Joyent (See previous CloudAve coverage), the San Francisco based infrastructure cloud service provider, today announced the availability of Windows and Linux virtual machines in their cloud. They are targeting the enterprise customers who want to move their existing apps to VMs on the cloud. The new Windows and Linux solutions are available at all of Joyent’s datacenters worldwide, including their highly secure, high-connectivity, high-density SuperNAP Swithch|NAP data center in Las Vegas.
Yawn, what is new here?
There is nothing new about this announcement in the cloud infrastructure space. Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and others has been offering it for quite some time. Only now, Joyent has woken up to the fact that they don’t have offerings along the lines of Amazon EC2 and jumped into the game.
How do they expect to sell it?
Well, for one, they are trying to spin the offerings from Amazon and others as commoditized infrastructure. They are trying to push their own offerings as more suitable for enterprises who are expecting higher performance in the cloud. This is not a new strategy for them. In fact, in my post capturing the Winners and Losers of 2009, I talked about this strategy of Joyent.
Joyent has been offering infrastructure for web applications even before many of us heard the term cloud computing. To defend themselves against the onslaught of what we now call as cloud economics, from players like Amazon Web Services, Joyent repositioned themselves by offering highly optimized vertical offerings like MySql Accelerator along with others like Cloud Control and Joyent Smart Platform
They are continuing the same approach and their claims about differentiation from players like Amazon include
- Disk I/O and Memory I/O, which are common bottlenecks leading to application failure to scale
- Improved CPU speed and reduced network latency for faster performance
- Best-in-class price to performance ratio, making it pound-for-pound the most affordable solution on the market for the performance delivered.
But their claims are not entirely wrong. We are hearing complaints from Amazon customers who talk about bad I/O, unreliable hardware, network latency and, even, problems with scalability due to capacity issues. Clearly, Joyent is trying to build their business on these complaints. From what I hear, Joyent definitely offers better performance than some of the public cloud providers in the market. However, Amazon is not going to rest on their laurels and be satisfied with their existing market share. They are definitely going to push back harder making it difficult to sell services differentiating themselves from “poor performance” of commoditized infrastructure. Joyent definitely have their task cut out in this space. It will be interesting to see how far they can go with this strategy.
Related articles
- Joyent Adds Windows, Linux Support (nytimes.com)
- Joyent Adds Windows, Linux Support (pcworld.com)
- Joyent Secures $15 Million in Series C Funding (techvibes.com)
- Joyent lands another $15M for cloud computing services (venturebeat.com)
- Joyent lands $7M to bring companies into the cloud (deals.venturebeat.com)
- Joyent Offers Cloud Services at SuperNAP (datacenterknowledge.com)
Hi Krish, thanks for the post! A bit of a yawn yes, but I work for a cloud computing company that is supported across all platforms so it is good for me to be kept abreast what others are achieving.