Joyent

More Thumper, More Beer, And Everything is Clear

Jason and I were down at Sun yesterday taking delivery of another Sun X4500 (aka “Thumper”). Here’s a picture of us with Bill Moore and Jeff Bonwick of Sun. This is part of the extraordinary Try and Buy program at Sun (though the picture looks more like “Wheel and Steal”). We encourage you to take advantage of Try and Buy to get a taste of the great products Sun is producing.

Utility computing for web applications solves many problems for customers especially when it can be purchased as a service on-demand. By the way, this isn’t the Sun Grid (a product targeted at batch computing rather than interactive web applications). When someone wants to stand-up a web application, the options can be daunting. How does one buy enough resources for today and the future?

Allow me to illustrate with some pictures of the beers we had to celebrate the arrival of Joyent’s newest Thumper.

Your web application has budget for this (a one liter beer):

Trouble is you have a pretty good idea you’re going to need something more like this:

Unfortunately, you can’t afford the 3 liter boot of beer (until your business grows). Wouldn’t it be nice if you could share?

Joyent offers very affordable ways for our customers to experience Sun products without having to worry about purchasing the whole server, data center infrastructure, bandwidth commits, service contracts. For applications, Joyent (through TextDrive) provides Containers (a slice of an OpenSolaris server with defined upper and lower limits for CPU, RAM, Bandwidth, Storage) on high-end Sun X4100s (AMD Opteron) and T1000s (Sun UltraSparc). Containers allow Joyent customers to grow organically rather than making bets on server hardware and bandwidth commits. Joyent Containers have persistent storage, a single IP address, and don’t require uploading machine images. A Joyent Container works just like a you would expect a dedicated server to work. And Joyent Containers will be getting even more interesting in the coming months as we provide more utility computing for web-delivered applications.

Joyent believes in the same utility model for storage. A fully-loaded Sun X4500 (48 500gb drives) retails for $69,995.00. Even with discounting, this is a significant investment for a small business or application shop. Joyent believes customers should be able to buy storage accessible over the Internet that approaches the cost of storage one might buy at the local computer store. If this storage is on a Sun X4500, the reliability of the storage is enhanced tremendously. And if the protocol for managing that storage is dead simple and widely used already, well, that would be very nice.

I’ll drink to that!