David Lindt at Sun created a great set of photos from his time at JavaOne.  Over 100 good photos from the entire week.  Good job Dave.  Here are the photos.

As you might know, Sun has a very good photographer take photos of the keynotes at CommunityOne.  There's a sample in this entry, but you can see all the photos at the Sun Photo site.  

I'm told the terms of use are quite reasonable.

Russ

At the start of the first day of JavaOne, here are some of the more interesting stories around Sun's Cloud Computing efforts.

• eWeek talking about Sun's Cloud Services
• The Register on Sun-Microsoft Cloud interoperability
• InformationWeek on partner support for the Sun Cloud

Just a sample.  There are lots more.

 Russ

Cloud computing will be very well represented this year at JavaOne.  There are 22 sessions about Cloud Computing at this year's JavaOne Conference from June 2-5 in San Francisco.  The sessions this year include:

• Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Hudson
• A panel on Cloud Computing: Show Me the Money
• Seeding the Cloud: Developing Scalable Applications for the Cloud
• Drizzle: A New Database for the Cloud
• Storing Data in the Cloud

In addition there are speakers from Sun Microsystems, IBM, Google and Amazon.  You can see these and all the Cloud Computing oriented sessions here.  You can see the session catalog for JavaOne here.

 See you at JavaOne.

 Russ Castronovo

Sun Distinguished Engineer, Glenn Brunette has another Kenai project he's created as part of his efforts to raise awareness of the security of data stored in the.  Its called "ZFS Encrypted Backup to S3"  (zfs-backup-to-s3) and builds upon the foundation provided by the ZFS Automatic Snapshot service by offering a simple and easy to use way of saving encrypted ZFS snapshots in the Cloud.  These snapshots can be retrieved and decrypted using the s3-crypto tool mentioned in the previous post..

This software project only supports the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (on OpenSolaris) at this time.  It supports the use of a
protected encryption key file or a PKCS#11 token for its encryption operations.

This tool has been tested with Amazon S3 and the Sun Cloud Storage Service.  There's a project for this on Kenai where you
can view the code and documentation, download the tools and contribute to the projects and discussions.  Access it here.

In an effort to raise awareness of the security of data stored in the Cloud, Sun distinguished engineer Glenn Brunette has created an interesting project on Kenai. The project, "Crypto Front End to S3 CLIs" (s3-crypto) delivers a simple and intuitive way for people to encrypt their files before automatically storing them in the Cloud.  Similarly, files are automatically decrypted upon retrieval so that the entire process is transparent. 

The keys and encryption process are all handled on the client meaning that the Cloud provider only has access to encrypted content (and not the encryption keys!)  This project offers two utilities: s3-crypto.sh (the ultimate in flexibility and control) and csb (Cloud Safety Box - a simplified interface that accepts all of the default settings).

This software project can be configured to use either the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (on OpenSolaris) or OpenSSL (on OpenSolaris or other platforms), and it has been tested on both OpenSolaris and Mac OS X.  Glenn is also working to make this tool available for the Sun Cloud when it become available.

Glenn has created a project on Kenai for this where you can view the code, downlood the tool and contribute to the project and discussion.  You can access it here.

In his recent Wolfe's Den blog entry, Alex Wolfe of InformationWeek has a video that he did with Lew Tucker at CommunityOne East in March.  Although the news around for the video is about recent news about Sun (which I won't comment on).  Here's the video in which Lew and Alex talk Cloud Computing.

Also, there will be tons of opportunities for this type of information at CommunityOne West in June.

Below is a video of Ian Murdock, Sun's VP of Emerging Technologiesof that was sent to the CommunityOne Oslo event when Ian couldn't make it.  In it he addresses the CommunityOne attendees on Cloud Computing and Open Source and the relationship between the two areas.

You can get details of CommunityOne Oslo here.

Russ

In a story I saw on the New York Times website was this piece about how enterprises are looking at Cloud Computing.  Entitled, "The Enterprise Impact of Cloud Computing," it makes a very good point about the optics Cloud Computing provides to enterprises, even if a company doesn't adopt Cloud Computing.  

 In essence the story observes that enterprises are using Cloud Computing as a pricing benchmark.  While this might not be a fair benchmark, its a fairly transformative idea.  If an enterprise discovers its paying 10x for storage that a Cloud provider is charging, it might lead to all kinds of interesting pricing pressures.  I'm keenly following this notion.

From Cloud Computing Expo last week, the folks at Sys-con had a few photos that caught my eye.  

First up is Dave Douglas, the head of Sun's Cloud Computing group.  Next is my fellow booth staffers Cassandra Clark and Angelo Rajadurai.

Finally, if you want a very in-depth review of Cloud Computing Expo, I suggest you read Said Syed's blog entry.

 Russ

Next Wednesday, April 1, I'll be at the Cloudcamp in New York City.  Its going to be held at the Sun offices in at 101 Park Avenue.  Attendance is limited to 200 people.  Its an unconference format, but the tentative schedule is:

6:00pm: Registration
6:00pm - 8:00pm Networking (with Food and Open Bar)
6:30pm: Introductions
6:45pm: Lightning Talks
7:15pm: Lightning Panel
7:45pm: Begin Unconference
8:00pm: Unconference Session 1
9:00pm: Unconference Session 2
10:00pm Networking (with Food & Beer)

 I look forward to seeing you there.

Russ

If you want to learn more about where the Sun Cloud will reside this video is a corporate overview by Switch.  It provides a good overview of the firm, the facility and the approach.

Russ

Today is announced the Sun Cloud.  Some of the early coverage has appeard.  Here are a few samples.  Despite some references to Sun competing with Amazon they do a decent job of explaining what went on today.

• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Associated Press
  
• Cnet
• IDG

There are tons more stories appearing, but this is a good sampling.

We've said before that we'll be providing more information about our public cloud offering at CommunityOne East on March 18.  The session you want to listen to is the first general session with Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker at 9:00a Eastern.

You'll be able to listen in via sun.com or Sun's cloud computing site.

 Let us know what you think.

I was able to attend the IDC Directions Conference today and was particularly looking for the "Clouds and Beyond: Positioning for the Next 20 Years in Enterprise IT" session run by Sr. VP and Chief Analyst, Frank Gens.   It had a fairly large crown for San Jose in the teeth of a recession.

The talk was positioned as providing info on what one can expect from the cloud and how to take advantage of it.  To me the session seemed aimed a the IT person in an enterprise that was still trying to make sense of Cloud computing.

Gens did a good job of providing some high-level industry perspective and spent a fair amount of time reviewing the IDC data.  Seeing 2009 as a year where enterprise Cloud activity moves from the sandbox to the mainstream seems a fairly safe prediction.

When I'm at these industry forums I look for the data/information I didn't expect.  Gens had three nuggets I came away with that stood out to me.  First, there was a slide that outlined the barriers to clouds that their survey respondents listed.  After security, which was #1, the next four items (performance, availability, difficulty in integrating with my current operations and not enough customization) seemed to all be pages from the same book.  That is, the barrier that respondents were listing were are particulars about using clouds.  Not a barrier on *whether* they'd use a cloud.

Second, there was a very interesting slide on what workloads worked better for clouds and which didn't.  The information looked very promising and Gens didn't spend much time on it.  It looked like early thinking.  I wish I'd taken a picture.  Finally, IDC seemed to be predicting that about 25% of the increase in market spending from 2009 to 2012 will be on IT that's a Cloud service.  That might not sound like a big number, but when you think of the size of the market ($300B+) and even given modes market growth, they're talking a huge number.  I was pining for more info on this as well.

All in all a worthwhile time with some good perspective.  Thanks IDC and Frank Gens.