Sun Microsystems has introduced its open cloud initiative and confirmed plans to offer 'public clouds' for developers, students and startups.

The new platform is reportedly powered by various Sun technologies, including Java, Mysql, Open Solaris and Open Storage.

'There are two distinct markets,' Juan Carlos Soto, VP of cloud computing marketing at Sun, told IT Examiner. 'The first one is offering cloud-computing infrastructure as a public, utility-like service to anyone in the world. Many new startups and individual projects within corporations are already taking advantage of this lower cost, instantly available, approach to computing. Sun showed some features of the cloud, and discussed the company's forthcoming cloud storage and compute services, today at Communityone.'
 
'Many businesses today are not yet comfortable with storing their business-sensitive information in the cloud. Sun therefore offers products and services today to help large organisations build their own, internal, private clouds in their own data centers behind their corporate firewall,' said Soto.

Dave Douglas, a senior Sun VP, explained that Sun's approach to cloud computing 'blended' open source development with design innovation.

'Sun's approach to cloud computing blends our expertise in developing open source software and communities with unique design innovation. Sun's open cloud platform is the first step in delivering on our vision of a world that has many clouds that are both open and interoperable. Our cloud architecture empowers developers with the expanded interoperability and freedom of choice they need to easily take advantage of the agility, efficiency and cost benefits of cloud computing,' added Douglas.

According to Douglas, Sun Cloud comprises two primary services: Sun Cloud storage and Sun Cloud compute. The 'core' of Sun's Cloud Compute is apparently based on the virtual data centre (VDC) capabilities acquired in the corporation's purchase of Q-layer in January 2009. VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including Opensolaris, Linux or Windows. The platform features a drag-and-drop method, in addition to APIs and a command line interface for provisioning compute, storage and networking resources via any web browser.

It should be noted that Sun's cloud storage service supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs. X

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