Sky's The Limit: Sun Buys Cloud Computing Company Q-layer

Q-layer, based in Lochristi, Belgium, will become part of Sun's cloud computing business unit that develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Q-layer's technology automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun's strategy to enable building public and private clouds, according to Sun.

"Sun's open, network-centric approach coupled with optimized systems, software and services provides the critical building blocks for private and public cloud offerings," said David Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing and chief sustainability officer at Sun, in a statement.

Q-layer's NephOS Platform is a complete data center abstraction and modeling platform with extension capabilities and full support for cloud computing services, according to Q-layer's Web site. The NephOS Platform enables CloudApps like the Virtual Private Data Center, which that allows users at any skill level to define, provision and manage their own data center without managing hardware.

As businesses rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the data center determines the flexibility of the entire company, Douglas said. Q-layer supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements, according to Sun.

Q-layer was founded in 2005 and bills itself as the first company to introduce full data center virtualization by integrating server, network and storage virtualization.