When I was out in the Bay Area for our launch a while back I stopped by Joyent‘s new headquarters (I actually visited them on their very first day in their new digs). I chatted with CTO Jason Hoffman about his background, what Joyent’s all about and what they are doing with Dell. Take a listen:
Some of the topics Jason tackles
- What Joyent does (hint: they provide virtual datacenters)
- Joyent customers: they range from the top facebook applications, on line media companies, movie, music and tv studios, online retailers…
- Your next computer is the data center — which needs operating environment, an open API and a good set of developer tools.
- How Jason got to where he is: via a Doctorate in pathology where he was an end consumer of compute. He realized that a lot of the efficiencies that they had developed in his field could be applied to a hosting environment.
- Dell as Joyent’s “private cloud arm:” Joyent software running on Dell’s hardware where Dell can come in and set up the entire environment enabling departments within companies to act as service providers within their organizations.
To put it in perspective…
And since we’re talking about Joyent and Dell and Joyent working together I thought I would include this excerpt from a post that Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady recently wrote about the private cloud:
At the present time, however, most of that which we call Platform-as-a-Service – the layer currently serving as middleware – is public cloud only. The PaaS fabrics tend to be proprietary and not available for private consumption. Salesforce.com, for example, doesn’t let you replicate Force.com on your servers. Ditto for Google App Engine. Microsoft Azure features may be trickling back into Windows, but you’re not going to be running Azure in your local datacenter. This is why Dell’s distribution of Joyent’s cloud software came as such a surprise to many; you just don’t see these fabrics being made available locally.
Extra-credit reading
- Survey Shows More Than Half of Dynamic Language Developers Are Looking To Build Cloud-based Applications in Next Year
Pau for now…