Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Joyent rolled out the Manta Storage Service, a cloud object store and data services platform that combines compute and analytics capabilities directly to customers’ data stored in the cloud. The service is managed utility compute in-place on unstructured data.

By removing the need to manage infrastructure and move data, the service speeds up processing of big data and lowers the cost of such processing, the provider said in a statement. The compute tasks include log analysis, search index generation, financial analysis and many other data-intensive tasks that normally require data movement or setup of separate compute clusters and processing software.

The service brings code in parallel to physical servers in secure containers while data is automatically merged using the industry-standard Map/Reduce pattern.

Konstantin Gredeskoul, CTO of Wanelo, an early adopter of the service, said Manta makes ad-hoc querying and analysis quick and cost effective. “We are now able to perform complex cohort analysis and retention reports across hundreds of gigabytes of data in a couple of minutes,” he said.

“When compared to traditional methods such as data warehousing, this is game changing.”

Joyent has partnered with data storage management company Panzura to help customers move large volumes of unstructured data into the Manta from both cloud and on-premise storage systems.

Here's a list of promises Joyent's Manta Storage service makes:

- A multi-data center object store with fine-grained replication controls

- No object size limits

- Strongly consistent writes and highly available reads

- Per-object replication policies