Image via CrunchBase
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.
