well it looks like sun are going ahead with their ubiquitous computing plans without mithril greg reuters market news sun micro outlines roadmap for managing networks friday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am et by peter henderson san francisco reuters computer maker sun microsystems inc on thursday said it would create in a few years a network environment that will be as straightforward to handle as a single machine a strategy it calls nNUMBER it laid out a road map for a new layer of intelligent software and systems that will meld unwieldy networks into easy to use systems a goal similar to those of most rivals making computers which manage networks emc corp announced this week software aimed at allowing users to manage storage resources as a pool hewlett packard co has a utility data center designed for broader management international business machines corp s project eliza is working to make computers self healing when systems break applications still have to run zeroes and ones on some computing engine but the whole idea behind nNUMBER is you stop thinking about that you don t think about what box it is running on sun vice president steve mackay head of the nNUMBER program said in an interview on the sidelines of a sun user conference many industry executives see computer power eventually being sold like power or water as a utility that can be turned on or off in whatever volume one wants whenever needed for that to happen computers must be tied together seamlessly rather than cobbling them together with tenuous links as most networks do today experts say there are still major barriers though such as communications standards for machines from different vendors to interoperate closely sun promised to deliver a virtualization engine that would let administrators look at their entire network as a pool by the end of the year network administrators today often have no automatic system to report what is in the network it ll tell you what you have and how it is laid out promised mackay the second stage beginning in NUMBER would allow users to identify a service such as online banking and allocate resources for them with a few clicks sun said finally in NUMBER sun s software should allow networks to change uses of resources on the fly in response to changing needs such as a bank assuring quicker online response time for priority users the company said 