form of N1, a new sort of über-operating system unveiled on September 19th by Sun Microsystems, a computer maker. N1 will make it much easier to run corporate data centresthus eliminating much of the work now done by armies of systems administrators.
N1's key concept is virtualisationcreating pools of resources such as computing power and storage capacity that can be used as needed. This is done by automating the work of systems administrators. Instead of having to load and configure software manually, they tell N1 to set up a computer system for themwhich, assuming it actually works, takes hours rather than weeks. What is more, N1 claims to be self-managing, meaning that it can, say, allocate additional computing resources to a website that faces a sudden surge in demand. Since this means that the many different computer systems in a data centre can easily be re-configured, N1 in effect turns them into one single big system.
