Lew Tucker, Sun CTO for Cloud Computing, started with the company as a member of James Gosling's original Java development team so, as you might imagine, he has some familiarity with legacy applications. After an absence of a few years, Tucker returned in 2008 to accept his current position, and he has already laid out his first concern, which is to determine how best to bring legacy applications into the cloud, according to Chris Preimesberger, who interviewed Tucker for eWeek.com.

When Tucker thinks of legacy applications he numbers Oracle and SAP databases among them, since such solutions do not typically employ the open-source and Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) infrastructures commonly found in the cloud.

Hardware acquisition is clearly not the recommended route to migrating legacy apps to the cloud in Tucker's view. According to Preimesberger, Tucker cautioned an audience at the January 2009 Cloud Connect conference, "If you're a startup, it makes no sense to buy racks of servers. There are rooms of legacy computers downstairs here in the Computer History Museum—you don't want to spend your startup money on hardware that will join them."

Nor is the mix-and-match approach recommended since that involves workarounds, patches and other short-term fixes. Tucker says modernizing data systems should start with an appraisal of a company's position within its industry.

Once the data center became the computer, Tucker contends, the current shift to SAAS-oriented structures was a foregone conclusion.

"You can't just take some prepackaged legacy application running somewhere and just throw it into the cloud," Tucker told eWEEK in a separate interview. "With virtualization, over time, we will be almost able to do that. In time, we'll be able to virtualize basically the old data center, and therefore you'll be able to move your applications over into it."

Tucker proposes an incremental approach to legacy app migration rather than a wholesale shift. "It's not that kind of a switch. It's more of an evolution of what's going on in the data center and an evolution of the development of more interesting services on the Internet that are now finding applicability back in the enterprise," Tucker told Preimesberger.

Tucker cites Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and new online HR applications as current examples of these "more interesting" services, adding, "A lot of these have already moved into the cloud, and they are now becoming part of the IT organization that we have to manage and administrate.

Summing up, Tucker observed to the author, "The question really isn't, Will legacy applications have to move? I think some will, and some won't. The real question is, How does an IT organization evolve? This will mean bringing in more and more cloud services. The goal is to move all your end users forward at the same time."

More Information

Complete text of Chris Preimesberger\'s article

Sun and Cloud Computing

Sun Virtualization Solutions [...read more...]

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