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Wikipedia
Sun Microsystems will be making some announcements on Wednesday regarding
their Cloud offerings. Here at Cloud Avenue, we got a chance to talk to the
folks at Sun, in advance, about their announcement and I am going to share it
here on this post.
So far Sun has been talking vaguely about their plans to jump into the Cloud
bandwagon. Tomorrow, they are going to offer some clarity on some of their
plans. Earlier today, Fred Wison wondered if Amazon can dominate the Cloud Infrastructure
landscape like Google in Search.
Is it possible that AMZN
will come to dominate cloud services in the same way that Google has come to
dominate search (or Amazon has come to dominate online
retailing)?
Well, I don’t know if Amazon will dominate the space but I am sure that they
will have a tough competitor in the name of Sun Microsystems. Yes, Sun is going
to release products that competes directly with Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2
services. Their public cloud offering will initially start off with a storage
and compute service and they may add more in the future. This service will have
general availability sometime in the summer. On the compute service, similar to
Amazon EC2, users can run various operating systems like Solaris, Open Solaris,
Linux, Windows, etc.. They are touting openness here and any application or
service that is set up on top of Sun’s public cloud can be moved to any other
provider or, even, private clouds.
Sun is also putting their acquisition of qlayer into good use in their Cloud Computing
offerings. They are using the technology they acquired in this case to offer
what is called as “Virtual Data Center”. This will allow users to instantly
provision and deploy servers to the cloud, scale up or down based on demand and
even use the tools to deploy in other public and private clouds.
The other announcement from Sun is the release of an extension for their
OpenOffice suite. Openoffice users can now save their documents easily to the
cloud. Openoffice had an extension to export documents to Google Apps for some
time now. It is not clear if this is the same extension with some repackaging or
an entirely new extension with access to other vendors too.
Sun is also planning to release a set of tools that will help developers
build applications on top of Sun and other Cloud providers including Amazon.
These tools, based on WebDAV model, will help developers build cloud
functionalities on their applications, be it productivity suite or accounting
suite or any other business tool. This will be released under Creative Commons License.
In my opinion, this is a big move. This is going to offer the much needed
competition to Amazon Web Services that has the potential to bring down the
price. Sun already owns MySQL and it is just a matter of time before they offer
relational databases as a service. If they include the management of “MySQL
cloud” into their Virtual Datacenter Application, it will put companies like FathomDB out of business and they
could offer Microsoft the much needed competition in the “Relational Database in
the Cloud” space.
PS: Developers who want to access their APIs might be able to access it using Project Kenai.
Update: Perhaps by the time Sun release this offering, it will be all IBM?
Give me a break! When is the last time Sun has ever executed on anything even remotely resembling an intelligent strategy. This is a company that lurches from one thing to another with virtually nothing to show for itself.
Amazon always has a strategy and a plan for everything. It’s a company that knows where it has been, where it is, and where it’s going.
Sun? Give me a break.
I don’t care about past company/platform wars. If they offer real openness, reliability and more value for money, they have a good chance to put up a fight. Let the markets decide based on what they offer now than us, based on their past actions.