joyent

Intel an investor in storage firm for Apple users

Intel Capital announced seven new investments Tuesday, including a storage systems company for Apple users and a cloud computing company.

"Innovation does not stop during economic slowdowns," Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president, said in a statement. "New technologies are the drivers of growth that help lead economies back to prosperity."

Investments as spelled out by Intel:

Active Storage (Los Angeles) provides a media storage platform for Apple-based infrastructures. The company's hardware RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) solutions are aimed toward the business and creative industries, particularly video post-production, … Read more

Avoiding lock-in in the cloud

As the cloud continues to emerge as a serious option, many people are starting to catch on that there are limits to what can be done outside that particular platform.

Right now there only a few options if you are a cloud or PaaS provider: 1. Cordon off virtual machines and use VM images (like Amazon.com or Joyent) 2. Allow development on some programming language (like Google App Engine) 3. Force users onto your platform (like Salesforce.com)

The applications that are built on top of a particular vendor's infrastructure are locked into that provider's way of … Read more

Is Google's BigTable too private?

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the … Read more

Defining cloud computing

Ask a dozen people what "cloud computing" means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, "What is Cloud Computing ?"

Check out the responses in this video:

Bungee Labs extends its application hosting options

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more

Google App Engine: Cashing in on the user data

Google's announcement of its App Engine has naturally generated a lot of buzz, as well as some fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is the concern that Google will corral even more user data via its App Engine, becoming a kind of 21st century data and advertising baron, as Microsoft has been the operating system and productivity software baron in the last three decades.

If you extrapolate from Google's growing share of search and advertising, and include a growing share of Web applications through its APIs and the fledgling App Engine, you could imagine a Google that becomes the … Read more

Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service

On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.

Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy … Read more

The rush is on: Web apps are deserting the browser

I just got a preview of the new version of Joyent Connector, the slick work-group app I covered last year. The interface has been cleaned up a bit (not that it was bad to begin with), but the big news is that Joyent is announcing an offline version of its service. By the end of April, Joyent users will be able to get a downloadable client for the service that lets them access their work-group data even when their PC is disconnected.

Joyent's client app uses the company's new platform, which it calls Slingshot. This tool provides a … Read more