Rod Boothby: "with Joyent, service providers can deploy Clouds in a matter of weeks"

The last visit of our November press tour in the Silicon Valley took place in downtown San Francisco, with Joyent, an innovative company dedicated to Cloud deployments. Joyent is now planning to deploy in Europe, starting with France and the UK. A few important announcements were made at this meeting. We were greeted by Bryan Brown and Rod Boothby, respectively SVP Business Development and VP Global Business Development

introduction

taginlineimportJoyent's mission statement is simple: "the best in class software for cloud operators". Joyent's main customers are public cloud operators. The company was founded in 2004 and the cloud offering was launched in 2006. In 2009, Intel invested in Joyent and on November 19, 2010, DELL signed an OEM agreement with Joyent.

"Joyent isn't the oldest, but one of the oldest Cloud operators" Brown added.

Joyent thinks it "is the only software company to build a complete Cloud stack". Other companies have software stacks and others operate Clouds, whereas "we do both" Boothby said, "and we think that our only competitor is Microsoft".

offering providers the "most profitable Cloud"

taginlineimportJoyent's goal is simple, they want to "offer service providers, the most profitable Cloud". VMWare's approach to virtualise servers, but Joyent's solution is a complete data centre virtualisation offer. Here are somoe of Joyent's differentiators.

• operating system: a team of former SUN developers joined Joyent. That means that eveything can be optimised in the Cloud" Boothby said,
• broad range of models can be offered to clients and more breadth of performance and better scalability,
• the file system that Joyent is using is based on ZFS and it allows them to cache (mutilple tier cache approach mixing RAM and SSDs) and as a result is can run Windows a lot faster than anyone else.

The Joyent partner list includes players like load balancing company Zeus, New relic and Cohesion, Intel and Arista. Joyent is using Arista to manage their switching and this is making it possible to better control the cloud.

in real life: two striking examples

• Here is a proven example with Gilt Groupe who - thanks to Joyent - is spending less than 1% of its revenue on infrastructure, which is 70% better than the average spend on that kind of things,
• LinkedIn: uses Joyent to deploy all their ancillary project (mobile.linkedin.com for instance, is running on Joyent). What it means is that companies like LinkedIN can launch and only scale up if they are successful. Note: LinkedIn started in 2003, before Joyent launched and therefore, its main service is running off a legacy infrastructure. Bumper Sticker from LinkedIn is working off Joyent servers too,
• a list of clients and business cases is available from Joyent's web site.

the Joyent PAAS offering: node.js

The Platform as a service offering of Joyent's is characterised by HTML5, CSS and Javascript. What is revolutionary is the non-io blocking server side javascript which is making it possible to run millions of users and it allows 784,000 requests per second (vs. approx. 40,000 requests per second for Google), "which is insane", Boothby exclaimed.

What Joyent is claiming is that node.js is fast and light enough to support the "Internet of Things"

Becoming a public cloud service provider

If a service provider wanted to set up a public cloud for its clients, they would be able to do this in a matter of weeks, Boothby explained. Servers can be Dell but Joyent is Intel-based, so that other vendors can be chosen.

There are no limits to the number of virtual machines it can handle, and single sign on is included, and can be integrated with whatever legacy customer and billing system you have, Boothby explained.

Why bother? because there is more revenue per machine. On a JOyent cloud, one can generate 4 to 5 times more revenue per machine Rod Boothby explained, and this is based on our experience (they support over 30,000 customers, thousands of applications and billions of page views), and Joyent is confident that the only Cloud that will stay in such a competitive market is the one that is the most profitable.

This kind of turnkey approach means services too! This is why Joyent partnered with Dell services (formerly Perot systems). The Dell partnership will start immediately in the US but there are plans to expand in Europe and Asia, and "very strong in Asia". "We have a long-standing relationship with Dell" explained Nema Badley, Director of Marketing at Joyent, precising that Joyent was running another press meeting at the same time in San Francisco.

PAAS and Cloud computing

In Joyent's mind, there is a difference between PAAS (platform as a service) and Cloud computing, as PAAS is part of Cloud computing but Cloud goes beyond platforms. In the following video, I have asked our Joyent hosts to expatiate on this differentiation.