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Sun Microsystems

Check It Out

Sun is refocusing its efforts from the days of its grid computing service to cloud-based offerings starting with a hosted computing and storage service aimed at developers, startups, and students. Sun's offerings will compete with Amazon EC2 and S3, however, it hopes to differentiate itself by being more open with its APIs, which it will publish on the Web under a Creative Commons license. They'll include a storage administration API, a storage WebDAV API, and a storage object API that will be compatible with Amazon S3. Sun will also provide client libraries for Java, Ruby and Python development.

Customers

None listed.

Get Started

Sun recommends the following ways via their web site to get engaged with their cloud computing initiative:

Contact

Website: www.sun.com/cloud

Overview

Sun has a vast arsenal of hardware and software assets it's brought together to create compelling cloud computing services, whether as a direct provider of those services, as a partner to service providers, or as a supplier to organizations that are looking to launch their own private clouds. It starts with the delivery of the Sun Cloud, a public compute and storage cloud, due out later in 2009.

The initial audience for its cloud offerings will be developers, startups, and students with the goal is to extend and grow their offerings to target enterprise customers. Sun's cloud offerings will compete directly with Amazon Web Services, but their strategy is to differentiate themselves by being more open with their APIs, which they will publish on the Web under a Creative Commons license.

Value Proposition

Sun can help organizations in the following ways:

  • reduce capital expenses by converting IT costs to operating expenses
  • decrease the cost of running a data center by improving automation and resource management
  • create a flexible, on-demand infrastructure, rather than building to only match peak loads
  • improve application development and testing cycles
  • pushing for open standards and interoperability so data can move freely between clouds and providers

Products & Services

  • Sun Cloud Storage for backing up data to the cloud.

  • Sun Cloud Compute for developing applications in the cloud on Sun infrastructure.

  • Cloud enablement technologies:
    • Solaris operating system - the most powerful, secure, and popular cloud OS available today.
    • Virtualization for each aspect of cloud computing: hypervisor, OS, network, storage, and applications.
    • Open Storage that combines open source software with standard components to reduce such costs by 90%.
    • MySQL the leading open source database for developing for high-volume web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software.
    • Developer tools, such as NetBeans, Project Kenai, and Project Speedway designed to improve the developer experience for cloud computing.

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