Can Sun Bring Back Its Lustre Through Cloud Computing?

Sun has always been about "the network is the computer"—its very marketing mantra— so it has had the long-range vision for two and a half decades about the power of shared computing resources.

"We've already got a good presence here; you're going to see us be more visible [in this space] as we roll out new products early next year," Dave Douglas, Sun's senior vice president of cloud computing and the company's chief sustainability officer, told the group. "Our goal is to be able to play in all areas of these new systems."

Sun has always provided most of the hardware (Sun Fire blade servers, StorageTek storage arrays and even its own branded network switch), server and storage software (OpenSolaris, GlassFish Web server, MySQL database, Zettabyte File System, Lustre backup/recovery package and others), and networking software (Java) for general enterprise data center use. Sun's services group has been recast for cloud service duty.

Now, through Douglas' group, the company is identifying and supplying the necessary ingredients to build custom cloud structures.

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