Sun trademarked the phrase; The Network is the Computer, in 1984 well before the current frenzy over cloud computing had started. Their foresight of the coming shift in computing and storage from local data centers to distributed networks of virtual machines was ahead of the time, but surprisingly they have lagged behind in bringing many cloud bases products and solutions to market. Companies like Amazon already have systems in place for pay by the hour computing with their Elastic Compute Cloud, and scalable storage with Simple Storage. Although Sun may have been late to the game, they are developing some interesting new technologies that promise to give established cloud companies a run for their money.
Sun’s focus in cloud technologies is the creation of open standards that allow users to freely change systems and vendors. Cloud computing providers today lock in customers with proprietary services like storage. Sun’s vision of the future of cloud computing is an “Intercloud”, or a cloud of clouds that would connect different cloud systems into one network. This is pretty much just a reinvention of the current Internet setup but with some new technology. Sun is working to achieve this by building these standards into their products, and by releasing much of their work under Creative Commons license.
Sun has announced that this coming summer they will start a closed beta of their cloud system. This additional player in the cloud-computing arena, with their emphasis on open standards and shared technologies, will be a welcome addition. Sun has a lot of catching up to do before they can become as synonymous with cloud computing as Amazon or Google, but with enough time and community involvement they may open the cloud to a point where they all become equal.
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