Maureen O'Gara

Intel Virtualization Magazine

A piece of the $25 million investment pie Intel Capital sliced up and handed out recently to seven start-ups went to Joyent Inc, the California company that claims to have launched the first cloud infrastructure service in China a few weeks ago.

It's the first institutional money - and not much of it obviously - that the five-year-old self-funded company has taken - and it's profitable so theoretically it doesn't need it.

But its CEO David Young figures it could "benefit from immensely increased scale," since Joyent "plans to take cloud computing to a place where our competitors, built on virtualization foundations such as VMWare ESX, Microsoft HyperV, XEN, KVM, won't be able to go."

Joyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It's supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages according to Gartner.

Its widgetry includes cloud management, a dynamic software development platform that auto-scales and now embraces IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

It says MySQL runs three times faster and Wordpress handles 20 times more requests per second on Joyent than on Amazon's EC2.

Intel's money will go into product development and sales and marketing.