It’s more than clear that Sun doesn’t want to be a secondary player in the emerging markets, most of all in the virtualization and cloud computing ones.
In the virtualization space the company is developing its own hypervisor, based on Xen, and an enterprise management system that could rival with VMware vCenter.
Unfortunately both xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 are terribly in late and the customers’ hopes to have an open source hypervisor with enterprise-grade support within a reasonable amount of time are fading away.
Sun is also moving to build a concrete presence in the cloud computing space: its general purpose grid computing facility Network.com is being upgraded, probably to mimic the wildly popular Amazon EC2.
And now the company announces the acquisition of Q-layer, a European company offering a management platform, called NephOS, that simplifies the on-demand provisioning of discrete servers, as well as networks and storage resources, and offers per-user chargeback capabilities.
It seems very likely that the next version of Network.com may feature NephOS to further compete with Amazon.