News for December 10

TheRegister: Sun adds goodies to OpenSolaris 2008.11

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, it may be December, but it is time for the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update, the second tweak of the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform. With the new release today, it's getting some interesting storage enhancements as well as the usual update additions.

The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

Linux is popular, in part, because it is not only free, but distributed in a usable form and for the most recent hardware available on the market. So to compete with Linux, and to get an edge on other commercial Unixes (which are not open source or freely distributed), Sun Microsystems is emulating the distribution methods employed by the Fedora and openSUSE development communities, which create the code that eventually becomes the commercially supported releases from Red Hat and Novell, respectively.

The difference is this: Sun will actually support OpenSolaris in a commercial environment through paid support contracts, while neither Red Hat nor Novell do so with their development releases. (Ubuntu has a much more sensible approach, supporting all of its releases and offering long-term support for users who want to install the software and not mess with it much for a couple of years.)

Infoworld: Sun takes another swing at cloud computing

by James Niccolai

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.

Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper.

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.

On Tuesday Sun gathered some press and analysts together to discuss how it will tackle the cloud market moving forward. It talked about its plans only in general terms and said specifics will follow after the New Year.

Thanks partly to its early embrace of the Web, Sun has a formidable list of technologies that it can bring to the cloud market. Besides its servers and storage gear it has its Solaris OS, MySQL database, xVM virtualization software and ZFS file system, to name a few. Most of the software is open source.

The question now is how it will package that technology and persuade service providers and enterprises to let Sun be their vendor of choice for the cloud.

"A lot of the enabling technology is there. It's how they are going to pull it together and take it to market that matters," said Jean Bozman, an analyst at market research company IDC.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz formed Sun's Cloud Computing division a few months ago and it now has several hundred engineers, Douglas said. Sun also hired Lew Tucker, who helped build Salesforce.com's online AppExchange, to be the division's CTO.

Sun sees three levels of cloud computing, Douglas said. At the highest level are software as a service applications such as Salesforce.com's CRM; in the middle are cloud development platforms such as the Google App Engine; and at the bottom are infrastructure services such as Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

GigaOM: Clouds Looming for Software Server Vendors

by Stacey Higginbotham

As cloud computing moves beyond startups and attracts enterprise users, major software vendors are being forced to reckon with a new challenge to their current pricing models. Much like the emergence of software as a service has caused many large software vendors to evaluate existing licensing models that charge a set price for each software package copy running on a machine, the emergence of cloud computing is pressuring top server software vendors Microsoft, Oracle and IBM to adopt a subscription-style type of pricing.

The issue is similar to the battle that raged years ago when corporate customers started buying servers with multiple processors. Prior to that, vendors sold software on a per-core basis, so a customer who paid $20,000 for a copy of Microsoft's software for a single-core machine was hit with a $40,000 licensing cost when he upgraded to dual-core servers. With virtualized servers, where several virtual machines can exist on one server, such math becomes more complex, and can lead to even higher prices.

As Microsoft, Oracle and IBM adapt to the cloud business model, they're likely to see their software licensing revenue drop. How they will manage this is part of a new report out from research firm TechAlpha that looks at how virtualization will affect industries ranging from software to storage. George Gilbert, co-founder and principal at TechAlpha, says Microsoft has been fairly advanced about its licensing efforts in the cloud, while Oracle seems to be lagging.

"The new principles of pricing with the ultimate destination of software in the cloud requires two things: capacity on demand, and something that's divorced from the physical infrastructure," says Gilbert. "The idea that you install software on a box and it lives there for the useful life of the server is increasingly less relevant."

This won't just apply to public cloud providers such as Amazon. Enterprises will undoubtedly build their own clouds of virtualized computing power, in turn making the shift more painful for vendors such as Oracle, which currently has a limited offering on public clouds. Gilbert estimates that about half of Oracle's licensing revenue could be affected by this shift to subscription-based licensing.