News

posted on 09 May 2008 13:21

Sun is building a cloud competitor to Amazon's EC2 and Microsoft's Live Mesh which will offer storage services amongst its many other services.

Sun currently offers pay-as-you-go computing services 'in the cloud' with its Network.com platform for high-performance applications. However it has been left behind by Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google's cloud computing initiatives in which applications run on remote data centres hosted by Amazon and Google and are accessed through Web services.

Sun has announced that it is going to ramp up its cloud offering with project Hydrazine - hydrazine is a liquid fuel for rockets. This will provide services in the cloud, such as e-mail, calendaring, messaging, database and more. A set of common services will be available for developers, including repository services.

Regarding cloud computing, Rich Green, Sun's SW EVP, said: "We are building the rocket fuel in Project Hydrazine." It's based on JavaFX and will deliver an "immersive, creative experience."

Green talked about this at Sun's JavaOne conference. Apart from the presentation video there are no specifics available.

Sun aims to sell hardware and services to cloud IT services suppliers. It is also aiming to be a cloud IT services supplier itself.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}