Australian infrastructure as a service provider Joviam is taking on the US market, with the cloud computing company switching on hardware in Equinix’s SV2 Silicon Valley data centre.
Joviam also offers services out of Equinix’s SY3 data centre in the Sydney suburb of Mascot.
Director and co-founder Gabby Jarrett said the company was preparing to launch third data centre in Melbourne before the end of the year, as well as eyeing future opportunities to expand into Europe and Asia.
Jarrett said Joviam has a focus on the SMB and mid-market.
“What we’ve done is we’ve taken the performance of enterprise grade tech and priced in such a way that makes it available to a wider market,” Jarrett said.
Jarrett said that a key difference between Joviam and a range of other cloud providers is its use of hyperconverged infrastructure and InfiniBand networking; a combination the company claims that can deliver significant performance benefits to the customers of its infrastructure as a service offering.
Joviam also emphasis the configurability of its IaaS offering and its support for ‘infrastructure as code’
“It all comes back to the flexibility and configurability of the platform,” Jarrett said. “We really wanted to make sure we are providing a clean slate — a really powerful, robust, highly configurable piece of infrastructure that the mid-market could utilise however they wanted to and be sure that they weren’t stung with some phenomenal fee at the end of each month.”
With the use of hyperconverged infrastructure, “horizontal scaling is easy, simple and fast and the InfiniBand networking fabric behind it is really where all the speed and performance comes from,” Jarrett said. “We’ve got performance benchmarks against other cloud players that show this to a great extent.”
The company’s “secret sauce” relies on a range of open source and proprietary software, including a customised Xen hypervisor, she said.
Joviam is preparing to launch GPU-focused instances and is also looking at offering a dedicated-hardware-as-a-service option.
Australian customers have already been launching instances in the new US data centre, Jarrett said. Prior to the SV2 launch the company already had customers from the US and a range of other countries, and they have also been taking advantage of the San Francisco infrastructure, she added.
“Australia’s a great test in a way — in that, especially in terms of cloud computing, it’s not an insignificant market but compared to the rest of the world it is obviously smaller. It was a great place for us to really gauge how the market felt, what our users were looking for, what they wanted and what was missing,” Jarrett said
“We really wanted to consolidate the platform and our user base before we looked offshore. We felt that we’d done that and we were quite happy with what we’d achieved here. Based on revenue levels as well as some other investment we decided to expand into the US essentially.”