Grid Provisioning for Service Providers

3Tera is demonstrating what amounts to a new OS or provisioning system that will allow service providers greater flexibility than ever in configuring and delivering applications.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 9, 2006]

It's the Friday before ISPCON and we're in a web-based Webex-hosted meeting with Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based 3Tera, a company that bills itself as providing a Grid Operating System for Web Applications.

The system is called AppLogic, and Bert Armijo, vice president of marketing, is showing ISP-Planet how it works.

White board your application
The interface looks like graph paper. It's meant to look like what the IT staff draws on the white board when planning an application. But the AppLogic software translates the images and the connections between them into an application running on one or more servers.

"AppLogic allows you to run existing applications, scale them, add and remove hardware dynamically, and all data is mirrored in storage," says Armijo. "It uses generic hardware—no SANs, no blade servers, no load balancers."

The user defines an application on the white board-like interface as, for example, a database, a mail server, a logging server, and draws the connections between them. The CRM app that Armijo is drawing up has 9 elements.

"So what's the difference between this and a high end provisioning system," we ask.

"Provisioning solutions operate on servers and software images in isolation," says Armijo. "They have no context for what constitutes an application for a service. AppLogic executes applications directly so users no longer have to manage individual software configuations. Because of this, a single command is all it takes to start, stop, import, export, backup, scale or migrate an entire application in AppLogic, even if that application runs on as many as a hundred servers."

The AppLogic structure (see image at right, click on it to view a larger image) allows service providers to use generic hardware in an on demand configuration. The system tracks each application, ensuring that it has the resources it needs, and keeps track of each piece of hardware, automatically discarding hardware that fails and adding new hardware to each application as needed.

In his demonstration, Armijo is defining the needs of each element of the CRM solution according to three key parameters: CPU usage (percent, from 0.01 to 1), bandwidth, and memory. In addition, he gives the elements of the application the IP addresses they need.

"So you need to know how the application works," we comment.

"To build it, you need to know how the application works," Armijo says, "but once you've defined the application structure, you can connect it to a portal, and automate it. We can teach people how to use this system in a 2 hour Webex tutoring session, and they'll have built their first application within a week."

There's far far more to this system, and Armijo showed us how the system allocated resources given the servers it had, but this brief article describes the basics.

See it in action
For anyone attending ISPCON, 3Tera has a demonstration of a key application, CPanel, running on its system. He says that the developers of CPanel are talking to 3Tera about how the company got CPanel to work on multiple CPUs.

This is just the beginning. "Right now, we're talking to you about what we've got, but soon, we'll be talking about the future. AppLogic makes a lot of new things possible," enthuses Armijo.

— End