Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Sun Acquires A Cloud Management Company, Takes Aim At IBM (JAVA)

Sun (JAVA) is heralding its acquisition of Belgian cloud computing company Q-layer, "a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds."

Put EC2 or Azure out of your mind. "Cloud computing" is one of the most abused terms in tech, and (as Larry Ellison hilariously noted) can be twisted to mean almost anything.

Sun's latest move beefs up its "virtualization" offerings: the ability for enterprises to use a small cluster of servers (sometimes called a "private cloud") to share resources and emulate the functions of having many more computers

Monday, January 5, 2009

EMC adding open sauce to Decho mix

Storage giant EMC is rumoured to have bought SourceLabs, a Seattle-based open source startup with nifty software technology for identifying developer problems and finding answers, for its Decho 'digital echo' business unit.

Decho was formed late last year by combining EMC's Mozy online backup product and Seattle-based Pi, the Paul Maritz personal information startup, to provide technology for businesses and consumers using cloud storage and information handling services. When Maritz was selected by EMC boss Joe Tucci to run VMware a new CEO was recruited for Decho, Harel Kodesh, like Maritz an ex-Microsoft executive. He is also president of EMC's cloud infrastructure business which includes the Atmos cloud storage product.

Trying to find a match between SourceLabs products and services and Decho's is tricky. Byron Sebastian, an ex-BEA executive, started SourceLabs, and the company's purpose is to help "Linux and Open Source developers and administrators make the most of their Linux and Open Source software by developing products and services to help better support and manage Open Source software." How does that fit into cloud computing?