Joyent CTO, Jason Hoffman recently announced the company’s recent plans, which included the move for an open-source for its cloud-based OS. They call it the SmartOS; it is now currently being used for Joyent’s public cloud platform and SmartDataCenter‘s private cloud platform. The SmartOS will be launched very soon as an open-source system like the Joyent-led Node.js.  According to Hoffman SmartOS is the only modern OS because it took a decade to finally complete it.

Joyent is the least concerned now of what other cloud-based offerings think. The company has finalized their decision to use SmartOS in helping their cloud-based customers, which includes telecommunication firms. According to them they find it more secure and efficient because of their container model.

Recently, Joyent is the only vendor that offers both virtualization platforms in both the public and private cloud using the same operating system. Enterprises and developers can utilize hardware virtualization using KVM if there are OS limitations and operating system-level virtualization if language runtime is very vital, which is a lot similar with SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service). With Joyent and SmartOS, IT solution companies can host more users using a single server without compromising efficiency and revenue potential.

Hoffman says it is their commitment to offer for the web community the best services to make the world a better place. Offering Joyent as open-sourced OS is good; anyone can in fact license it if it is their option.

SmartOS is basically an open-sourced OS for servers that works similarly like Windows or RHEL from Red Hat and VMWare’s ESX. Their package includes KVM Hypervisor, DTrace and ZFS file system.

Joyent emphasizes that the reason for this move is because they are thinking in terms of web applications and servers. The company is moving towards this direction because of the following trends:

• Network enhancement architecture within the data center – ZFS will allow connection between data centers and a variety of data storages within their server. SmartOS will work as a useful commodity that will make the fine line between data storages and data centers even thinner.
• Allocated compute nodes – DTrace works with sys admin concerning cloud architecture using SmartOS; any issues will be traced and solved quickly making nodes build out distributed efficiently.
• Ascent of rooted devices – SmartOS requires only 128 MB of RAM making it very much compatible for use in smaller devices, which is useful for both high level data center enterprises and  low level digital signs and sensors.
• Acceptance of virtualization platforms – SmartOS’ KVM feature will allow small silicon chips to run faster and more efficiently, unlike other hypervisors that need to use their second or third generation versions to run them.

SmartOS is also taking advantage of the situation with VMWare that got their users upset when the latter changed their VSphere licensing option. SmartOS may gain popularity because of this issue.