Sun Microsystems made its long awaited Cloud Computing pitch this week, but found the news overshadowed by the leaking of takeover talks by IBM.
Don't you just hate some days? Sun Microsystems has spent months trailing its Cloud Computing push with a view to making it explicit at its CommunityOne developer conference in New York this week. Then the news leaks on the very morning of that announcement that Sun is apparently in negotiations with IBM to be bought, at which point the main question of the day is not 'what is Sun's Cloud strategy?' so much as 'will IBM bother to carry it on if the takeover goes through?'. Some days you just want to stay in bed!
But Sun's top management didn't take that lie-in option. Instead they just made it known that they weren't about to comment on speculation about IBM or a change of ownership or anything of that nature and instead attempted to carry out the day as planned. So that mean announcing details of Sun's latest push into the Cloud services market with some hosted computing and storage offerings that will be rolled to developers later in the year. Or at least they will be rolled out to developers later in the year assuming...well, we can leave that for another day.
For now, we know that the Sun Storage Cloud and the Sun Compute Cloud is intended to compete with Amazon Web Services S3 storrage and EC2 compute services. This is very much aimed at developers, students and startups, and is clearly positioned as being an offering for testing and developing new applications over the Internet using Sun's hardware – and as such is seemingly aimed squarely in the direction of Amazon.
The essential pitch is that developers access the services from a Web browser and provision resources on Linux, Windows and OpenSolaris operating systems. The differentiator from Amazon's play is that the APIs are more open and are published on the internet under a Creative Common Licence. They'll include a storage administration API, a storage WebDAV API, and a storage object API that will be compatible with Amazon S3, while there will also be client libraries for Java, Ruby and Python development.
Sun has had a stab at The Cloud before - althrough in those days it was referred to as Grid - in the form of the Sun Grid Compute Utility, which allowed companies to pay for computing cycles on an hourly basis. While this is one the main selling points for Cloud Computing these days, the timing may have been wrong as the offering attracted little interest from customers and Sun stopped trying to sign up new subscribers last year.
According to Dave Douglas, Sun's senior vice president for Cloud Computing, Sun is coming at The Cloud from a different angle to other vendors. “We blend Sun's expertise in developing open-source software and communities with unique design innovation,” he said, adding that this means that Sun's version of Cloud Computing is "both open and interoperable”, in line with basic Sun corporate values. “In Sun’s view, we think there’s going to be many Clouds: there’s going to be public and private Clouds, Clouds set up for different applications, Clouds behind firewalls and Clouds done geographically for political and legal reasons.
"Everyone's talking about Clouds but what it boils down to for developers are that they will bring a dramatically increased level of choice to developers," he said. Unfortunately for Sun, what it all boiled down to this week was everyone wondering how much of this would still be relevant if IBM becomes Sun's new master...
