Sun sees much room for cloud innovation

By Jeff Feinman

April 3, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Sun Microsystems is looking to put its own stamp on cloud computing, with plans to use its own database and storage. The company announced its Open Cloud Platform idea in March, and more details were provided Wednesday at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York City.

Sun has modeled some of its cloud computing strategy from Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, creating, for instance , interoperability with Amazon’s set of storage APIs. But at the same time, the company is looking to do its own thing, said Dave Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing at Sun. One of those differentiators Douglas mentioned is the “virtual data center,” which is a collection of data center resources geared for enterprise companies.

“We think Amazon has done some cool stuff, but there’s a huge amount of room to continue to innovate in this space,” Douglas told SD Times at  the expo.  “It’s still very early in the game as far as what models really make sense.”
      
Sun has plans to create an in-cloud database, and will work with its MySQL technology to make that happen down the road. Sun acquired MySQL in January 2008. 
 
Asked if Sun has any plans for a message queue service, Douglas said that the company hasn’t announced anything, but the company is working on “a whole suite of services” at the layer above basic compute and storage. That layer entails the MySQL database, the Project Caroline development platform for creating Internet-based services, and the Java platform.

“We think there’s going to be a new wave of developer services that are cloud-aware,” Douglas said.

Sun will also determine down the line if it will provide a single API for all cloud utilities. Douglas said that the company’s concern right now is getting its APIs out under a favorable license.   

In terms of cloud storage, Sun will use its Open Storage offerings, which combine open-source software with hardware. Douglas said that this can reduce a user’s costs a great deal, and it lets Sun add new protocols quickly and integrate with new APIs. Open Storage can be used in its Solaris environment as well as Linux, Microsoft and VMware.     



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