What People Are Saying About Manta

By now you’ve learned what the Manta storage system is, and a bit about how to use it. Now check out the response this first-of-its-kind product is getting from our engineers, other industry folk, the media and of course, the Twitterverse.

Inside Perspectives From Our Engineers

No one knows Manta better than the engineers who created it. Bryan Cantrill, Mark Cavage and fellow Joyent engineers have been building Manta for over a year, and now, they’re finally able to publicly discuss the capabilities it houses. In case you’re wondering how the idea for Manta came about, Bryan has the full story in his blog post, “Manta: From Revelation to Product.” He reminds us that even though the idea behind Manta was “beautifully simple,” it wasn’t obvious.

He also tells the story of Manta’s journey from a casual IM conversation to the product’s release this past week. One of the first steps was getting Dave Pacheco on board to work on Manta computation, which Pacheco explains himself with an example of a non-trivial job in his blog post, Inside Manta: Distributing the Unix Shell.

Brendan Gregg, our lead performance engineer, dives a little deeper with a demonstration of how he’ll use Manta for storing and processing performance data. In “Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce” he starts with 40 Gbytes of trace data and uses Manta to compute the number of lines in his trace files.

Last but not least, Josh Clulow talks about building the component of Manta that allows you to run interactive jobs, mlogin(1).

Manta in Every Industry

Christopher Hogue, a computational biologist, explored the great potential Manta holds for data mining in the scientific community. In particular, he focuses on life sciences research and genomic computing in his blog post, “Computing on Storage - It's All About The Implementation.

At a broader level, Ben Kepes speculates that Manta will have a powerful effect on the the way organizations work by greatly reducing the cost of analysis. He believes that Manta is “a solution for Data’s Gravity.”

Manta in the Media

Of course we were excited to see some of the industry’s leading journalists covering Manta on the day of its launch. Alex Williams of TechCrunch wrote that, “The ramifications of the Manta service are considerable and make Joyent more relevant as an infrastructure and a services provider.” Brandon Butler noted that “Joyent engineers are no strangers to shaking up the cloud industry” in his Network World article “Taking aim at Amazon, Google, Joyent melds compute/storage services,” Thor Olavsrud elaborated on Manta’s capabilities in CIO: “Manta gives you the capability to execute compute tasks including log analysis, search index generation, financial analysis and other data-intensive tasks without moving data or setting up compute clusters and processing software.”

Meanwhile on Twitter

We were also thrilled to see plenty of informal coverage rolling in over the past few days in the form of tweets. It's been great to see that everyone else is as excited about Manta as we are. We’ve shared a few highlights below:



Post written by rachelbalik