Sun Microsystems has announced the Cloud Strategic Planning Service to provide cloud know-how to companies of various sizes that want to implement a form of cloud computing.

The planning service will be provided through Sun's consulting arm, Sun Professional Services. It will evaluate a customer for cloud-readiness, determine whether a public or private cloud is appropriate, and identify opportunities in the cloud in terms of the nature of the business, the corporate culture, and the existing IT environment.

"Cloud computing has been billed by the industry as the answer to today's IT woes, without much clarity on how to get there. We are applying our industry-specific consulting and technology expertise to offer secure, practical guidance," said Amy O'Connor, VP of services marketing at Sun.

In a CommunityOne address, Sun's Lew Tucker, CTO of Sun Cloud, said Sun was gathering a large number of third parties to help it broaden Sun Cloud, currently in beta, which will become generally available this summer. "It's an amazing time for cloud computing. ... We're seeing interest in the cloud inside the U.S. government. With just a credit card, you can bring up your data center in the cloud in a couple of minutes," he told attendees.

"No more filling out a form in triplicate and walking it down the hall" to get a new server, he added.

CommunityOne is a bicoastal, three-day conference sponsored by Sun to bring open source and commercial technologists together. Monday's event in San Francisco preceded the opening of Sun's established JavaOne show Tuesday.

Mike Harvey, VP for business development of Moonwalk, the Milton, Australia, maker of data management software, joined Tucker on stage to say that his company could provide a policy-driven application in Sun's cloud to convert data for storage there. Moonwalk will move Windows, SUSE Linux, and Red Hat Linux, Netware, or NetApp data into the Sun Cloud for replication, disaster recovery, tiered storage, or long-term archiving, he said.