Sun adding open source app server to Amazon cloud

Sun Microsystems will make its open-source GlassFish application server available on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform on Wednesday.

Sun also will unveil integration between the MySQL open-source database and the Sun Identity Manager product and single sign-on capabilities for Google Apps.

The GlassFish Portfolio and Sun's open-source identity management technologies, including OpenSSO and OpenDS, will be available via the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) portion of the Amazon Web Services platform. The plan was called a first step in Sun's strategy to offer its open-source software on cloud platforms, including Amazon EC2 and Sun Cloud. Sun, however, is in the midst of being acquired by Oracle, which could change Sun's plans if it wants.

GlassFish Portfolio features the GlassFish application server, while OpenSSO Enterprise offers Web access management, federation and Web services security, Sun said. OpenDS Standard Edition provides a directory service based on LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and DSML (Directory Services Markup Language).

Users hosting GlassFish on the Amazon platform would pay only Amazon EC2 charges and, if they choose to have support, Sun support charges, said Mark Herring, Sun vice president of marketing for MySQL and software infrastructure.

To link to Google Apps Premier Edition, Sun is offering a version of its OpenSSO Express product providing single sign-on to the Google platform. With Sun Identity Starter Kit for Google Apps, users can use enterprise logins to access Google Apps while getting increased security and improved administration, Sun said. Google Apps features SaaS applications, such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Sun is also integrating the MySQL database with Sun Identity Manager, which provisions users to repositories like relational databases. Customers no longer need to maintain a separate database to store identity roles.

“They can use MySQL now,” Herring said. Integration is between MySQL 5.1 and Identity Manager 8.1.

The integration is part of an enhanced interoperability between MySQl and Sun Identity Management Suite, which also features products such as the Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition LDAP server.

The announcements are being made simultaneously at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., and the RSA Conference 2009 in San Francisco. Sun at the MySQL conference on Tuesday announced beta availability of MySQL 5.4 and general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.0.

Also at the Santa Clara conference, Virident Systems and Sun announced GreenCloud Server for MySQL, a server offering in-memory computing on a large scale for the MySQL database. The server is intended to deliver high performance as well as energy and cost efficiency in Internet data centers. GreenCloud Server for MySQL, featuring a 2U rack server with dual quad-CPUs and 80-576GB of in-memory dataset capacity, starts in price at $6,000.