Amazon has taken off with its cloud compute infrastructure but there still have been some limitations from an enterprise perspective. Mainly, some enterprises are concerned about keeping their data private, about reliability, and storage costs over time. Any enterprise looking at potentially leveraging the cloud would love to have a hybrid solution which allows them to manage their own internal cloud and then burst over to a public cloud for either automated failover, extra storage, or to port an application over after using an internal platform for development. Sun seems to get it as evidenced by their announcement today to offer their own cloud computing platform. Key here is that it will be interoperable with Amazon S3 and its platform.
"Sun anticipates that the cloud scene will feature many clouds, both public and private, that are interoperable and driven by different application types. Applications eyed for deployment on Sun Cloud include Web 2.0 applications, social networking systems, gaming applications, and anything that needs the scale of the Web, said Tucker. Departmental applications are envisioned as well.
"What we're introducing in New York here is we're talking about our public cloud," for developers, Tucker said. Sun has seen a lot of interest in cloud computing from enterprises, he said. "It’s getting very rapid uptake at least in the large enterprises today," said Tucker.
What is interesting is that their is a little known startup with great open source technology called Eucalyptus which is helping drive some of this initiative. Eucalyptus will be the software that will allow the Sun cloud to interoperate with other platforms and services. With this open source platform, companies can now deploy apps on their own cloud and use Amazon or other cloud services for high availabilty or extra storage without vendor lockin. Congratulations to Rich Wolski and team as they have made tremendous strides during the last 6 months. I was just with them in New York yesterday and believe they are on to something big.
Eucalyptus looks great.. check out CohesiveFT.com as well..Their VPN Cubed helps you deploy as well as manage your virtual computing software stacks across clouds and across data centers and clouds.
I hope our CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 will work with SUN cloud storage with minimal or no modifications. I am glad there are more players in the cloud market and it would be an expected move from a company like SUN
Certainly whomever provides middleware to help enterprises leverage multiple cloud APIs will be adding value.
However, I think there is more to this than just web-based APIs.
Addressing the challenges around hybrid clouds will involve deep integrations with underlying legacy infrastructure components (SANs, networking gear, etc) which are not wired to be managed through REST and SOAP APIs.
Fortunately I think that means we’ll see a bunch of interesting startups pop up to fill that gap.
A couple of related posts:
http://johngannonblog.com/2009/03/18/feld-thoughts-spurring-my-thoughts-on-cloud-computing/
http://johngannonblog.com/2009/03/13/systems-management-or-cloud-management/
Everybody thinks Eucalyptus can be an alternative to Amazon EC2 for private clouds in the Enterprise. I think it’s not really a cloud platform, but a clustered platform that looks like cloud platform.
The difference can look subtle, but this is the main I reason I think Eucalyptus cannot be deployed in a massive environemnt: hosting providers for example.
This is one of the reason why we are developing abicloud in abiquo (www.abiquo.com).
cohesiveft looks great-would love to meet them