Sun's Cloud Plans
At the CommunityOne developer event in New York City, Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker disclosed more information about Sun's cloud computing effort. In particular, they showed details about the Sun Open Cloud Platform. This open cloud computing infrastructure will leverage Sun's technology and form the core of an upcoming public cloud service from Sun.
The Sun Cloud will provide a storage service first and a compute service later. It will be able to be accessed widely this summer. Sun will support Linux, Solaris and Windows as well as x86/x64 and SPARC. In addition, the Sun Cloud will utilize WebDAV for file access via the Internet.
Sun is also previewing the APIs for the Sun Cloud in order to allow developers to review and comment on them. They are available here under the Creative Commons version 3.0 license .
One of the differentiating features of Sun's cloud offering is that it will built around a Virtual Data Center (VDC) model. This provides a a unified management interface to compute, networking, and storage resources. The VDC is a single point of control for everything needed to stage an application and uses a drag-and-drop method for provisioning resources.
You can see the presentations from the event as well as live chats and on-demand video by going here. To get an overview of Sun's cloud computing efforts you can go to Sun's cloud computing page.
