Sun announced the acquisition of the producer of software for cloud computing - Q-layer, a Belgium based company. Q-layer has been founded to provide a virtual data center for cloud computing services offered by data centеr service providers.

The company's solution is to abstract the hardware, storage and network facilities of a physical data centers would into a Database Abstraction Layer (DAL). DAL also features a language to instantiate and operate a virtual private data center (VPDC) in a cloud. Q-layer's NephOS software operates through existing virtualization hypervisor technologies like those Microsoft, Sun, VMware and Xen provide.

Users can provision their own virtual data centres through a web interface, specifying virtualised server, storage, network bandwidth and application components. The company's technology enables data centers to provide scalable services and reorganize and customize the solution they offer quickly and simply.

Q-layer is another step to help Sun to strengthen its virtual data center solutions for cloud computing and to better compete VMware. Sun also aims to provide its customers with a cloud computing and web hosting solution that will help them to compete with the cloud data center services provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.