This visually appealing utility computing system gets another feature boost.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 6, 2008]

If you've been to the booth of Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based grid software provider 3Tera, what you'll remember most is the GUI of its AppLogic software. Simply drag and drop connections between servers to build your application.

For example, the AppLogic documentation shows how to build a shared file storage application (see image at right).

The documentation reads:

Figure 3 shows shared file storage implemented as a structure of appliances. The structure consists of two application servers, app1 and app2 which are instances of the same class APP, and a network attached storage (NAS) appliance nas1 of class NAS. The outputs of both application servers are connected to the cifs input of the nas1 box. The NAS appliance is configured with a suitably large volume, sufficient to meet the storage needs of app1 and app2. Each appliance is configured with additional properties and attributes as needed.

AppLogic makes it easy to describe arbitrarily complex structures of virtual appliances in a uniform way by capturing the set of instances that participate in them, the configuration parameters for each instance and the connections between their terminals.

3Tera sells through channel partners and direct to end users, but "we're not trying to build our own data center," says Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales and product management at 3Tera.

"Our goal is to help hosting providers offer a cloud utility on their own. This benefits us and gives users the choice they crave. Users are not stuck with any one partner. If they have an issue with provider A, they can move to B, C, D, or E. Or if partner A does not have a presence in Europe, they can go to Europe with G and still have a presence with A."

For users, the AppLogic GUI is so powerful that the infrastructure, Armijo says, becomes self-documenting.

Version 2.2
AppLogic 2.2 now fully supports 64 bit appliances, including the ability to mix and match 64 bit and 32 bit appliances.

Another key upgrade is the addition of basic monitoring to AppLogic. "Now, providers don't need a secondary monitoring app," says Armijo.

The software now supports a larger grid than any provider should need. "Our benchmark is a grid of 112 nodes, with almost 500 processors, and 50 TB of storage," he says. "It has close to 1 TB of memory."

The key isn't the maximum size of an application running on the software. The message is this: "you can scale to that size, but you can get started for a few hundred dollars per month."

User profiles
This sort of application, scalable, and starting at a very small size, appeals to specific categories of business. Obviously, Web 2.0 and SaaS providers are customers. Some customers are enterprises that want to test out applications before deploying.

"A fairly new category of customer," Armijo says, "is system integrators. They are using AppLogic to meet customer demand. Some are using it for development and QA, others to avoid locking the customer into any one data center."

For integrators, AppLogic can speed up the workflow, he says. "Maybe the customer won't give the integrator access to hardware until the contract is signed. Then, it takes time for the customer to set up the hardware. That's a long cycle. With AppLogic, the integrator can put the infrastructure together on minimal, hosted resources so that when the contract is signed, the integrator can provide a beta immediately. The integrator gets the money faster. Time to money is the life blood of the system integrator."

Hosting providers, of course, are customers. Many enterprises host their own servers, Armijo says, in part because a dedicated server is expensive. AppLogic allows webhosts to host applications at a fraction of the price of a dedicated server.

Once an application is defined in AppLogic, it can be copied easily.

Also, customers can see what's going on. "That's the difference between cloud computing and utility computing," says Armijo. "In the cloud, users look for freedom, they do not want to deal with infrastructure, they do not want to manage and control servers. Utility computing is all about control. It's used mostly by IT people who have a healthy paranoia (gained from harsh experience) or control freaks when it comes to the infrastructure their application is running on, who want to build it themselves and know where everything is at all times."

Pricing and availability
AppLogic is available now from 3Tera. Pricing is based on resources used. Specific pricing was not disclosed.

"The goal with our hosting partners is to match our revenue to theirs," says Armijo. "We can do this because we're not funded by venture capitalists. If we were, there would be a big push for revenue up front, but we don't do that."

One way to help is to not price support per phone call. "For the first few months, they can call support whenever they need it," says Armijo. "We want to make sure that when they roll out AppLogic, the user experience is positive."

Coming next: AppLogic 2.3, which goes into beta at the end of this month (AppLogic 2.2 went into beta in October, 2007).

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