Joyent, the San Franscisco based company offering enterprise class cloud computing solutions, is shifting focus to completely concentrate on enterprise customers. I wrote about Joyent in the early months of Cloud Ave and Joyent has, ever since, prioritized their offerings towards enterprise customers.
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.
Since that time, along with their existing Joyent Accelerator product, they have added
- Cloud Control software that can be used to deploy private cloud inside the business’ own datacenters.
- In January 2009, they acquired the company Reasonably Smart and this acquisition provided them to offer Joyent Smart Platform, an open source platform that allows developers to develop in Javascript, deploy in Git, scale effortlessly and pay only for usage without any lock-in. The open source nature of the platform allows users to take it to any other cloud provider or host on premise.
Their other offering, Joyent accelerator for MySQL, a virtual MySQL applicance optimized for high end performance was announced last Tuesday. Well, MySQL virtual appliances are nothing new. We have seen many such offerings even before Cloud Computing started to occupy our imagination. What makes this offering interesting is the fact that Joyent has worked with MySQL team in Sun Microsystems to offer an highly optimized and high performance appliance. Joyent already have a very close relationship with Sun Microsystems through their extensive use of Open Solaris (trivia: Joyent’s is the world’s largest Open Solaris installation) and ZFS file system. This collaboration with MySQL team further firms up Joyent’s partnership with Sun Microsystems but it also brings in a huge risk after the planned Oracle takeover of Sun. The performance benchmark studies done by Joyent seems to show that their appliance can do 3X times more transaction per second than the MySQL installed on Amazon EC2. The other important factor touted by Joyent is the stability of the appliance when used in a really high usage website. As an example, they quote the database usage of Whereivebeen.com website during a 13 month period. In this period, 47,921,072,680 queries were made to the appliance without a single reboot or downtime. The appliance can be rented as a single appliance or as a part of their web scale architecture.
In their efforts to shift their focus completely towards enterprises, few days back, Joyent offloaded their Strongspace (Cloud based storage with access through multiple SFTP users) and Bingodisk (Cloud bases storage with WebDAV access) to a relatively unknown company called Expandrive. Since these two products were more focused on consumer side of things, Joyent felt the need to move it out to concentrate entirely on the enterprise segments.
Joyent is a company I have been watching for sometime now. They don’t get as much press like other players like Amazon or GoGrid but they are quietly targeting the enterprises with many Fortune 1000 clients including Visa, LinkedIn, MLB.com, CNN, etc.. Their emphasis on open standards and open source is very attractive for the enterprises but their over-reliance on Sun’s products is a bit worrisome in this changed market landscape.
