Sun gears up to try utility cloud again using somebody else's datacenter

Timothy Prickett Morgan reported at Channel Register on Friday that Sun is evidently gearing up to make a third run at selling cloud computing cycles to customers. This based on comments that Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos made a AFCOM’s Data Center World conference

The details are unknown, but reports coming out of the AFCOM Data Center World conference (here and here) indicate that this time around, Sun is going to use a third party hosting company to host its cloud computing offering instead of hosting it in its own high-tech (and much bragged about) data centers.

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s chief technology officer, said in a keynote speech at the AFCOM event that the company had “thousands of cores” and “petabytes of storage” installed at the SuperNAP data center run by Switch Communications, which is located in Las Vegas and which has, according to legend, rose from the ashes of the broadband trading operations of none other than Enron.

Hmmm. “Thousands of cores” eh? What is that, like 3 racks? Not really much of a cloud, that.

Anyway, you may recall that Sun has been down this road before, first with SunGrid and then the Network.com rebranding,  which culminated in a shut down back in December. I think it’s very odd, and disturbing if you are a Sun customer, that they aren’t using their own datacenter, especially since they have spilled so much ink talking about how great their datacenter guys are (oh, say, here, here, and the 0 datacenter dust up here, and let’s please not forget the whole Redshift “our datacenter will be one of five on the planet” thing).