Sun rolls out cloud computing strategy 18 March, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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The company also discussed its plans to offer public clouds in the form of what the vendor is calling the Sun Cloud, which is its first public cloud service aimed at developers, students and start-ups. However, Sun's cloud computing strategy encompasses not just public clouds, but also private clouds, which Michelle Warren, president of MW Research & Consulting, noted is significant.

"This is a significant announcement because Sun really has to get into the cloud computing space, just as Cisco had to get into the server space," Warren said. "Sun needs to do this move because cloud is a major trend and it will spread through the IT industry. Sun's clients are going to be looking for a cloud computing solution, and Sun simply has to be there. If they had not come out with a cloud announcement, that would have been notable. It would have been a glaring omission."

Sun isn't a complete stranger to cloud computing, as it has made a couple of strategic acquisitions in the area, but Warren said that it's a space that is dominated more by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Although it is a large IT player, this isn't Sun's area.

"Sun is pretty insignificant in the overall cloud space. Possibly with the announcement they can get upgraded," Warren said. It also depends on what the vendor does over the next six months with its cloud computing offerings, as well as how its competitors respond, she said.

Additionally, amidst rumors of IBM buying Sun (rumors that have been circulating for years, she noted), the speculated merger of the two companies could form a pretty powerful cloud computing organization, Warren said.

As part of the announcement at the CommunityOne event, Sun announced the release of a core set of Open APIs that are now up for public review and comment. The APIs are for others building public and private clouds, so they can easily design them to be compatible with the Sun Cloud, according to the vendor.

"Sun's approach to cloud computing blends our expertise in developing open source software and communities with unique design innovation. Sun's Open Cloud platform is the first step in delivering on our vision of a world that has many clouds that are both open and interoperable," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems, in a statement. "Our cloud architecture empowers developers with the expanded interoperability and freedom of choice they need to easily take advantage of the agility, efficiency and cost benefits of cloud computing."

At the center of the offering will be the Sun Cloud Storage Service and the Sun Cloud Compute Service, which the company plans to launch in the summer of this year. To make the Sun Cloud easy to use, Sun is leveraging various technology that run the gamut from deploying applications to provisioning resources. With the Sun Cloud Compute Service, Sun will be using the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities acquired when the company purchased Q-layer in January 2009. The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application tht runs on any operating system within the cloud.

Meanwhile, the Sun Cloud Storage Service supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs.

Also of note is the fact that Sun addresses both private and public clouds with its cloud computing strategy, Warren said. One of the key things around cloud computing right now is that as it becomes more prevalent, the issues around security, privacy and storage of information become more relevant.

"It's a hybrid solution, really," she said.