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Table of ConTenTs

Table of ConTenTs

Cloud Computing at a Higher Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Why Cloud Computing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Clouds: Much More Than Cheap Computing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

IT Efficiency on a Whole New Scale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Faster, More Flexible Programming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Compelling New Opportunities: The Cloud Ecosystem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

How Did Cloud Computing Start?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Harnessing Cloud Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Use the Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Leverage the Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Build the Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Be the Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

Cloud Computing Defined. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cornerstone Technologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

The Architectural Services Layers of Cloud Computing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Software as a Service (SaaS). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Platform as a Service (PaaS). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Inside the Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 5

Operating System Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Platform Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Network Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Application Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Sun Cloud Computing |

Table of ConTenTs

Software Deployment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Software Packaging. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Machine Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Sun’s Cloud Philosophies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Open Source and Interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

Comprehensive Product Portfolio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Enterprise-grade Systemic Qualities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Efficiency/Economy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Reliability/Availability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Density/Scalability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0

Agility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .0

Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

New Sun Technologies Relevant to the Cloud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Virtualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Modular Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Open Storage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 3

What You Can Do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Copyright 1994-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Cloud Computing | 3

Cloud CompuTing aT a HigHer level


in many ways, cloud computing is simply a metaphor for the internet,
the increasing movement of compute and data resources onto the
Web. but there’s a difference: cloud computing represents a new
tipping point for the value of network computing. it delivers higher
efficiency, massive scalability, and faster, easier software develop-
ment. it’s about new programming models, new iT infrastructure,
and the enabling of new business models.

For those developers and enterprises who want to embrace cloud computing, Sun is
developing critical technologies to deliver enterprise scale and systemic qualities to this
new paradigm:

Interoperability — While most current clouds offer closed platforms and
vendor lock-in, developers clamor for interoperability. Sun’s open-source
product strategy and Java™ principles are focused on providing interoperability
for large-scale computing resources. Think of the existing cloud “islands” merging
into a new, interoperable “Intercloud” where applications can be moved to and
operate across multiple platforms.

High-density horizontal computing — Sun is pioneering high-power-density
compute-node architectures and extreme-scale Infiniband fabrics as part of our
top-tier HPC deployments. This high-density technology is being incorporated
into our large-scale cloud designs.

Data in the cloud — More than just compute utilities, cloud computing is
increasingly about petascale data. Sun’s Open Storage products offer hybrid
data servers with unprecedented efficiency and performance for the emerging
data-intensive computing applications that will become a key part of the cloud.

These technology bets are focused on driving more efficient large-scale cloud
deployments that can provide the infrastructure for next-generation business
opportunities: social networks, algorithmic trading, continuous risk analysis,
and so on.


WHY Cloud CompuTing?

Why Cloud Computing?
“The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform
shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform
the IT industry, but it will also profoundly change the way
people work and companies operate.”
—The Economist, “Let it Rise,” 0/3/08

Clouds: much more Than Cheap Computing
Cloud computing brings a new level of efficiency and economy to delivering IT
resources on demand — and in the process it opens up new business models and market
opportunities.

While many people think of current cloud computing offerings as purely “pay by the
drink” compute platforms, they’re really a convergence of two major
interdependent IT trends:

IT Efficiency — Minimize costs where companies are converting their IT costs
from capital expenses to operating expenses through technologies such as
virtualization. Cloud computing begins as a way to improve infrastructure
resource deployment and utilization, but fully exploiting this infrastructure
eventually leads to a new application development model.

Business Agility — Maximize return using IT as a competitive weapon through
rapid time to market, integrated application stacks, instant machine image
deployment, and petascale parallel programming. Cloud computing is embraced
as a critical way to revolutionize time to service. But inevitably these services
must be built on equally innovative rapid-deployment-infrastructure models.

To be sure, these trends have existed in the IT industry for years. However, the recent
emergence of massive network bandwidth and virtualization technologies has enabled
this transformation to a new services-oriented infrastructure.

Cloud computing enables IT organizations to increase hardware utilization rates dramati-
cally, and to scale up to massive capacities in an instant — without constantly having to
invest in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. It also creates
new opportunities to build a better breed of network services, in less time, for less money.



“By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital ex-
penditures and instead purchase 40% of their IT infrastruc-
ture as a service . . .. ‘Cloud computing’ will take off, thus
untying applications from specific infrastructure.”
—Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT
Organisations and Users in 008 and Beyond,” /3/08

it Efficiency on a Whole new Scale
Cloud computing is all about efficiency. It provides a way to deploy and access everything
from single systems to huge amounts of IT resources — on demand, in real time, at an af-
fordable cost. It makes high-performance compute and high-capacity storage available to
anyone with a credit card. And since the best cloud strategies build on concepts and tools
that developers already know, clouds also have the potential to redefine the relationship
between information technology and the developers and business units that depend on it.

Reduce capital expenditures — Cloud computing makes it possible for companies
to convert IT costs from capital expense to operating expense through technolo-
gies such as virtualization.

Cut the cost of running a datacenter — Cloud computing improves infrastructure
utilization rates and streamlines resource management. For example, clouds
allow for self-service provisioning through APIs, bringing a higher level of automa-
tion to the datacenter and reducing management costs.

Eliminate overprovisioning — Cloud computing provides scaling on demand,
which, when combined with utility pricing, removes the need to overprovision
to meet demand. With cloud computing, companies can scale up to massive
capacities in an instant.

For those who think cloud computing is just fluff, take a closer look at the cloud
offerings that are already available. Major Internet providers Amazon.com, Google, and
others are leveraging their infrastructure investments and “sharing” their large-scale
economics. Already the bandwidth used by Amazon Web Services (AWS) exceeds that
associated with their core e-tailing services. Forward-looking enterprises of all types —
from Web .0 startups to global enterprises — are embracing cloud computing to reduce
infrastructure costs.

The New York Times needed to convert million articles and images in its
archive (from 85 to 980) to PDF. Their Internal IT said it would take them seven
weeks. In the meantime, one developer using 00 Amazon EC simple Web service
interface instances running Hadoop (an open-source implementation similar to
MapReduce) completed the job in 4 hours for less than $300.
—open.blogs.nytimes.com, “Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!”
//07, open.blogs.nytimes.com/007//0/self-service-prorated-super-com-
puting-fun/



Faster, more Flexible programming
Cloud computing isn’t only about hardware — it’s also a programming revolution. Agile,
easy-to-access, lightweight Web protocols — coupled with pervasive horizontally scaled
architecture — can accelerate development cycles and time to market with new
applications and services. New business functions are now just a script away.

Accelerated cycles — The cloud computing model provides a faster, more
efficient way to develop the new generation of applications and services. Faster
development and testing cycles means businesses can accomplish in hours what
used to take days, weeks, or months.

Increase agility — Cloud computing accommodates change like no other model.
For example, Animoto Productions, makers of a mashup tool that creates video
from images and music, used cloud computing to scale up from 50 servers to
3,500 in just three days. Cloud computing can also provide a wider selection of
more lightweight and agile development tools, simplifying and speeding up the
development process.

The immediate impact will be unprecedented flexibility in service creation and acceler-
ated development cycles. But at the same time, development flexibility could become
constrained by APIs if they’re not truly open. Cloud computing can usher in a new era of
productivity for developers if they build on platforms that are designed to be federated
rather than centralized. But there’s a major shift underway in programming culture and
the languages that will be used in clouds.

What’s the Next Web Stack?



Today, the integrated, optimized, open-source Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP)
stack is the preferred platform for building and deploying new Web applications and
services. Cloud computing will be the catalyst for the adoption of an even newer stack of
more lightweight, agile tools such as lighttpd, an open-source Web server; Hadoop, the
free Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications; and
MogileFS, a file system that enables horizontal scaling of storage across any number of
machines.

Compelling new opportunities: The Cloud ecosystem
But cloud computing isn’t just about a proliferation of Xen image stacks on a restricted
handful of infrastructure providers. It’s also about an emerging ecosystem of complemen-
tary services that provide computing resources such as on-ramps for cloud abstraction,
professional services to help in deployment, specialized application components such as
distributed databases, and virtual private datacenters for the entire range of IT providers
and consumers.

These services span the range of customer requirements, from individual developers and
small startups to large enterprises. And they continue to expand the levels of virtualization,
a key architectural component of the cloud that offers ever-higher abstractions of
underlying services.



How did Cloud Computing start?
At a basic level, cloud computing is simply a means of delivering IT resources as services.
Almost all IT resources can be delivered as a cloud service: applications, compute power,
storage capacity, networking, programming tools, even communications services and
collaboration tools.

Cloud computing began as large-scale Internet service providers such as Google,
Amazon, and others built out their infrastructure. An architecture emerged: massively
scaled, horizontally distributed system resources, abstracted as virtual IT services and
managed as continuously configured, pooled resources. This architectural model was
immortalized by George Gilder in his October 006 Wired magazine article titled “The
Information Factories.” The server farms Gilder wrote about were architecturally similar
to grid computing, but where grids are used for loosely coupled, technical computing
applications, this new cloud model was being applied to Internet services.

“In this architecture, the data is mostly resident on servers
‘somewhere on the Internet’ and the application runs on
both the ‘cloud servers’ and the user’s browser.”
—Eric Schmidt in ‘Information Factories’ by G. Gilder

Both clouds and grids are built to scale horizontally very efficiently. Both are built to
withstand failures of individual elements or nodes. Both are charged on a per-use basis.
But while grids typically process batch jobs, with a defined start and end point, cloud
services can be continuous. What’s more, clouds expand the types of resources available
— file storage, databases, and Web services — and extend the applicability to Web and
enterprise applications.

At the same time, the concept of utility computing became a focus of IT design and
operations. As Nick Carr observed in his book The Big Switch, computing services
infrastructure was beginning to parallel the development of electricity as a utility.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could purchase compute resources, on demand, only paying
for what you need, when you need it?

For end users, cloud computing means there are no hardware acquisition costs, no
software licenses or upgrades to manage, no new employees or consultants to hire,
no facilities to lease, no capital costs of any kind — and no hidden costs. Just a metered,
per-use rate or a fixed subscription fee. Use only what you want, pay only for what
you use.

Cloud computing actually takes the utility model to the next level. It’s a new and evolved
form of utility computing in which many different types of resources (hardware, software,
storage, communications, and so on) can be combined and recombined on the fly into



the specific capabilities or services customers require. From CPU cycles for HPC projects to
storage capacity for enterprise-grade backups to complete IDEs for software development,
cloud computing can deliver virtually any IT capability, in real time.

Under the circumstances it is easy to see that a broad range of organizations and
individuals would like to purchase “computing” as a service, and those firms already
building hyperscale distributed data centers would inevitably choose to begin offering this
infrastructure as a service.

Harnessing Cloud Computing
So how does an individual or a business take advantage of the cloud computing trend?
It’s not just about loading machine images consisting of your entire software stack onto a
public cloud like AWS — there are several different ways to exploit this infrastructure and
explore the ecosystem of new business models.

use the Cloud
The number and quality of public, commercially available cloud-based service offerings
is growing fast. Using the cloud is often the best option for startups, research projects,
Web .0 developers, or niche players who want a simple, low-cost way to “load and go.”
If you’re an Internet startup today, you will be mandated by your investors to keep you IT
spend to a minimum. This is certainly what the cloud is for.

leverage the Cloud
Typically, enterprises are using public clouds for specific functions or workloads.
The cloud is an attractive alternative for:

Development and testing — This is perhaps the easiest cloud use case for
enterprises (not just startup developers). Why wait to order servers when you
don’t even know if the project will pass the proof of concept?

Functional offloading — You can use the cloud for specific workloads.
For example, SmugMug does its image thumbnailing as a batch job in the cloud.

“We really don’t want to operate datacenters anymore.
We’d rather spend our time giving our customers great
service and writing great software than managing physi-
cal hardware.”
—Don MacAskill, CEO, SmugMug



Augmentation — Clouds give you a new option for handling peak load or antici-
pated spikes in demand for services. This is a very attractive option for enterprises,
but also potentially one of the most difficult use cases. Success is dependent on
the statefulness of the application and the interdependence with other datasets
that may need to be replicated and load-balanced across the two sites.

Experimenting — Why download demos of new software, and then install,
license, and test it? In the future, software evaluation can be performed in the
cloud, before licenses or support need to be purchased.

Build the Cloud
Many large enterprises understand the economic benefits of cloud computing but
want to ensure strict enforcement of security policies. So they’re experimenting first
with “private” clouds (see section .4), with a longer-term option of migrating mature
enterprise applications to a cloud that’s able to deliver the right service levels.

Other companies may simply want to build private clouds to take advantage of the
economics of resource pools and standardize their development and deployment
processes.

Be the Cloud
This category includes both cloud computing service providers and cloud aggregators
— companies that offer multiple types of cloud services.

As enterprises and service providers gain experience with the cloud architecture model
and confidence in the security and access-control technologies that are available, many
will decide to deploy externally facing cloud services. The phenomenal growth rates of
some of the public cloud offerings available today will no doubt accelerate the momen-
tum. Amazon’s EC was introduced only two years ago and officially graduated from beta
to general availability in October 008.

Cloud service providers can:

• Provide new routes to market for startups and Web .0 application developers

• Offer new value-added capabilities such as analytics

• Derive a competitive edge through enterprise-level SLAs

• Help enterprise customers develop their own clouds

If you’re building large datacenters today, you should probably be thinking about whether
you’re going to offer cloud services.


Cloud CompuTing defined

public, private, and Hybrid Clouds
A company may choose to use a service provider’s cloud or build its own — but is it
always all or nothing? Sun sees an opportunity to blend the advantages of the two
primary options:

Public clouds are run by third parties, and jobs from many different customers
may be mixed together on the servers, storage systems, and other infrastructure
within the cloud. End users don’t know who else’s job may be me running on the
same server, network, or disk as their own jobs.

Private clouds are a good option for companies dealing with data protection and
service-level issues. Private clouds are on-demand infrastructure owned by a single
customer who controls which applications run, and where. They own the server,
network, and disk and can decide which users are allowed to use the
infrastructure.

But even those who feel compelled in the short term to build a private cloud will likely
want to run applications both in privately owned infrastructure and in the public cloud
space. This gives rise to the concept of a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid clouds combine the public and private cloud models. You own parts and
share other parts, though in a controlled way. Hybrid clouds offer the promise
of on-demand, externally provisioned scale, but add the complexity of determin-
ing how to distribute applications across these different environments. While
enterprises may be attracted to the promise of a hybrid cloud, this option, at least
initially, will likely be reserved for simple stateless applications that require no
complex databases or synchronization.


“It’s one of the foundations of the next generation of
computing. . .. It’s a world where the network is the plat-
form for all computing, where everything we think of as
a computer today is just a device that connects to the big
computer we’re building. Cloud computing is a great way
to think about how we’ll deliver computing services in the
future.”
—Tim O’Reilly, CEO, O’Reilly Media



Cornerstone Technology
While the basic technologies of cloud computing such as horizontally scaled, distributed
compute nodes have been available for some time, virtualization — the abstraction of com-
puter resources — is the cornerstone technology for all cloud architectures. With the ability
to virtualize servers (behind a hypervisor-abstracted operating system), storage devices,
desktops, and applications, a wide array of IT resources can now be allocated
on demand.

The dramatic growth in the ubiquitous availability of affordable high-bandwidth
networking over the past several years is equally critical. What was available to only a small
percentage of Internet users a decade ago is now offered to the majority of Internet users in
North America, Europe, and Asia: high bandwidth, which allows massive compute and data
resources to be accessed from the browser. Virtualized resources can truly be anywhere in
the cloud — not just across gigabit datacenter LANs and WANs but also via broadband to
remote programmers and end users.

Additional enabling technologies for cloud computing can deliver IT capabilities on an
absolutely unprecedented scale. Just a few examples:

Sophisticated file systems such as ZFS can support virtually unlimited storage
capacities, integration of the file system and volume management, snapshots and
copy-on-write clones, on-line integrity checking, and repair.

Patterns in architecture allow for accelerated development of superscale cloud
architectures by providing repeatable solutions to common problems.

New techniques for managing structured, unstructured, and semistructured data
can provide radical improvements in data-intensive computing.

Machine images can be instantly deployed, dramatically simplifying and accelerat-
ing resource allocation while increasing IT agility and responsiveness.

The architectural services layers of Cloud Computing
While the first revolution of the Internet saw the three-tier (or n-tier) model emerge as a
general architecture, the use of virtualization in clouds has created a new set of layers:
applications, services, and infrastructure. These layers don’t just encapsulate on-demand
resources, they also define a new application development model. And within each layer of
abstraction there are myriad business opportunities for defining services that can be offered
on a pay-per-use basis.

Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS is at the highest layer and features a complete application offered as a service, on-
demand, via multitenancy — meaning a single instance of the software runs on the


inside THe Cloud

provider’s infrastructure and serves multiple client organizations. The most widely known
example of SaaS is Salesforce.com, but there are now many others, including the Google
Apps offering of basic business services such as e-mail. Of course, Salesforce.com’s multi-
tenant application has preceded the definition of cloud computing by a few years. On the
other hand, like many other players in cloud computing, Salesforce.com now operates at
more than one cloud layer with its release of Force.com, a companion application
development environment, or platform as a service.

platform as a Service (paaS)
The middle layer, or PaaS, is the encapsulation of a development environment abstraction
and the packaging of a payload of services. The archetypal payload is a Xen image (part of
Amazon Web Services) containing a basic Web stack (for example, a Linux distro, a Web
server, and a programming environment such as Pearl or Ruby).

PaaS offerings can provide for every phase of software development and testing, or they
can be specialized around a particular area, such as content management.

Commercial examples include Google App Engine, which serves applications on Google’s
infrastructure. PaaS services such as these can provide a great deal of flexibility but may
be constrained by the capabilities that are available through the provider.

infrastructure as a Service (iaaS)
IaaS is at the lowest layer and is a means of delivering basic storage and compute
capabilities as standardized services over the network. Servers, storage systems, switches,
routers, and other systems are pooled (through virtualization technology, for example) to
handle specific types of workloads — from batch processing to server/storage augmenta-
tion during peak loads.

The best-known commercial example is Amazon Web Services, whose EC and S3
services offer bare-bones compute and storage services (respectively). Another example
is Joyent whose main product is a line of virtualized servers which provide a highly
scalable on-demand infrastructure for running Web sites, including rich Web applications
written in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Java.

inside THe Cloud
A key attraction of cloud computing is that it conceals the complexity of the infrastructure
from developers and end users. They don’t know or need to know what’s in the cloud
— they only care that it delivers the services they need. But those who choose to build
clouds for private use or as a business in itself have critical technology decisions to make
in abstracting and managing underlying resources. This section takes a closer look at the
key architectural attributes and underlying technologies of virtualization.


inside THe Cloud

virtualization
Virtualization is a cornerstone design technique for all cloud architectures. In cloud
computing it refers primarily to platform virtualization, or the abstraction of physical IT
resources from the people and applications using them. Virtualization allows servers,
storage devices, and other hardware to be treated as a pool of resources rather than
discrete systems, so that these resources can be allocated on demand. In cloud comput-
ing, we’re interested in techniques such as paravirtualization, which allows a single
server to be treated as multiple virtual servers, and clustering, which allows multiple
servers to be treated as a single server.

As a means of encapsulation of physical resources, virtualization solves several core
challenges of datacenter managers and delivers specific advantages, including:

Higher utilization rates — Prior to virtualization, server and storage utilization
rates in enterprise datacenters typically averaged less than 50% (in fact, 0% to
5% utilization rates were common). Through virtualization, workloads can
be encapsulated and transferred to idle or underused systems — which means
existing systems can be consolidated, so purchases of additional server capacity
can be delayed or avoided.

Resource consolidation — Virtualization allows for consolidation of multiple IT
resources. Beyond server and storage consolidation, virtualization provides an
opportunity to consolidate the systems architecture, application infrastructure,
data and databases, interfaces, networks, desktops, and even business processes,
resulting in cost savings and greater efficiency.

Lower power usage/costs — The electricity required to run enterprise-class data-
centers is no longer available in unlimited supplies, and the cost is on an upward
spiral. For every dollar spent on server hardware, an addition dollar is spent on
power (including the cost of running and cooling servers). Using virtualization to
consolidate makes it possible to cut total power consumption and save significant
money.

Space savings — Server sprawl remains a serious problem in most enterprise
datacenters, but datacenter expansion is not always an option, with building
costs averaging several thousand dollars per square foot. Virtualization can
alleviate the strain by consolidating many virtual systems onto fewer physical
systems.

Disaster recovery/business continuity — Virtualization can increase
overall service-level availability rates and provide new options for disaster
recovery solutions.

Reduced operations costs — The average enterprise spends $8 in maintenance
for every $ spent on new infrastructure. Virtualization can change the server-
to-admin ratio, reduce the total administrative workload, and cut total
operations costs.


inside THe Cloud

operating System Virtualization
The use of OS-level virtualization or partitioning (such as LPARs, VPARs, NPARs,
Dynamic System Domains, and so on) in cloud architectures can help solve some of the
core security, privacy, and regulatory issues that could otherwise hinder the adoption of
cloud computing.

For example, OS virtualization such as that provided by Solaris™ Containers makes it
possible to maintain a one-application-per-server deployment model while simultaneously
sharing hardware resources. Solaris Containers isolate software applications and services
using software-defined boundaries and allow many private execution environments to be
created within a single instance of the Solaris OS. Each environment has its own identity,
separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it’s running on its own system,
making consolidation simple, safe, and secure. This makes it possible to reduce the
administrative overhead and complexity of managing multiple operating systems and
improve utilization at the same time.

platform Virtualization
Platform virtualization allows arbitrary operating systems and resulting application
environments to run on a given system. There are two basic models for this system
virtualization: full virtualization, or a complete simulation of underlying hardware,
and paravirtualization, which offers a “mostly similar” model of the underlying hardware.
These are implemented as Type hypervisors, which run directly on hardware, and
Type hypervisors, which run on top of a traditional operating system.

Each of the top virtualization vendors offers variations of both models. It’s important to
realize that there are design and performance trade-offs for any model of system virtual-
ization. Generally, the more abstract the OS is made from the underlying hardware, the
less hardware-specific features can be accessed. Increased OS abstraction can also
increase the potential for performance reduction and limitations.

network Virtualization
Load-balancing techniques have been a hot topic in cloud computing because, as
the physical and virtual systems within the cloud scale up, so does the complexity of
managing the workload that’s performed to deliver the service.

Load balancers group multiple servers and services behind virtual IP addresses. They
provide resource-based scheduling of service requests and automatic failover when a
node fails. While hardware balancers may outperform software-based balancers, their
flexibility is always limited. Engineers end up either writing software that interacts with
hardware via a suboptimal user interface or using a large number of computers to solve
the problem.

A significant challenge in cloud computing networking is not just the provisioning of
individual virtual network interfaces to a given virtual environment, but also the
increasing need of cloud infrastructures to offer a more complicated virtual private
datacenter, which provisions a set of different system roles and the logical interconnec-
tions between those roles.


inside THe Cloud

Application Virtualization
There is also a software angle to “containers” within the cloud. The Web container tech-
nology implemented in the cloud greatly impacts developer productivity and flexibility.

The Web container is the part of the application server that manages servlets,
JavaServerTM Page (JSP) files, and other Web-tier components. But not all Web container
technologies are created equal. Apache Tomcat, for example, is a popular open-source
Web container technology, but it has limitations for developers who want to go beyond
Web-tier applications. If an application needs to use persistence, clustering, failover, mes-
saging, or Enterprise Java Beans (EJBTM), these capabilities have to be added to Tomcat one
by one, whereas the GlassFish™ Project provides an integrated collection of Java EE con-
tainers that delivers all of these capabilities.

Today, most cloud computing offerings concentrate on platform virtualization, and the
developer chooses the OS and development platform. But increasingly public clouds and
certainly private clouds will offer higher-level development environment programming
abstractions. Over time, we might expect the level of abstraction that the developer
interfaces with to move gradually upward as more functionality percolates down into the
platform.

software deployment
With cloud computing offering increasing abstraction of the underlying hardware, a
related, but separate, set of decisions must be made concerning how the software and
applications are deployed on cloud infrastructure. The cloud computing model is flexible
enough to accommodate applications of all types and sizes, at all phases of development
and deployment. Cloud architectures can be the delivery platform for monolithic, propri-
etary applications such as ERP and CRM; the development and deployment platform for a
new breed of lightweight, dynamically typed applications built on open source software;
or a source of IDEs and testing resources.

Software packaging
The software-based packaging of software components, data, server and storage pools,
and other cloud resources makes efficient resource allocation, re-use, and management
possible.

The packaging system is essentially a software delivery mechanism that simplifies and ac-
celerates the installation of everything from operating systems to applications to end-user
data. The image packaging system (IPS) for the OpenSolaris™ OS, for example, makes it
possible to create images and install, search, update, and manage packages in the image.
The IPS can also be used to create custom packages and repositories and to publish and
manage packages to the repositories. Increasingly, cloud operators and datacenters are
moving away from installing systems software on each server, choosing to deploy golden
images on farms of servers. In any case, basic software configurations must be provisioned
on the system resource pools.


sun’s Cloud pHilosopHies

machine images
Increasingly, a similar image-based deployment model is becoming the primary mecha-
nism for deploying application development payloads on virtual resource pools. Machine
images contain user-specific applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration set-
tings and are hosted within the cloud. Perhaps the best-known examples are Xen images.
This model of deployment is the basis of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are built
around a variety of kernels. You can select among a range of public AMIs (preconfigured,
templated images) or build your own custom/private AMI.

Most AMIs are built on some form of Linux, such as Fedora or Ubuntu. They’re easy to
modify and share, and tools are provided by Amazon. Paid AMIs can be created by ISVs
and stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon Machine Images are available
for OpenSolaris (3-bit) and Solaris Express (3-bit and 64-bit) operating systems.

It’s Sun’s goal to combine the systems and software to build a cloud, the architectural
expertise to maximize cloud capabilities, and the technologies to take cloud computing to
a higher level. Our approach is to deliver all the components that enterprises, developers,
and end users need to build cloud environments, through our own or partners’ offerings.

open source and interoperability
While some clouds are closed platforms with vendor lock-in, Sun’s open-source philosophy
and Java principles are the basis of our strategy: providing interoperability for large-scale
computing resources and distributing applications across multiple cloud infrastructure
components.

Ideally, users of cloud computing would be able to move their applications among a
variety of standardized providers who offer open-source interfaces to common services.
Today, most clouds are proprietary, and even where the components offered are open
source, cloud operators cultivate significant lock-in through their underlying services,
such as storage and databases.

Private clouds created by individual enterprises certainly have the advantage of offering
(and requiring) adherence to corporate standards, but even here the desire for enterprises
to be able to “flex” their private clouds with public-cloud capacity on demand calls for
increasing levels of open standards to emerge in the cloud computing milieu.
Think of the existing cloud islands merging into a new, interoperable “Intercloud.” The
Intercloud would take the basic concept of the Internet up another level, essentially a
global cloud of clouds, united by a set of protocols and software, yet segmented (for
security and predictability) into clusters and “intraclouds.”



Sun is working toward the vision of the Intercloud by expanding research and develop-
ment efforts in four key open-source areas:

Software — Providing the open-standards-based tools that developers and
architects need to build agile services that can be deployed in the cloud — from
Sun’s Web stack to software elements from other vendors

Systems — Delivering compute, storage, and networking systems that interop-
erate with each other and integrate with systems from other vendors, whether
they’re based on AMDTM, Intel®, or SPARC® architectures

Microelectronics — Pushing the envelope for chip multithreading (CMT) and
multicore computing; moving to ever-higher compute densities within the cloud

Services — Supporting development efforts through a broad range of professional
services, network services, and value-added service offerings from partners (ISVs,
OEMs, channel partners, and systems integrators)

Comprehensive product portfolio
Sun is specially positioned to bring cloud computing to fruition because we have a
top-to-bottom solution to support the entire stack — from microprocessors (and servers)
offering unique multithreaded power/performance capability to innovative Open Storage
solutions to a full complement of application development software technologies,
including virtualization, identity management, and Web .0 programming platform tools.

Sun products are integrated across all the layers of technology involved and can be
integrated with standards-based technologies from other vendors. And many of Sun’s
products and technologies are on-ramps to cloud computing, including virtually all of
Sun’s server and storage systems, the Solaris OS, the ZFS file system, the Sun xVM
portfolio, and Sun Ray™ desktops.

enterprise-grade systemic Qualities
The unpredictable nature of cloud computing workloads requires that clouds be
architected for extremely high levels of efficiency, service-level availability, scalability,
manageability, security, and other systemic qualities.

Initially, cloud computing platforms are attractive for their low-cost development
and deployment capabilities. But as firms increasingly use cloud platforms for actual
production environments, they will require enterprise-level SLAs.
Maximizing systemic qualities requires integrating the development of these qualities into
the design process of large-scale architectures. For cloud computing, the focus of systemic
qualities is different from the host-based, client-server models and Web-based models of
the past. In some ways the challenge to achieve systemic qualities is more complex. On
the other hand, if these architectures are properly designed from the beginning, this can
contribute to, and not challenge, the achievement of systemic qualities.


Sun has introduced a number of innovations that deliver enterprise-grade systemic
qualities in cloud computing architectures. These innovations are primarily in the areas of
efficiency and economy, reliability and availability, density and scalability, agility,
and security.

Efficiency/Economy
• Pioneered the “green”-computing movement with energy-efficient CoolThreads™
technology and the use of printed circuit boards using far less hazardous materials
— which has saved companies hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs alone

• Low-cost innovator with offerings that span datacenter design, hardware, OS,
and software components; leading advocate of open-source software; using
virtualization technologies in all aspects of product design and development in
order to achieve greater power efficiencies

• Enables large numbers of servers to function more efficiently and saves costs on
energy, cabling, HVAC, and so on; minimizes capital expenditures (infrastructure
owned by the provider)

Reliability/Availability
• Service-level availability through the built-in RAS features of the Solaris OS and
OpenSolaris OS and sophisticated hardware-level availability features from failover
to clustering to dynamic reconfiguration

• Reliability by way of multiple redundant sites, which makes it suitable for business
continuity and disaster recovery

density/Scalability
• Extremely high density; large number of cores per rack and transactions
per rack unit

• Cloud nodes in the form of Sun™ Modular Datacenter systems and the Sun
Constellation System cloud computing environment; virtualization and dynamic
reconfiguration for efficient scaling on demand without having to engineer for
peak loads

Agility
• Multiple hardware architectures to customize systems to workloads

• Multitenancy, enabling sharing of resources (and costs) among a large pool of
users, allowing for:
— Centralization of infrastructure in areas with lower costs such as
real estate and electricity
— Peak-load capacity increases without engineering for highest
possible load levels

• Sun Grid Engine software to request and reserve resources for specific amounts of
time (see sun.com/software/gridware.)


neW sun TeCHnologies relevanT To THe Cloud

Security
Typically, security improves with the centralization of data and increased security-focused
resources, so cloud computing raises concerns about loss of control over certain sensi-
tive data. Accesses are typically logged, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be
difficult or impossible. Sun addresses the challenges with a range of innovations. For
example:

• The Solaris 0 OS includes Process and User Rights Management, Trusted Exten-
sions for Mandatory Access Control (MAC), and the Cryptographic Framework
and Secure By Default Networking that allows developers to safely deliver new
solutions, consolidate with security, and protect mission-critical data.

• Sun Identity Manager software is the market leader, delivering the only complete
user-provisioning and metadirectory solution that enhances enterprise security.

• The Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) contains everything an
enterprise needs to develop and deploy an SOA platform for the reuse of existing
applications, the delivery of new services, and enabling legacy and packaged
applications to rapidly integrate within an existing infrastructure. The suite is
SOA-based, is fully integrated, and delivers a rich set of integration and composite
application capabilities, including business process management (BPM), industry-
leading messaging, rich transformation, and a broad array of connectors.

• Sun is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web
Access Management for our governance, reporting, and compliance software,
providing controlled and role-based access management to back-line resources
or federated partner services, based on unique-ID, role, IP-address, group, or per-
asset entitlements.




virtualization
Sun is one of the few companies with the ability to address all of the different kinds
of cloud virtualization: hypervisor (Sun xVM Server), OS (Solaris Containers), network
(Crossbow), storage (COMSTAR, ZFS), and applications (GlassFish and Java CAPS
technologies).

As a vertically integrated system company with two decades of experience in virtualiza-
tion technologies — from the Network File System (NFS) that Sun introduced in 985 to
Dynamic System Domains, chip multithreading (CMT), and Solaris Containers — Sun has
the experience and expertise to take virtualization a new level.

Our virtualization platform is the Sun xVM portfolio, which provides comprehensive
virtualization capabilities, interoperability across heterogeneous environments, and
integrated management of both virtual and physical resources.

Sun xVM Server is Sun’s datacenter-grade, Xen-based, bare-metal Type- hypervisor that
uses the enterprise-scale Solaris Operating System as the OS core (as opposed to a
restricted Linux core), providing access to OS-level network virtualization/optimization.
xVM Server includes both the hypervisor and the relevant management infrastructure
to monitor and manage the running of multiple different OS guests, including Windows,
Linux, and Solaris guest operating systems, on a single physical server at the same time. It
also provides live migration and works well with VMware and Microsoft virtual machines.
That makes xVM Server an excellent foundation for larger virtualization solutions, which
can then be managed and orchestrated by xVM Ops Center software, Sun’s virtualization
management product. But unlike other Type- hypervisors using a bare Linux core, xVM
Server is built within a Solaris OS container providing unique hardware capabilities:
multithreaded CPUs, 0GbE links, and quality-of-service control to improve I/O perfor-
mance. xVM Server is also able to extend the advanced technologies in the Solaris OS,
such as ZFS, Predictive Self-Healing, DTrace, advanced networking, and security to
Windows and Linux guests (in addition to any Solaris guest instances). Additionally,
unlike other virtualization platforms, Sun xVM Server draws on open-source and
community involvement through the OpenSolaris and OpenxVM communities to provide
an open and interoperable offering.

Sun xVM Server, coupled with Sun’s OpenSolaris project, provides the most innovative
and advanced building blocks for cloud infrastructure:

• Network virtualization with Crossbow
• Storage virtualization based on COMSTAR and ZFS
• OS virtualization based on Solaris Containers
• Virtualization based on OpenxVM
• Device and location independence, enabling users to access systems regardless of
their physical location or type of access device (PC, PDA, mobile phone, and more)
• Desktop virtualization via Sun xVM Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)


modular systems
Large-scale datacenters are using increasingly modular approaches to provision
and manage pools of standard servers, storage systems, and network resources.

Points of delivery (PODs), for example, provide environments that are optimized for
specific workloads, such as HTTP or HPC, or specific capacities, such as numbers of users
or transactions. They encapsulate storage, networking, management, and servers.

The POD hardware platform layer consists of compute hardware, networking, and
storage. The availability and scalability requirements and the service tier that the hard-
ware is intended to support often drive the specifications of the servers. Applications can
scale independently. As applications need more resources than are available in a POD,
additional PODs can be added, providing more capacity. Both horizontal and vertical
scaling can be used as appropriate for each application.

One example of a POD is the Sun Customer Ready HPC Cluster, a platform that allows IT
organizations to deploy a standard set of preintegrated servers, switches, and storage
devices with rack-at-a-time granularity. These HPC clusters can be built out of standard
rackmount servers, such as the Sun Fire™ X450 server, or Sun Constellation Systems built
with Sun Blade™ X6000 series blade modules. The Sun Constellation C48 racks (four Sun
Blade X6000 systems) offer 7 TFLOPS from 768 cores, but with 7% improved power
efficiency. Systems such as this, while providing unprecedented power efficiency, are
typical of extreme power density associated with cloud computing datacenters. Thus,
most cloud datacenters reject traditional underfloor cooling, opting for more efficient
overhead services and hot isle/cold isle layouts.

Another well-known example of POD design is the Sun Modular Datacenter S0, a compre-
hensive datacenter delivered in a shipping container. The 0-foot enhanced container can
be loaded into almost any transportation system and delivered to a customer’s site, ready
to be installed by Sun or a Sun partner. Inside is an integrated power, cooling, and rack
system that can be populated with any 9-inch rackable, front-to-back-cooled equipment
that fits the customer’s specific computing needs.

The Sun Modular Datacenter has proven to be ten times faster to deploy than a
conventional datacenter. Plus, it reduces capital expenses with incremental expansion
capabilities, and it provides four times higher density per rack compared with a typical
datacenter — with 40% lower cooling costs in one-eighth the space.

open storage
Open Storage enables cloud computing to be done at a lower cost and at larger scale
than traditional, proprietary storage. Open Storage is about using industry-standard
components, including x64/x86 servers as storage controllers and flash memory, to
accelerate low-cost, high-capacity disk drives, with enterprise-class open-source software
to deliver inexpensive, high-capacity, highly scalable architectures.



Open Storage also enables new architectural models for data management. With the
open-source storage stack running on industry-standard hardware, including x64 and
SPARC systems, we’re able to get the data closer to the processors. This simplifies
data-intensive computing by eliminating the need to move data around a network.
Devices or servers that fit this model include Sun Fire X4540 servers, which are available
in to 48-TB configurations, all in a 4RU platform with four-core x64 processors. Shared
JBODs benefit from the Open Storage stack and enable highly available storage architec-
tures. Open Storage enables enterprise-class architectures to be built out of industry-stan-
dard components.

Customers, developers, and consumers can download this stack and build their own
storage appliances. But those customers who would rather buy a fully integrated storage
appliance can choose the Sun Storage 7000 family of unified storage systems. Following
the Open Storage model, these systems are built out of industry-standard servers,
leverage the capacity advantages of industry-standard SATA II drives, and integrate flash-
based SSDs in a hybrid storage model, all with a simple-to-use and elegant user interface.
By leveraging general-purpose hardware and software, a new breed of system becomes
possible. For example, the Sun Storage 7000 line has the ability to observe what’s going
on inside storage devices at a level that has previously not been possible.

Open Storage provides a new and unique business model as well. Capabilities such as
snapshot, replication, and compression are all included and there are no additional costs
for the data services. This open source stack also includes protocols such as NFS, CIFS,
iSCSI, and FC.

Open Storage architectures benefit from innovation in the information technology
industry. Being built on industry standard components enables quicker adaptation of
new processors and new interconnects (such as GigE and 0GigE), as well as
incorporating new technologies like flash-based SSDs.

Sun’s breakthrough Sun Fire X4540 series data servers are redefining storage density.
By integrating state-of-the-art server and storage technologies, the Sun Fire X4500 server
delivers the performance of a four-way x64 server and up to 48 TB in 4U of rack space.
This system also delivers incredibly high data throughput (about three times that of
competitive systems) for about half the cost of traditional solutions.

“[The Sun Fire X4500 server ] is the Web 2.0 server. . . .
I really think it is the category of the future.
Now companies can get hardware like this and build
next-generation applications.”
—Tim O’Reilly, CEO, O’Reilly Media


WHaT You Can do

Moreover, Sun’s storage servers are the vanguard of refactoring storage into general-
purpose server appliances. They combine a server with disk, networking capabilities,
and native metadata and query capabilities. Specialized software enables these general-
purpose systems to provide high-performance data services, making possible compute-
on-storage strategies for avoiding the high-latency movement of extreme-scale data for
data-intensive clouds.

WHaT You Can do
As you can see, cloud computing changes everything. It abstracts the software application
platform from the underlying hardware infrastructure, freeing developers and users from
becoming locked in to specific hardware. In cloud computing, the user’s data and soft-
ware execution are in the cloud (a.k.a. the Internet).

With a singular vision—The Network Is The ComputerTM—and the research, product
portfolio, and communities that this vision has created, Sun is uniquely positioned to help
enterprises build and use cloud computing deployments.

This is a vision that everyone can participate in. So here’s how you can help continue the
development of this architecture and take advantage of cloud computing:

• Evaluate your business and technology requirements – Sun can help, by conduct-
ing a Cloud Computing Workshop or Datacenter Assessment
sun.com/service/assess. A few key questions to help you get started:

— What are the different layers at which you might leverage cloud
services — Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS)?
— What are the business models under which you would operate and use
the cloud — public, private, hybrid?
— What are the different types of applications you want to put into the
cloud — Web, HPC and analytics, regulated applications?

• Join the Sun Cloud API community at http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis
to join the discussion and influence the direction of Sun’s open APIs for the cloud.

• Sign up for the Sun Cloud public beta sun.com/cloud and start building and testing
your applications and services in the cloud.



© 009. Sun Microsystems Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, Solaris,
OpenSolaris, ZFS, xVM, Sun Ray, CoolThreads, JavaServer, EJB, GlassFish, Sun Fire, Sun Blade, MySQL,
Sun Startup Essentials, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun
Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are
used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and
other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun
Microsystems, Inc. AMD and Opteron are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices.
Intel is a trademark or registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other
countries. Information subject to change without notice.

Lit. #GNHT4877-0 03/09


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