Confident！ Sun wants to break through cloud

The company told reporters and analysts on December 9 that Sun's new cloud computing office had been used for business, and based on 26 years of Network computing knowledge, the new cloud could coordinate software, hardware, and services between different parts of the company to consolidate the enterprise's cloud infrastructure.

Cloud computing, or public computing/Grid computing/On-demand computing, is based on ordering, providing processing power and data storage or applications to millions of users from a data center through a grid. This common type of cloud-such as Amazon EC2, Google Office apps and Salesforce.com, which provides online services-is called the "public" cloud because any business or individual can order it.

In the mainstream sense, private cloud computing is another meaning. The smaller, cloud-like network of IT systems within the firewall provides similar services, but is limited to a closed internal web. Such private, usually more manageable networks may include corporate or departmental offices and other companies that are also business partners, raw material suppliers, distributors, production chain entities, and other organizations closely linked to a company system.

Private cloud computing services range from simple online document backup and file storage to complex tasks, including 24x7 social networking sites, corporate geolocation services, financial services transactions, science and oil/gas exploration applications.

The company no longer needs to build its own data center for capital projects, which is a financial delight for the company. The company may, in accordance with its own needs leasing calculation capacity, according to the order plan payment-per day, annual or annual pay.

Sun has been "the network is the computer" as its marketing slogan. As a result, the company had foreseen the ability to share computing resources as early as 25 years ago.

"We're in the spotlight, but we'll be more frequent in the future because we're going to launch a new product early next year," Sun's senior vice president of Cloud computing, the company's chief sustainability officer David. "Our goal is to have a place in all the areas of these new systems," said Douglas. ”

Sun has been providing most of the hardware for ordinary enterprise data centers (Sunfire blades, storagetek storage arrays, even their own brand of network switches), servers, storage software (OpenSolaris, GlassFish network servers, MySQL databases, zettabyte file systems, lustre backup/recovery packages, and other network software (Java). Sun's services group also restructured because of cloud computing.

The company is now identifying and providing the necessary components through the Douglas Group to build a custom cloud structure.

Douglas and Lew Tucker, Sun vice president and chief technology officer of Cloud computing, have all said they believe the global slowdown will spur a lot of new interest in cloud computing next year.

"This is particularly true for large companies [for now]," said Douglas. A more conservative company might have said, ' Well, let cloud computing mature for a few years, ' but now they'll at least think about it before discounting, because their product sounds like it's going to save you money-and that's what everyone wants. ”

"We don't have a crystal ball to help us analyze risk and uncertainty, but what we can tell you is that every customer in our company is asking us what the cloud is going to be." ”

"Many sun customers are familiar with cloud computing," Tucker said, "so they usually start talking with specific questions." ”

"They're looking at Google, looking at Amazon and other big internet companies, and there's the question, ' How do they support that infrastructure? '" Tucker says. "The way they support the infrastructure is sometimes based on a cloud computing model that runs internally. Their [prospects] want to change their it, and cloud computing can quickly drive these changes.

"They look at the economy and ask," How can we spend less, or do more with the same settings as they do?

Ironically, Sun's first prime-time foray into genre (sun grid, launched in February 2005) did not follow a sharp rise in the company's hopes.

February 1, 2005, Sun announced its grid computing message-mainly for a number of global data centers-charged per hour per computer a fixed fee of one dollar a month, the cost of a dollar can get 1 billion bytes of storage capacity. Many customers pay, but not enough to quickly become a popular product.

Sun has done a lot of work on this. At about three years before the launch of the product, Sun had provided grid computing resources at a personalised price.

"Sun's grid computing is still there, and we've got a lot of big customers in grid computing," he said. Grid computing is an early attempt at cloud computing, some of which are more successful and somewhat less successful. Tucker told the relevant reporters.

"We will continue to support users who see how we can fix the model and continue to move forward," he said. But we didn't accept new customers a few weeks ago, because we were doing some data centers, and it didn't make sense to accept new customers. ”

However, Sun is not going to reject any customers who want to talk to us about cloud computing. Sun does need to succeed because the company has struggled to survive the first decade of this century in a loss-making situation.

Can cloud computing bring sun back to its former aura? The 2009 mystery will be officially announced.