Sun CTO: Cloud computing is like the mainframe

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun Microsystems chief technology officer, gave the keynote address at the AFCOM Data Center World conference in Las Vegas yesterday. And during it, he compared cloud computing to the mainframe.

What he said about cloud computing: “In some sense, it’s nothing new. This idea that we’re going to build large concentrations of computing, storage, and networking, and produce them as a service. That’s a great definition of mainframe computing. A bunch of 3270s hooked up as a professionally managed pool of resources.”

Though the idea that mainframe computing is similar to the cloud is not new (see “Cloud computing = mainframe rehash?“), it was interesting to hear it straight from a Sun executive.