Joyent Brings Its Public Cloud To Europe

Joyent is introducing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Europe, taking it into competition with big cloud hitters like Amazon and Rackspace.

Joyent Cloud Europe will provide compute services out of its Amsterdam-based data centre, running it over the company’s proprietary cloud infrastructure platform SmartDataCenter, which is seen by the company as its key differentiator.

Uptime guarantees

Helping run the SmartDataCenter is SmartOS, which Joyent claims provides tough security and uses Node.js, the server-side Javascript language that “is making machine-to-machine and big data computing more efficient than ever before”. SmartOS is based on the open source operating system Illumos.

Customers can take the software that powers the Joyent public cloud to their own data centres. For hybrid cloud users, this means for much-needed consistency between data centres, Joyent believes.

Joyent’s general manager for cloud, Steve Tuck, told TechWeekEurope the company has only ever seen 11 seconds unplanned downtime and its service level agreements (SLAs) promise to deliver 100 percent uptime.

“One important thing for companies to look at is, as they are evaluating providers, that they get statistics on availability,” Tuck said. “We’ve got the only full copy-on-write file system in the cloud with ZFS [Z file system]. ZFS is a well-documented file system out of Sun that ensures that everything is on a write it is copied, that means you can’t lose data. In the cloud world, losing data is one of the fundamental sins.

“Now we’ve got data centres on the east and west coasts of the US, central Europe, Japan and Singapore, it’ll give people a much bigger footprint for where they deploy.”

For those worried about having a data centre on their own shores, Joyent is planning to work with telecoms providers in the UK to provide services within those ISPs. This would give greater guarantees around latency and should allay some fears over data transfer, Joyent believes.

As for what’s in the company’s data centres, Dell boxes are used to power the infrastructure. “Our model is very large compute nodes that almost resemble a storage appliance from five years ago. There’s huge volumes of DRAM, lots of CPU, 24 cores and then lots of spindles. So it’s a very high-performance server,” Tuck said. “We serve all production data locally for performance reasons. So it’s not an architecture with a SAN [storage area network] behind it purposefully. We use shared NFS [network file system] storage for Tier 2 data.”

The vendor believes its infrastructure is ideal for providing the compute required for applications where people need real-time updates. “A lot of platforms are moving to Joyent because they really need an enterprise-robust infrastructure underneath so they can deliver the SLAs and quality of service to their customers,” Tuck added.

The company is also planning to open data centres in Singapore and Tokyo in the next 90 days.

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