Sun takes another swing at cloud computing

From InfoWorld: Having coined the phrase "the network is the computer" more than a decade ago Sun Microsystems could expect to be leading the march towards cloud computing, but in some ways it is still at the start line.

Sun recently pulled the plug on its Grid Compute Utility service, which was launched two years ago and allowed companies to buy computing power from Sun's datacenters at a fixed rate per hour, like a public utility.

The service, which predated Amazon.com's EC2 service , is now "in transition" as Sun prepares to launch some new services, according to its Web site . Sun is still supporting customers who signed up for the Grid service but stopped accepting new customers several weeks ago.

"That was kind of an early attempt at cloud computing. We got some features right and some not right," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president in charge of Sun's Cloud Computing division. "We still think that model totally makes sense," he added.

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