Sun's new mantra: Call us the 'cloud company'

From CNET News.com: During the Internet bubble era, Sun Microsystems profited as one of the big suppliers of networking computing technology to IT. Now it's hoping to similarly benefit from another tech trend as the computer industry slowly migrates toward cloud computing.

On Wednesday, Sun will announce its entry into the cloud-computing business with a public cloud service aimed developers, students, and start-ups. It will also detail its plans for an open cloud-computing infrastructure, for public or private clouds.

Sun will be making the announcement at its CommunityOne developer event taking place in New York City.

As part of the announcement, Sun plans to release a set of open application programming interfaces as part of its positioning that--and here I'm quoting from the official press release--"Sun is fostering collaboration and interoperability among other clouds and cloud-based applications."

"At the core of the Sun Cloud Compute Service are the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities acquired in Sun's purchase of Q-layer in January 2009, which provide everything an individual or team of developers needs to build and operate a datacenter in the cloud. The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including OpenSolaris, Linux or Windows. It 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. The Sun Cloud Storage Service supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs. By leveraging pre-packaged Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) of Sun's open source software, developers will be able to easily deploy applications to the Sun Cloud."

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