The company says that its application technology platorm will now be able to combine applications from multiple data centers, creating services.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 30, 2008]

Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera announced that its eye-catching application building platform has gone through a major upgrade. The company calls its new platform an "infrastructure delivery network."

At the highest level, that means that the company can deliver remote backup on its technology platform, which is called AppLogic. In the past, AppLogic could not deliver remote backup because it could not co-ordinate applications in multiple data centers and also because of a relatively low-level feature added in AppLogic 2.3: the ability to monitor the state of an application and the number of instances of it that are running.

The open cloud
"What's new in cloud computing is the ability to leverage it for general purpose computing, and not have to write for a specific platform," says Bert Armijo, 3Tera senior vice president of sales, marketing, and product management. "As long as the application runs on Linux (and now Solaris too), we can move between data centers with a single command."

In addition, AppLogic users can now use other software too. Users like the LAMP stack and Zimbra but also like proprietary software. "We need to be able to let companies like F5 and Cisco and Checkpoint and IBM participate, without them paying fees."

To that end, Armijo says, the company plans to release the AppLogic technology to a standards body. "We're going to open this thing up," Armijo says. He says the company will ask to start a standards process at the next major open meeting, which tends to be every quarter. He may work with the IEEE, or might work with another standards body.

The goal is clear. Users, Armijo says, will be able to take advantage of the latest technologies, such as VMWare and Amazon EC2.

But won't there still be lock in with 3Tera? "Sure, in the sense that there's a difference between driving to work and getting out of your car and walking to work," Armijo says. "There's no physical lock in, but things are so easy to do in AppLogic that going back to the physical hardware is not an attractive option."

3Tera now takes care of things you'd have to write your own code for, he notes, such as finding that an instance of an application died. But AppLogic does not generate proprietary code, he says. It's all Ruby or Perl or Python or whatever. "The core code is transportable."

The role of the local ISP
To date, Armijo admits, most of 3Tera's customers have been large providers. But he says that's a natural consequence of the fact that so far, the platform has been adopted only by the "tech intelligentsia." He says that once the platform becomes more mainstream, local ISPs will have a role to play, delivering these services to small businesses.

On the other hand, the large data center operators will stay ahead of the game. "We have customers with DOD certified data centers," Armijo says. "It's the same with HIPAA and SAS 70. We're still a small company, and compliance testing would be very difficult for us. Our partnerships allow us to leverage the expertise of of specialists. Some of these data centers have very, very expensive security. They scan for EMF signatures. They have bomb sniffers."

Not every data center can have all that, and not every data center needs it.

The company has just demonstrated a basic service, disaster recovery, on its technology platform. It wants to deliver more services. It also has an ambitious plan to release its technology as a standard. Keep an eye on 3Tera.

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