The tech blogosphere is always buzzing with news about various Amazon cloud offerings. But, Joyent is quietly laying foundation to become a strong player in the Enterprise Cloud segment. They already boast some big clients like CNN, Disney, Linked In, Paypal, GAP, etc.. Through their accelerator product, they cater to companies of all sizes from single person facebook app shops to Linked In with billion monthly views. From time to time, I write about various infrastructure providers and their products. In this post, I am going to briefly talk about Joyent and why this company excites me in the first place.

Joyent, founded in 2004, is a California based Infrastructure as a Service company offering cloud computing infrastructure and storage. Their main product is Joyent Accelerator, virtualized servers built on top of 8+ cores, 32+ GB RAM with a wide array of NAS based storage. Accelerators run custom open solaris OS on powerful Sun machines. Their use of BSD userland on Solaris kernel offers better compatibility and stability. Their use of ZFS for storage ensures the reliability of user data. The accelerator offerings start from 256 MB of RAM and goes all the way to 32 GB, serving customers ranging from single person blog sites to startups to enterprises. In all they have more than 13,000 clients with about 40-50 fortune 500 companies. They have four data centers in US and are planning for more around the world. Unlike Google App Engine or Amazon's offerings, Joyent accelerators use open standards based file system that doesn't require any application rewrites or data lock-in. Joyent accelerators can be managed without any complexity of Amazon's EC2 instances. Joyent accelerators can run applications written in languages like Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Erlang running on frameworks like Tomcat, Gigaspaces XAP, Axiom Stack, GlassFish, CakePHP, Symfony, Drupal, Django, Merb, Ruby on Rails, CouchDB, .NET in mono, Ejabberd, SunGridEngine, etc.. They certainly offer a pretty powerful scalable infrastructure taking care of the needs of startups to enterprises. Here is the story of an enterpreneur who scaled efficiently using Joyent's infrastructure.

Their other two products are Joyent Connector and BingoDisk. Joyent Connector is an Office 2.0 kind of SaaS application offering personal information manager tools and file storage. Bingo Disk is their scalable cloud based storage offering access through WebDAV open protocol.

But what excites me most about Joyent is their open approach. They are not only sticking to open formats and protocols, they have also open sourced their SaaS application, Joyent Connector. You can take the source code and run it from any data center or any cloud provider. They have also open sourced some of their tools including the monitoring tool, DTrace. The most important part of their open source strategy is their plan to release Bingo Disk under one of the open source licenses. Even though they don't have a date for the release yet, we can expect it to happen in the near future.

Joyent's products may not be as fashionable like other cloud based vendors but their approach to openness is very important in convincing customers that their data is safe and they are not locked in with the vendor. This approach could go a long way in convincing wary enterprise customers towards Cloud Computing.

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