September 15, 2011 — Joyent is pitching its Joyent Cloud as a faster, cheaper platform that will give customers more insight into their cloud-based operations than the incumbent leader Amazon.
The new-and-improved Joyent Cloud, announced Thursday, builds atop the company’s rethought SmartDataCenter 6 management technology and adds more business analytics to help corporate customers get a better handle on what’s actually going on in their cloud-based infrastructure. One criticism of Amazon is that its cloud services are something of a black box; the company doesn’t make it easy for customers to see what’s happening in its cloud. Many rely on third parties like RightScale for dashboard views into the inner workings of their EC2 operations.
Smaller cloud players like Joyent can compete well on those types of value-added services but have a long way to go to equal Amazon when it comes to sheer scale, said Carl Brooks, infrastructure analyst with Tier 1 Research, a division of The 451 Group. Read more
