Sun Microsystems announced today that they acquired the cloud computing firm Q-Layer.

According to the official press release:

The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.

Looking at Q-Layer’s website, it looks like a good buy for Sun. They provide pretty easy to use Microsoft Windows-based tools to deploy new virtual machine images onto datacenters, which should meld nicely with Sun’s previous announcement about their intentions with cloud computing.  Q-layer also provides a customized OS for cloud computing called NephOS:

The main components of the Q-layer NephOS Platform include a repository-based model of the data center, termed the Data Center Resource Planning (DRP) model, a Data center Abstraction Layer (DAL), and a uniform data center scipting environment, called Qshell. This provides in turn the abstract model, the translation and orchestration logic, and the extension language required to fully enable an agile data center.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, SaaS