That arrogant Larry Ellison has just become the Sun king. We knew it was going to happen and now Oracle is our newest competitor. We need to respond appropriately to this.

Two very different press conferences/product launches happened today, and both had a very common theme: control.

Clearly ORACLE is targeting IBM and NCR – Teradata products with the release of the SUN ORACLE EXADATA Version 2 platform. It was obvious listening to Mr. Larry Ellison, where he used the word “THEY” numerous times signaling towards IBM and NCR. Though it was not said during the presentation, “THEY” could include HP as well. At this point without the final approval of the SUN purchase, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for ORACLE to make another enemy, HP.

As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, investors will start looking to get in on the act. With that in mind, a friend and I began discussing which public companies were getting into the cloud computing market and to what extent. I have put together the following list, and encourage comments, suggestions, and contributions.

Just five days after HP announced it would acquire IBRIX, another scale-out NAS provider has been purchased. LSI announced today that it would acquire ONStor for $25 million in cash. The company sold a range of SAN and NAS storage systems, but was best-known for its Bobcat clustered NAS gateways.

How did a online bookseller become potentially the most important IT Supplier in the world? Were their employees not simply selling books but also devouring them to solve their own internal problems? And without Amazon beginning to scare the beejesus out of the traditional IT suppliers, would we have cloud?

VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.

While the bulk of Sun-related news this week relates to reported talks of a buyout by IBM, the company took a break from negotiations to introduce their own cloud computing and storage infrastructure, challenging Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and perhaps VMware, Microsoft, and Nirvanix.

IBM were always going to go acquisitive this year and it’s no surprise to me that the first target appears to be Sun. As other commentators have already pointed out, this is not a reaction to Cisco’s announcement on Monday but more a strike against HP. This is about being Number 1 again!

Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see!