With Manta Storage, Joyent Eyes Data Services

There's an old saying from Wayne Gretzky that great hockey players "skate to where the puck is going" rather than where it's been. Joyent believes the intersection of cloud computing and Big Data is where the puck is going. Towards that end, the company today rolled out Manta, a new object storage service that allows Joyent customers to bring together compute and data analysis on the same cloud infrastructure.

Joyent describes the new service as "the first true convergence of compute and data on the market . . . offering managed utility compute in-place on unstructured data." Manta allows for the execution of compute tasks such as log analysis, search index generation and financial analysis without any data movement or any setup of compute clusters or processing software. Code is brought in parallel to physical servers in secure containers, while data is automatically merged using the industry-standard Map/Reduce pattern.

Moving Up the Stack

CEO Jason Hoffman says Joyent and the Big Three infrastructure as a service (IaaS) players - Amazon, Google and Microsoft - have pretty much standardized on eight virtual machine instance types. That means the playing field must shift from pricing to services.

"I think the four of us have pretty much commoditized those instances," said Hoffman. "There is now a common sore of offerings. What we're now focusing on is how to add data services.  I suspect we are going to see IaaS moving up the stack toward managed data services. I think that's what the next 18 to 24 months will look like."

In introducing Manta, Joyent shared the experiences of early adopter customers who are using the new service to streamline their data analysis.

“Copying data across a network from storage onto a compute cluster can take hours," said Konstantin Gredeskoul, CTO of the online shopping community Wanelo (short for Want. Need. Love). "Joyent Manta Storage Service strips the need to invest any time moving the data around, making ad-hoc querying and analysis near-instantaneous, seamless and cost-effective. We are now able to perform complex cohort analysis and retention reports across hundreds of gigabytes of data in a couple of minutes. When compared to traditional methods such as data warehousing, this is game changing.”

“Fifty percent of the world's smartphone traffic goes through Ericsson and we are continuously evaluating new technologies to increase the ability of the network to manage growing data volumes in the most responsive, secure, cost effective ways possible,” said Vish Nandlall Ph.D, CTO & Head of Strategy and Marketing for Ericsson North America. “Joyent’s new compute-on-storage innovation is a fundamental paradigm shift that changes the economics and utility of object storage and high-performance big data analysis."

Additional features of Manta include:

Joyent has partnered with data storage management company Panzura to ensure enterprise customers to securely migrate data from existing NAS, backup and archive storage solutions to Manta.

“Joyent Manta Storage Service represents an exciting alternative for customers looking to offload and consolidate storage services to the cloud,” said Jim Thayer, vice president of channels and business development at Panzura.  “By combining the Joyent and Panzura platform and integrating with Dell hardware, enterprises can efficiently and quickly access and process unstructured data with lower cost and a streamlined infrastructure.”