The View From Inside the Cloud: Sun's Cloud Operations

There has been a lot of great coverage of the Sun Cloud at Community One West. While you are browsing the coverage of the very interesting talks, have a video called A Look Inside the Sun Cloud showing our cloud deployment at the Switch SuperNAP.  

Jeff Ames With Switch Communications, the company that designed, built, and operates the SuperNAP data center, and hosts our latest Sun Cloud systems, and I spent some time with Adam Burke from National Public Radio. Its interesting to hear over an hour of Discussion boiled down to a few minutes. I think Adam presented a really well balanced and artfully created piece here. Hear for yourself.

It's pretty amazing to work for a company where not only are we allowed to be very open about our work, we are encouraged to do so. 

Enjoy... 

Hi,

This is my first entry in this new Blog so I'll take a second to say Hello.  I'm Dan Butzer, Sun's Sr. Director of Sun Cloud Operations, Security, and Infrastructure Engineering.  Our team of incredibly gifted and committed engineers design, deploy, and operate the equipment, networks, and facilities from which Sun will deliver its cloud services.

Last week, at the AFCOM Data Center World conference, Greg Papadopoulos previewed to the attendees that fact that Sun's next cloud Data Center would be located at the incredible SuperNAP in Las Vegas.  Rich Miller did a great job covering this and posted it to his DataCenterKnowledge site within minutes of the announcement, Thanks for the great coverage Rich!  For some really interesting information on how this facility was built, be sure to view this video produced by SwitchNAP and Schneider Electric (whom you may recognize as the parent company of APC)

There is more news coming soon.  Be sure to to catch the next announcements at Community One on March 18.

LIVE EVENT DETAILS:
-What:  Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker will unveil details about Sun's public cloud service during the opening keynote of the CommunityOne East Conference
-When:  March 18, 9:00 a.m. ET
-Where:  New York Marriott Marquis, Salon 1 & 2
1535 Broadway, New York, NY
-Registration:  http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/
-CommunityOne East website: http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/

Look for more information about the cloud operations and facilities on this Blog in the coming weeks.  We plan to set the gold standard for transparency in our communications and be very open about how we design, build, and operate Sun's cloud.  After all, its going to be your data and your applications running in the cloud, I sure know that as an ops, security and infrastructure person, I would want to have a solid understanding of the capabilities, processes, technologies, and the people to whom I might trust my data.  As a little sneak peek, here's something I can't ever recall any name brand cloud provider offering, a few pictures from inside their cloud operations.  Here are just 2 to get things rolling, one from the cold aisle and one down the hot aisle of one of our rows of systems.  Look for more information as we work to make Sun's Cloud the friendliest place to park your cloud apps, both to the environment and to YOUR economy. 

In the coming months we'll talk more about the equipment we have selected, the processes we use to deploy and operate it, and the partnerships and great mutual friendships we have formed along the way (hey, nobody does everything better than everyone else, partnering is in our DNA!).  We'll introduce you to some of the people and even try to get more of the ops team to start their own blogs and let everyone know what we are doing, what we are thinking about and how we think we can approach some really hard problems in a very new way.

Bye for now!

--Dan