Sun Is Joining The Cloud Race

You might not know, but Sun is one of the pioneers of the “cloud”, they were offering back in 2005 “grid computing as a service” for “$1 an hour per processor used and $1 each month per gigabyte of storage the company requires“. Of course, back then Amazon was just selling stuff.

So, yesterday was supposed to be the day when Sun Microsystems will have a major announcement about the company’s plans for the next generation cloud computing. Well, it didn’t happen. The only thing we’ve got was from Dave Douglas, director of Sun’s cloud computing business unit: ”Sun is a part of many cloud efforts already in various forms, and so we’ve got a lot of pieces that were there.”

Network.com however, Sun’s front-end for its Grid Compute Utility has a “cloud teaser” on the front page:

Network.com is in transition as we add some exciting new options. We’re not ready to show off what we’re working on just yet, but we’d like to hear from you, and we’d like to keep in touch

I strongly believe that Sun will not get into direct competition with Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon’s web services, but most probably will provide some on-premises cloud computing around Open Solaris, version 2008.11 was just released yesterday.

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