Joyent Inc.

Online Infrastructure Provider Launches Hosted Storage Business with Low-Cost Combined Storage and Server Technology from Sun

Joyent provides applications, tools, and unique, on-demand services and hardware solutions over the Web to small to medium-size businesses, e-businesses and developers. In addition, Joyent offers customers the option of using its tools and packaged application along with disk storage without having to build their own infrastructure.

Customer Challenges

Develop low-cost, low-maintenance storage infrastructure on which to grow hosted storage business
Avoid training separate storage and server maintenance staffs
Minimize infrastructure complexity and data center footprint

Solution

To open the doors to a hosted storage business, Joyent chose the Sun Fire X4500 Server, a storage solution combined with massively powerful server capabilities—all in one box. The new Sun technology is designed to minimize space consumption while helping to make online storage affordable to clients.

Business Results

83%-86% reduction in cost of storage, from $6-$7 per gigabyte to $1 per gigabyte
80% reduction in server rackspace needed, from 20 units per EMC device to 4 for Sun
50% reduction in cost of power and cooling with combined server and storage in a single unit
80% reduction in TCO
Ability to combine server and storage maintenance by training staff on just one operating system

Products and Services

Story Details

Whether they’re focused on running a business, serving online customers or writing complex applications in Java, the customers of start-up Joyent Inc. can concentrate on their core competencies and priorities without having to invest in an IT infrastructure. From e-mail to Web hosting to storage, Joyent delivers the technology and packaged applications that enable its customers to provide value without being held back by maintenance or cost issues.

Making its services affordable is one of Joyent’s key goals. For instance, one of its most popular products, called Bingo, consists of a hosted 100 gigabytes of storage for $199 per year. To offer this product, Joyent needed a storage solution that would cost no more than $1 per gigabyte as opposed to the $6-$7 per gigabyte it was paying for EMC disk storage. In addition, Joyent wanted a storage infrastructure that would require minimum maintenance, and the company had to keep close watch of space consumption.

" There are a lot of outstanding features in the Sun Fire X4500 server, such as the absence of cables. The cabling is in the silicon. What also differentiate the Sun Fire X4500 are the types of drives it has and the way the vibration has been handled. It’s really a unique product you can only get from Sun. It’s just an amazing accomplishment in engineering. "

— David Young, CEO, Joyent Inc.

Impressed with Sun’s new technology for lowering costs and simplifying maintenance in the data center, Joyent chose Sun Fire X4500 server―a server and storage device all packaged together with four-way x64 processors and 24 terabytes of storage.

With Joyent’s three Sun Fire X4500 servers, customers can consolidate servers and get powerful processing capabilities along with storage while shrinking the footprint that both servers and storage typically require.

Since the founding of the company four years ago, Joyent has participated in the OpenSolaris storage community to serve its customers better by tapping the community's knowledge and engineering expertise. The company relies on one of the largest OpenSolaris installations in the world to provide a highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure for Web sites. “We've scaled clients up to over 1 billion page views a month using Joyent Accelerators built on ZFS, D-Trace and Containers in OpenSolaris,” says Rod Boothby, vice president of Platform Evangelism at Joyent. In addition, the company's OpenSolaris-based Cloud Computing solution, Strongspace, Bingodisk, SFTP integration in Connector and Accelerators were made possible and robust by the efforts of the Sun OpenSolaris storage community.

To run its customers’ applications cost-effectively, the company also decided on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers and Sun Fire X4100 servers, all running the Solaris Operating System. Read more about the difference Sun servers are making for Joyent’s customers.

The Sun Fire X4500 servers have given Joyent a hosted storage business at an affordable cost—$1 per gigabyte as opposed to $6-$7 per gigabyte for EMC. In addition, Joyent has reduced the footprint of its storage infrastructure reducing the rack space required by 80 percent, from 20 units per EMC device to 4 for Sun. With the Sun Fire X4500, Joyent has a piece of hardware that is vastly easier to maintain than traditional storage servers, with fewer moving parts to break. The high reliability of the Sun Fire X4500 servers helps reduce the total cost of storage ownership by 80 percent.

All told, the Sun solution is helping Joyent grow its business while keeping costs under control. And that’s a recipe for success for any start-up company.

Read more about the difference Sun servers are making for Joyent’s customers.