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Sun adds to its cloud layer

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CIOL Bureau
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UK: Sun wants to be the infrastructure supplier of choice for cloud computing. It recently acquired Q-layer, a Belgian ISV that has developed provisioning software to enable users to deploy applications with the resources they need in public or private clouds. It’s putting the right components together, but cloud-based infrastructure as a service is still three to five years away from mainstream enterprise adoption.

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The clouds are gathering, but this time it’s more than vapourware

Sun is not alone in setting up a Cloud Computing business unit and setting out its stall, but it perhaps has more justification to claim leadership in this space than most. Its strapline virtually from its inception has been ‘the network is the computer’.

Sun established its Cloud Computing business unit at the end of 2008 and aims to provide a range of building blocks to enable cloud providers to build different types of cloud services: from delivering applications from the cloud, as in software as a service (SaaS), to basic storage and compute capabilities from the cloud (infrastructure as a service, or IaaS) to providing a developer platform from the cloud (platform as a service, or PaaS).

The common factor behind these services is that the end user of the service only requires a device to access the Web; the compute power and infrastructure that delivers the service sits somewhere out in the cloud. Businesses can have their ERP, CRM and email without having to buy the systems on which to run them. They can provision compute power for software development, compilation and testing on an ‘as-needed’ basis, rather than buying the physical hardware for it to lie idle when not needed.

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Of course, someone has to provide the infrastructure and computing power that delivers services from the cloud, and that’s why service providers, web services players and retailers (Google and Amazon) and independent software vendors (salesforce.com and Microsoft) are racing to build out their cloud computing infrastructure. Sun is even encouraging enterprises to build private clouds for internal consumption, although most customers don’t know what a private cloud is, but then there’s nothing new in hardware vendors encouraging customers to buy more kit.

Vendors must stick to their knitting

A key feature of cloud-based computing resources is that they’re agile and extensible, resources can be speedily and efficiently allocated to users and equally speedily be relinquished and made available to other users when needed.

Of necessity, they’re a virtualised resource. And this is where Q-layer’s software comes in. Q-layer’s management software allows enterprises and cloud service providers to provision resources such as servers, storage and network bandwidth to applications, enabling users to scale environments to meet their requirements.

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For Sun, it’s an opportunity to provide a bit more of the stack, another building block in the structure that’s needed to help customers architect, assemble and operate clouds. And it stands a better chance of success with cloud computing than it did with its utility computing initiative, assuming it survives the downturn intact. This is Sun the product vendor, not Sun the platform-as-a-service provider. Its sales force and channel should be more in tune with selling Sun infrastructure than hiring it out.

The Q-layer software is an important addition to Sun’s portfolio. It is not going to convince customers that Sun is the only cloud infrastructure player worth considering, but it is a necessary component for any customer looking to put public or private clouds into production.

The main problem for Sun, however, is that it is forever seen as the non-mainstream choice. Wedded to its Solaris operating system, it eventually cosied up to market leader Microsoft and Windows, but dismisses Linux as inferior to Solaris. If you want a Sun solution, it is first and foremost a Solaris solution: Solaris, Apache, MySQL and Perl: ‘SAMP’ not ‘LAMP’ (i.e., with Linux as the foundation). That’s a shame because Q-layer works well with Linux and most clouds will be built around Linux or Windows rather than Solaris.

Cloud computing is still more hype than reality. Mainstream enterprise adoption of PaaS and IaaS is three to five years away in our opinion; even SaaS is not a common delivery platform for enterprise customers. However, as a service and software delivery mechanism, cloud’s time will come. Sun, like every other system vendor, is going to make sure it’s part of the action, if it was more platform-agnostic, it might have a bigger role.

The author is senior analyst at Ovum.