Sunday, May 4, 2008

Sun and Amazon... Could Be

I have always wanted to attend JavaOne having been a Java developer and architect now for more than 12 years and after seeing the hints that are flying around what might be announced tomorrow at the dinner before the conference makes me want to be there even more. Looks like Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz is going to make some interesting news for the blogosphere. David Berlind is attending Startup Camp for the conference and has talked about what might be happening in his blog David Berlind's Tech Radar. He says that Schwartz hinted at an Amazon with ZFS announcement for tomorrow night. This would be a great addition in many ways for the Amazon Cloud.
As it stand right now, Amazon is running an Intel based platform. I will be interested to see if the announcement involves offering some Solaris Operating System AMIs or even taking the open source codebase for ZFS and offering some of the same features on the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. This last option would be somewhat challenging without Sun's help but they have stated on their Solaris 10 Knowledge Base for ZFS site that they are looking at porting ZFS to linux. With ZFS on Amazon, we could really some amazing performance gains, virtually unlimited scalability on the file system, and much more reliable data integrity. We have had no problems with any of these so far (knock on wood) but having that extra assurance would always be welcome.
Om Malik interviewed Schwartz and asked about the availability of Amazon and Cloud Computing helping startups and what Jonathan's take was. He replied: “Do you think it would make sense for us to partner with Amazon to offer free info on the cloud? ... Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon.”
All of this build-up, let's see what happens! I will be very interested in seeing how this will impact Amazon EC2 and of course DigitalChalk!

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