Joyent Eyes Global Expansion of Cloud Infrastructure
Joyent is getting ready to bring online new datacenters that it says will equip it to compete with cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services.
San Francisco-based Joyent is building new datacenters in Europe and in the Asia Pacific. The datacenter in Europe should be up and running next month and the Asia Pacific facilities are slated to go online by May. Also, through a partnership with telecom provider Telefónica, Joyent is establishing a series of alliances to add further capacity around the world.
To support its global expansion and build on its offerings and go-to-market efforts in North America, Joyent last week received a healthy investment of $85 million from Weather Investment II and Telefónica Digital, which join existing investors El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital and Liberty Global.
"With investments in the public cloud expansion and seeing this compute network come together with large service providers, starting with Telefónica, our expectation is by the end of 2012 there's going to be a very large federated footprint of high quality of service, cloud services available and that will be across every continent in the world," said Joyent Cloud President Steve Tuck in an interview.
Tuck makes no bones that the Joyent cloud competes with Amazon Web Services and in fact points out that his company launched its infrastructure as a service in 2004 -- before Amazon started peddling its offering. While there are similarities between the two services -- for instance, both are API-driven services aimed at those looking to consume virtual compute -- Tuck argues that the Joyent offering is better suited for mission-critical apps.
"The difference is when you look at performance and availability," Tuck said. "The kinds of companies that you'll see running on Joyent's cloud services in North America are typically running production-class applications, things that are driving revenue, things that always have to be up. In fact a lot of our customers come from Amazon when they've hit a wall, in terms of scale, in terms of performance."
In addition to its global build-out, Tuck said Joyent is expanding its capacity in the United States, notably the addition of a datacenter in Ashburn, Va., which adds to its seven datacenters in North America.
Joyent is also known for its stewardship of the Node.js server-side, open source JavaScript development environment. Node.js got a boost from an unlikely supporter, Microsoft, which in December released a Node.js SDK for its Azure cloud service. Microsoft corporate VP Scott Guthrie demoed it last week at the Node Summit in San Francisco.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 01, 2012