Project Hydrazine to fuel Sun's computing cloud venture
In the realm of cloud computing, Sun Microsystems is creating its own environment which will allow designers and developers to collaborate, create, and run products in Sun's infrastructure. Code named "Project Hydrazine" , the announcement was made at the JavaOne conference by Sun CTO Robert Brewin. Brewin believes, much like the hydrazine that fuels the space shuttle into orbit, this new project will help to power user's applications to astronomical levels.
Cloud-computing was first introduced in 2007. Large companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and IBM had vast hardware and network resources. They decided to rent out space that wasn't needed to small companies who lacked the money and/or resources to sustain a similar infrastructure. Data could be stored over various servers or even virtual servers and retrieved quickly by business and consumer alike. The major differences between cloud-computing and a data center lie in the remote location of the servers, the fact that the infrastructure itself is not owned by the company using it, and that the management tasks are are automated.
Two of the current players in the cloud-computing market are Amazon and Nirvanix. As Talkibie discussed last month, Amazon's EC2 and S3 services offer businesses an area to store, work, and host their information, and deploy programs and applications. Nirvanix's cloud focuses more on storage and claims "businesses are guaranteed a shorter time-to-market, reduced costs, and also benefit from better flexibility and control for their operations."
So what makes Project Hydrazine so special? Sun Microsystems is offering the hardware, the network environment, JavaFX rich Internet application technology, GlassFish application server, Sun enterprise service bus, Sun Directory server, MySQL, and "cheap storage". It is also including a module called "Project Insight", an effort to implement JavaFX technology to enable two-way conversations with consumers, including providing advertising. Sun is also, wisely, staying out of the designer tools development realm and partnering with Adobe to bring trusted toolsets into their repertoire. As a final touch, Project Hydrazine offers a mechanism which will help sync a person's devices with the applications and data stored on them, much like Microsoft Live Mesh. Overall, Sun is promising one stop shopping for all your designing, storage, and programming needs with the added incentive of a monetization tool to make every customer interaction more profitable and highly accessible.
Start up businesses often have a long battle ahead of them. Each dollar spent has to be evaluated for the return it will get. With the ability to rely on cloud computing, small businesses are able to operate at enterprise levels for a fraction of the cost. No need to worry about the overhead costs in creating an IT infrastructure and hiring the personnel to maintain it. If Project Hydrazine can deliver on its promises, the only thing separating a business from the Fortune 500 list is a good idea.
