Most cloud computing providers separate their storage and computing offerings, but Joyent is launching a new service called Manta that combines object storage and processing capabilities. The company says the offering is ideal for big data applications. “When you can operate on petabytes of data in situ, it’s more accurate to say that it made things possible that were economically impossible before,” explained Joyent’s Bryan Cantrill.
Manta has tiered pricing based on storage and bandwidth needs and charges .004 cents per GB of DRAM per second for computation. Cantrill says the costs are about equivalents with Amazon’s S3 storage, but that Manta offers better performance, particularly in big data use cases like transcoding images and finding patterns in log files.