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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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