Sun Microsystems unveils Open Cloud Platform

Sun's Open Cloud Platform is designed to power public and private clouds

Sun Microsystems has unveiled its combined open cloud computing infrastructure at the CommunityOne developer event in New York.

The Open Cloud Platform was announced by Sun's Cloud Computing Business Unit, and aims to power public and private clouds using a combination of the company's open technologies such as Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris and Open Storage. Sun also previewed plans to launch the Sun Cloud, its first public cloud service targeted at developers, students and startups.

The firm has released a set of core application programming interfaces for the new platform, which it is opening up for public review and comment. This is designed to further the spirit of openness that Sun is trying to foster, and to allow developers building their own public and private clouds to make them compatible with the Sun Cloud.

"Sun's Open Cloud platform is the first step in delivering our vision of a world that has many clouds that are both open and interoperable," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing at Sun.

"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."

Douglas hopes that the move will banish the growing trend towards proprietary clouds that limit choice and lock in customers, and instead embrace openness, flexibility and ease of use.

Developers will be able to deploy applications to the Sun Cloud immediately, by using pre-packaged virtual machine images of Sun's open source software, eliminating the need to download, install and configure infrastructure software.

Sun will offer two new services as part of the Sun Cloud - Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service - giving customers access to centralised storage and datacentre resources.

Sun's new open cloud platform has been somewhat overshadowed by news that the company may be soon bought by IBM in a cash deal expected to be worth $6.5bn (£4.68bn).