Joyent, a provider of a sophisticated cloud infrastructure stack has secured $85m of investment to take it's Solaris SmartOS based SmartDataCenter product global, putting it in direct competition with the likes of Amazon EC2.

Joyent was founded in 2004 by CEO, David Young and CTO, Jason Hoffman and offers SmartDataCenter, a product that can be used to build private clouds and a public cloud derivative called JoyentCloud.com which boasts LinkedIn and Context Optional among the client base.

Joyent recently announced a port of the Red Hat controlled KVM hypervisor to, expanding it's capabilities to support Unix, Windows and Linux operating systems, as well as an object storage service and Node.js JavaScript accelerator, an optimised release of Google's client-side V8 JavaScript environment.

David Young explained "Having worked with customers around the world, we see the demand for consistent global services regardless of how many countries our customers are operating in," He added,  "This funding will enable Joyent to build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients."

Joyent provides it's services from five data centres throughout the United States and says it will use the investment to expand service in to a global network of public clouds.

For the full story on 'The Register' follow this link: Joyent rakes in $85m to build out SmartOS clouds