Sun Breaks Through Clouds, Acquires Q-Layer

At the heart of Q-Layer's product palette is the NephOS platform that provides an abstraction layer on top of existing hardware and virtualization solutions. It should enable data centers to transition to a cloud computing infrastructure with the corresponding service offerings, such as for storage, virtual servers and website hosting, with usage-based chargeback possibilities. Even intranets should benefit from the NephOS solution.

Beside resource planning, NephOS provides a data center abstraction layer and Qshell, a Python-based cross-platform scripting environment. The supported virtualization technologies include VMware, ESX, Xen, Sun XVM Virtualbox and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Sun is holding back on financial data related to the purchase of Q-Layer, founded in 2005, but refers to its Cloud Computing website for details.