Sun takes another swing at cloud computing
After first attempt flops, vendor promises new services
By James Niccolai, San Francisco | Monday, 15 December, 2008
Sun recently pulled the plug on its Grid Compute Utility service, launched two years ago, which allowed companies to buy computing power from Sun's datacentres at a fixed rate per hour, like a public utility.
The service, which pre-dated Amazon.com's EC2 service, is now "in transition" as Sun prepares to launch some new services, according to its website. Sun is still supporting customers who signed up for the Grid service but stopped accepting new customers several weeks ago.
Last week Sun gathered press and analysts together to discuss how it will tackle the cloud market. It talked in general terms and said specifics will follow in the new year.
Thanks partly to its early embrace of the web, Sun has a formidable list of technologies that it can bring to the cloud market. Besides its servers and storage gear, it has its Solaris OS, MySQL database, xVM virtualisation software and ZFS file system, to name a few.
The question now is how it will package that technology and persuade service providers and enterprises to let Sun be their vendor of choice for the cloud.
"A lot of the enabling technology is there. It's how they are going to pull it together and take it to market that matters," says Jean Bozman, an analyst at IDC.
CEO Jonathan Schwartz formed Sun's Cloud Computing division a few months ago and it now has several hundred engineers, Douglas says. Sun also hired Lew Tucker, who helped build Salesforce.com's online AppExchange, to be the division's CTO.
Sun sees three levels of cloud computing, said Dave Douglas, head of the company's cloud computing division. At the highest level are software as a service applications such as Salesforce.com's CRM; in the middle are cloud development platforms such as the Google App Engine; and at the bottom are infrastructure services such as Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
Sun hopes to play a big role at the bottom two levels, Douglas said at the press conference. It wants to provide the infrastructure that service providers like Amazon use to offer cloud services, but it may also offer on-demand infrastructure services of its own.
Sun could offer a hosted version of its MySQL database for developers, for example, and it could launch on-demand computing services to replace its Grid utility service. But the company won't go into that level of detail yet.
"We'll have some more formal announcements after the New Year," Douglas says.
A reporter asked him why customers would use Sun products to build their cloud infrastructure, when many today are using industry standard servers and Linux.
Douglas argued that Sun's Solaris has several benefits, particularly in the area of management and security. A company could run Linux or Windows in virtual containers inside Solaris, he says, and then use the Sun OS for tasks like provisioning and security.
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at firm Insight64, asked if Sun expected companies to move legacy applications into the cloud.
"History shows that people don't write new applications all that often, they try to port them," he said. "So what happens to folks with huge Oracle or SAP apps, running on large vertically scaled servers? Can they move them into the cloud?"
"I think you'll see people leave those untouched," Douglas said. "But they may look to see if someone has a comparable service in the cloud, and switch their on-premise Siebel applications to Salesforce.com, for example," he added.
Like other companies, Sun may find it tough selling new cloud infrastructure products at a time when many companies are cutting back on spending, Brookwood noted.
"They have relationships with telecommunications and service providers," he said, "so to the extent they can find any of those with money to spend, that will be good for Sun."