Joyent and Nexenta Partnering

Joyent and Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced a strategic partnership that provides service providers with an end-to-end cloud services and storage solution that is unattainable by Amazon and other legacy cloud providers.

The solution includes a cloud software  which requires lower infrastructure investment thanks to higher hardware utilization rates, faster performance, and cloud analytics that give visibility into the software stack and stored data, and an efficient cloud storage, which runs on industry standard hardware and reduces storage costs.

With the partnership agreement, Joyent’s SmartDataCenter 6, an integrated suite of software and services, and Nexenta’s NexentaStor, an open storage solution that provides enterprise grade features like de-duplication, thin-provisioning, compression, unlimited scalability, inherent virtualization and data protection, come together to deliver an offering to Service Providers. By supporting open APIs, multi-tenancy and operational efficiency combined with the economics of industry standard commodity hardware, the Joyent/Nexenta solution is  for Service Providers to build and launch public, private and hybrid clouds.

Unlike other cloud software providers who employ inefficient hardware virtualization, SmartDataCenter 6 uses lightweight operating system virtualization, delivering as much as 70% higher utilization rates – hence decreasing Service Providers’ costs and increasing profit margins. Joyent’s cloud architecture also leads to performance: Recent benchmarks comparing Joyent and Amazon EC2 show that Joyent outperformed Amazon EC2 in CPU, Disc I/O and Memory I/O by as much as 14X.

SmartDataCenter 6 includes cloud analytics that give real-time visibility throughout the software stack and stored data into latency or other problems that can be addressed before downtime or outages occur. This transparency helps Service Providers avoid unnecessary equipment purchases to accommodate unexpected outages.

Service Providers’ clients demand scalable architecture that supports highly variable workloads and users – characteristics typical of next-generation web applications. SmartDataCenter 6 includes Node.js, a development environment and runtime that handles data-intensive real time applications found in social media, gaming, mobile applications, and machine to machine computing markets.

NexentaStor, which leverages the open source ZFS file system, is a supported commercial software package that runs on industry standard x86 servers and provides NAS and SAN capabilities including support for CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fiber Channel storage access. NexentaStor customers typically experience 75% or greater cost savings versus proprietary solutions as well as increased efficiency through compression, thin provisioning, de-duplication and industry leading usage of hybrid storage pools that leverage SSDs plus disks to provide price/performance especially of the random work loads of virtualized and cloud environments. NexentaStor also offers other capabilities for cloud deployments including Rest-APIs, boot from SAN, self-cloning from master configurations, high availability, synchronous and asynchronous replication and airtight end-to-end data integrity with the ability to find and detect silent data corruption.

"Service Providers around the world have an opportunity to profitably compete against Amazon Web Services with this combination of cloud software and storage that is inherently more cost-effective, scalable and performant than any other cloud offering in the market," said David Young, CEO of Joyent. "Any Service Provider who tries to compete with Amazon using the same legacy cloud technology Amazon uses is setting up for failure. Differentiation with a proven, robust solution is the only way to win."

"Service Providers like KT (Korea Telecom) understand that they need breakthrough innovation and end to end visibility to succeed in providing cloud services and storage to their customers," said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. "Service Providers around the world can learn from KT’s example and adopt a combined cloud software and storage solution that will make them competitive and successful as they grow their cloud businesses."