Sun sees much room for cloud innovation
By Jeff Feinman
April 3, 2009 — 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.
Cloud
computing can benefit development on a framework like Ruby on Rails
with its ability to quickly deploy applications and the ability to let
a user to pay only for what he or she uses, Douglas said. For instance,
if someone is building a website or service on their own hardware, they
might waste money if they purchase more hardware than needed. Cloud
computing, however, provides an opportunity to “pay as you go.”
In
speaking about the Open Cloud Manifesto, which was released in late
March and provides some basic principles about cloud computing, Douglas
said that joining the effort was an easy decision because it states
“basic things we’ve believed in for a long time.”
“I think
the question of open clouds is a fairly complicated one, getting into
patents and portability of code, images and data,” Douglas said. “We’re
really driving ourselves to find the edges of what 'open' means, but
it’s a very complex space and it’s going to take a while to sort it all
out.”
Over the summer, Sun will make its cloud more publicly
available, Douglas said, and the company will give a longer look under
the hood at JavaOne in San Francisco, June 2–5.
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