Sun's cloud has one interesting part

<yawn> Another "cloud" announcement. The cloud fad is getting a bit out of hand. It will be good for us all when IT folk learn that "cloud computing" means "virtualization over slow network links where somebody else handles not only your data but also all your data's security, and if they screw up your data or its security they owe you almost nothing". As we have recently started to see, one way that vendors can screw up your data is to get out of the cloud business with not enough notice for you to move to another cloud vendor.

Sun's announcement today is full of the normal cloud bluster, but it does have one good aspect: they're making the operational software and APIs free and open source. Companies that use Sun's software to move their data to the cloud, and then later have their cloud vendor quit or raise prices to a silly level, do not need to change administrative software to change vendors. Well, that's assuming that Sun's initiative takes off with the cloud vendors, but I suspect it will because all of those vendors want to be the recipient of moving customers, even at the risk of losing current customers to cheaper competitors. Tim Bray calls this "zero barrier to exit", and that should be exciting to companies who realize they can't trust just one cloud vendor.

And please: stop with the "private cloud" stuff. There is already a term for that: virtualization. We've been using that term for at least five years (and us old skool folks who remember mainframes have been thinking about it for about 30 years), and it completely describes what people are talking about when they say "private cloud". In-house virtualization greatly reduces the security risk of cloud computing by making your own employees responsible for data security. It also keeps your data on the local network, which makes moving it around much faster. I'm sure that some companies can save a bit of money by doing cloud computing, but I wonder if spending $3000 on their own (non-shared) monster server running Linux or FreeBSD wouldn't be better.