To be succesful in any endeavor you have to have the right tools. That old adage remains true whether you’re building a house, flying a plane, taking a picture, writing code or running a data center. For those in the latter catagory, though, cloud computing has changed the landscape. We’ve come to depend upon vendors and applications that form standard building blocks of our infrastructure, from firewalls to web servers. AppLogic was written with this in mind, of course, which is why we built our cloud without introducing new APIs for networking and storage, so you could use a broader set of apps. Now, however, we’re going to take it a step further.

3tera today announced AppStore, the next step in our Cloudware architecture announced last year. AppStore  will extend the AppLogic appliance catalog, opening it up to ISVs who want to publish their own appliances.  When fully operational in Q3, AppStore will appear as a standard part of your AppLogic catalog, always up to date with links to support and documentation for each appliance. You’ll be able to drag and drop any appliance into your applications and AppLogic will fetch it for you from the AppStore, and automatically let the publisher know about you so you can get updates and support.

For ISVs this AppStore presents new markets for their applications in cloud computing. For users, whether they’re using AppLogic in a public cloud through one of our data center partners or in a private cloud, AppStore will provide access to cutting edge tools from trusted vendors.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. When we announced the SLA for our VPDC a few weeks ago we got great reviews for pushing the envelope and standing up to enterprise grade availability requirements, but even those writing the best reviews wanted to see the details. Well the lawyers are done, and here’s the nitty gritty detail. We’ve worked hard to keep it understandable and predictable, so users know exactly where they stand.

3Tera AppLogic VPDC Service Level Agreement (SLA)

VPDC Availability Goal

3Tera’s goal is to make each Virtual Private Data Center (”VPDC”) that you obtain from 3Tera Available 100% of the time.

Availability Measurement and Remedies

If, as a result of any Covered Event(s), a Covered VPDC is not Available at least 99.999% of the time in any full calendar month, 3Tera will issue a credit to your account. If the affected VPDC was Available at least 99.9% of that month, the credit will be 10% of the Service Fee for that VPDC for that month; otherwise it will be 25% of that fee.

3Tera will monitor the availability of each VPDC, and will automatically issue any credit that is due. In addition, you may report an instance of unavailability to 3Tera, via our helpdesk, within 30 days of the date it occurred, providing the date and approximate time period of the unavailability.
Definitions

“Service Fee”: the monthly (recurring) fee paid to 3Tera for the affected VPDC. “Service Fee” does not include the fee for any other VPDC, or for support or any other services.

“Available”: a Covered VPDC is deemed Available during any period in which its VPDC controller is able to serve network requests, as indicated by 3Tera’s monitoring system or the VPDC’s system log.

“Covered VPDC” means a VPDC that, throughout the relevant month, was: (i) covered by 3Tera’s Assured Success Plan; and (ii) running only on servers located in the United States.

“Covered VPDC” does not include: (a) a single-server VPDC (”development grid”) or (b) a VPDC that, at the time it became not Available, was not running in a configuration then recommended by 3Tera.

“Covered Event”: any action, inaction, event, cause or circumstance other than the following: (i) an act or omission of you or your customer, or of any other third party not under the control of 3Tera or the Data Center; (ii) equipment, applications or systems not owned or controlled by, or services not provided by, 3Tera or the Data Center; (iii) an act of God, war, civil unrest, flood or fire; power outage lasting longer than 12 hours; internet outage, congestion or denial of service attack; or any other cause beyond the reasonable control of 3Tera or the Data Center; (iv) scheduled maintenance (including upgrades) of hardware or software, including AppLogic; (v) unscheduled maintenance required to install an urgent security update; (vi) suspension of your account or VPDC (e.g., for non-payment) or (vii) unavailability of any of your Applications or Appliances, even if occurring after an instance of unavailability of the VPDC.

“Data Center” means a person or entity, selected by 3Tera, that provides server hosting, internet connectivity and other services in connection with the affected VPDC.

Additional Terms and Conditions

1. Each credit will be issued to your account within 30 days of the end of the month for which the credit is due. Cash refunds are not available.

2. For you to be eligible for a credit, your account must be in good standing from the first day of the month for which the credit is due, until the date the credit is issued. For example, you may not have any past due invoices, or otherwise have breached any applicable EULA or Terms of Service.

3. This document states 3Tera’s sole liability and your entire remedy for any failure to meet the VPDC Availability Goal and any VPDC downtime or unavailability.

4. 3Tera reserves the right to revise or terminate this Service Level Agreement upon 60 days notice.

(SLA rev. 1-2009-03-30)

Late last week we became aware of a group of vendors promoting an Open Cloud Manifesto from a Microsoft blog post. A great deal has already been written about the manifesto and a bit of controversy it created on ZDnet, eweek, cnet, Silicon Alley Insider, and others.

The manifesto attempts to broadly define cloud computing, the issues it can create for users, and a list of principles the supporters suggest cloud vendors should adhere to:

1. Cloud providers must work together to ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards.

2. Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limiting (sic) their choice of providers.

3. Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them.

4. When new standards (or adjustments to existing standards) are needed, we must be judicious and pragmatic to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it.

5. Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be tested or verified against real customer requirements.

6. Cloud-computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap.

In the end, the manifesto simply puts in words the guiding principles 3tera has held to for the past three and a half years. We’ve embraced numerous existing standards, used open source where possible, introduced no new APIs, worked with existing management systems, ensured data portability, made sure users have a choice of providers across the globe, posted all our docs and specs online from day one, and when invited we’ve participated in interoperability discussions. We’re pleased these values are being embraced.

However, the manifesto is not without issue. First, the major cloud service providers weren’t participants in it’s creation, which raises questions about it’s viability. Second, as pointed out in the Microsoft post, acceptance is required “as is” with no acceptance of feedback. Third, it’s unclear exactly who controls the manifesto, what it’s future is, and whether there’s a process for participation in moving it forward. For these reasons, we’re holding off on endorsing the manifesto at this time.

3tera is fully committed to open cloud computing not just in principle, but in deeds. When there’s a truly open effort to define interoperability, application and data portability, and cross-cloud integration we’ll be a full participant.

What a difference a few years can make. When we launched AppLogic and described how IT could use resources outside their own data centers to run their apps, many folks were initially very skeptical. Although Nicholoas Carr had written and spoken about this for a couple years already at that point, more than a few told us we were nuts. Our ideas on packaging operating systems into appliances was even more controversial at times, prompting some heated blog posts. It all reminded me of the old quote “If (your idea) is original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

Of course, today cloud computing has become one of the hottest topics in technology, and the current economic climate is only accelerating that interest. As IT shops in companies large and small try to do more with less resources, they are looking to cloud computing for its flexible resource usage, low capital costs and ease of management.

Join 3tera and Forrester Research Principal Analyst James Staten for a free Webinar on March 4th as explore the new frontier of global cloud computing. Jame will discuss what he’s learned from enterprises that are looking to build their cloud strategy about their concerns and considerations. In addition, we’ll also demonstrate some capabilities of the global cloud live, incorporating both public cloud services and private clouds behind the corporate firewall.

Most purveyors of Cloud Computing claim that one of its great benefits is that it can turn capital expense into operational expense.  3tera’s AppLogic Cloud Computing Without Compromise, though, reduces all expenses, both CapEx and OpEx.

AppLogic encapsulates entire applications and everything those applications need to run – code, data, OS, middleware, DBMS, infrastructure, configuration, policies, etc. -  into a single, easy to manage entity that is abstracted from the hardware.  These encapsulated applications are “superimposed” on a server farm and dynamically allocate the resources they need to run.  Therefore, specific hardware is no longer assigned to specific functions – any idle hardware can be used by any active application.  Thus, hardware becomes much more densely populated, ergo, much less hardware is needed.  This results in greatly reduced CapEx.

As such, all servers in the farm can be commodity servers all configured the same way.  So there is no need for intensive server administration.  In most enterprises and at most data center operators, one administrator can manage approximately 50 servers.  With AppLogic, because the administrators are managing application instances each of which can consume any number – up to hundreds – of servers, the applications one administrator manages can be consuming hundreds of servers, thus, increasing administration efficiency by an order of magnitude.  This results in greatly reduced OpEx.

And, as great as this is, it is only icing on the cake.  The “cake” is this.  Because applications can be run on arrays of existing commodity servers, the time it normally takes to provision and configure hardware for specific applications is virtually, pardon the pun, eliminated.   Time to market is dramatically decreased creating huge revenue opportunity.

So, the next time someone proclaims, “You get what you pay for.”, tell them when you pay up for information technology infrastructure, you don’t have to pay more to get more.  With Cloud Computing Without Compromise, you get an awful lot for what you DON’T pay for!

This one’s been eating at me since September 17 at 10:09 AM.   That was when a speaker from Tier 1 Research concluded a presentation at the 4th Annual Hosting Transportation Summit (HTS) at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

HTS is a great event for anyone involved in the hosting industry.  It was attended this year by about 400 people representing everything that’s anything in the U.S. hosting industry.  Attendees, for the most part, have profit and loss responsibilities and were there to find new weapons for their arsenals to increase revenues.   I love these focused conferences.  Having them in Las Vegas is really smart.  That makes it easy to gauge attendees’ interest by seeing how much of the audiences at the various sessions are lost to the casino.  The sessions at HTS were well attended!

By contrast, that week was VM World, right across the street (which in Vegas means only a 15 minute stroll) at The Venetian.  VM World was impressive – close to 15,000 attendees, I am told.  My sense walking around there, though, was that the majority of the attendees were more technology oriented – looking for cool new technology – but were not the people in their organizations responsible for P&L, who make spending decisions, and, most importantly, who make strategic business decisions.

So, what happened at 10:09 AM Las Vegas time on 9/17?  I just finished watching and listening to a very well researched and prepared presentation by a Senior Analyst at Tier 1, who organizes the event.  He very thoroughly described how the Cloud people, the compute on demand people – people like Amazon and Google, were kicking the hosting providers’ butts as they remain a commodity whose ability to compete with these Cloud giants is starting to wane.

What he didn’t do, though (and this is no criticism of him – he did his job), was talk about what the hosting providers can and should do to combat this.

So, why now?  If it’s been eating at me 7 weeks, why am I writing about it now?

Well, for the last couple of months, enterprise interest in Cloud Computing seems to have emerged in spades (pardon the Las Vegas pun).  VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others have all made announcements readying themselves for enterprise Cloud Computing.  Our own marketing efforts have been focused around the enterprise as, though we are largely used by hosting providers and our customers are largely hosted, we have a full Cloud Computing platform that can run behind a corporate firewall, and our number of customers who do that, particularly enterprise customers, are definitely growing.

So, let’s not forget our hosting providers.  They are not only the salt of the Cloud, but they will be an integral part of Cloud Computing’s future.  In fact, as Clouds begin to interoperate globally, it will be the hosting providers who jump on that bandwagon who will fuel it with much of its resources.

Note to Hosting Providers:

If you are worried about how you are going to cope with this new competition, there is something you can do about it.  This advice might sound like an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality, but it is far from it.  The mentality is more of the nature that you should join a movement that they, too, will eventually have to join.

Whatever people think, there will not be a single dominant Cloud from any of these guys.  Cloud Computing, like any other utility, will evolve into a series of Clouds that can interoperate among themselves and are connected globally.  These interoperating Clouds will be run by hosting providers, will be proprietary Clouds like EC2, AppEngine, etc. and will be corporate data centers.

So, how does a hosting provider get on board?

Hosting providers need to implement Cloud Computing platforms in their data centers (of course, I think that platform needs to be 3tera’s AppLogic – plug, plug – surprise, surprise).  They need to build product offerings on these Cloud platforms.  Once there is a critical mass of applications hosted in all of these Clouds, the leaders will start interoperating with one another as people will want to share and reuse technology components, and, more importantly, companies will want to effect business to business transactions with companies running in other Clouds.

It will be inevitable that businesses running applications in proprietary Clouds will want to have the same capabilities, and in order to do so, their Clouds are going to have to start interoperating in the same ecosystem that yours do.

And guess what.  Many of the new enterprise customers we are attracting are and are wanting to run their web applications in external Clouds - HOSTED BY YOU.  So, there’s a whole new customer base here ripe for the picking.

So, hosting providers unite.  Get on board the Cloud train and in time, and not a real long time, the Amazons, Googles, Microsofts, Akamis, Salesforces, etc, of the world will have to join you or be beaten by you!

We’ve been so busy lately that time has become just a blur. When I went to post today, I found it’d been a month since the last blog entry. Ouch! Today, however, a recent article got me typing.

Recently, Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of Oracle, got a lot of press when he ranted that cloud computing is nothing more than a “fashion trend.” I can certainly understand the frustration he’s expressing. First the blogoshpere and later vendors started stretching the definition so they could label everything as cloud, draping themselves in the latest haute couture.

Having been in the infrastructure business for a couple decades, though, I’ve always found IT folks aren’t fashion conscious. They’re a pragmatic lot, and used to cutting through marketing noise. Anyone in IT for more than a couple years has lived through the hype cycle getting, and learned to dig through to what’s real. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that cio.com’s recent IT survey shows IT leaders find cloud computing promising and are putting it on their roadmaps in greater numbers. The survey suffers a bit from the broad definition of cloud computing, but there’s substance in there as well that makes it worth a read.

What should we make of this contradiction? Is cloud computing just a fashion trend? IMHO, vendors with real product can easily get caught up in the hype cycle. Trying to keep up with a barage of announcements as major companies rebrand old products and VC’s throw money at slide decks can easily distract you from the real issues. IT pros aren’t responding to the cio.com survey because it’s a fashion statement, they’re reacting because they have real needs that aren’t being met. They see cloud computing as a potential solution to those needs based on what they can discern from available products and services. At 3tera, as we work to deliver cloud computing, it’s useful to see that IT pros continue to seek technilogical leverage to solve real issues. It’s that fact we have to keep in mind going forward - rather than worry about the latest fashion trends.

Ken Fogarty, writing for CIO, comments on a panel on virtualization at MIT last week that included Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum.

“The good news is that virtualization will become a critical part of an even larger part of most IT infrastructures as time goes on.

“The bad news is that it will do so as part of a larger movement toward cloud computing and will, in large part, disappear as a separate discipline.”

This trend started a year ago and IMHO is new happening faster than most folks expected. Perhaps this explains why so many vendors seem to need to claim they are in the cloud computing space.

This week, something quite miraculous happened.  Those of us whose vision of the future is in the Clouds have seen our crystal balls start working.

Months ago, 3tera unveiled our Cloudware architecture.  But rather than try to convince the world that there is only a single architecture that works and ours is it, we emphasized that Cloud architectures need to be open.  Not only need they interoperate with all sorts of hardware and software as virtual appliances, they need to interoperate with other Clouds and Cloud components as well.

So, what happened this week?

The two undisputed leaders in virtualization, VMWare and Citrix/Xen announced suites of products in support of Cloud Computing, vCloud and Citrix Cloud Center (C3), respectively.  Undoubtedly, Microsoft and Red Hat and more will follow.

The anticipation that drove our Cloudware architecture is proving spot on.  There will be multiple global Clouds, they will not all be the same, and the ones that will get the brass rings will be the ones that interoperate rather than stand alone.  Cloudware is designed so that it will, in the not too distant future, have the ability to incorporate elements from any Cloud.

You will note that both VMWare and Citrix, in their Cloud announcements, emphasize the need for API-based interoperability among Clouds.  3tera agrees.  The development of this interoperability will make the vision easy to accomplish.

3tera intends to take this direction to the nth degree by not only enabling applications in one Cloud to interoperate with applications in others, but to enable elements from multiple Clouds to coexist in the same application.

There’s been a lot of music to our ears this week.  The huge install bases of VMWare and Citrix are becoming part of the eco-system that we have been participating in the definition of, designed for, been building for and support - the eco-system we’ve been predicting was coming.

So, if this is music to 3tera’s ears, it’s a multi-media extravaganza that should tickle all the senses of information technology users of any size   Combining a continued direction of open Cloud Computing where anything can operate in the Cloud with this new direction of interoperability among Clouds will leave all IT users at their own mercy.  Vendors will have less ability to manipulate and dictate what hardware you run your applications on, what operating systems you use, what software you deploy, what type of infrastructure components you rely on, what databases you use and where your applications run - and in how many places.  This will ALL be up to you and you’ll be able to change it all at YOUR will with just your little old browser.

A lot of people ask me - How are you going to get big enterprises to accept Cloud Computing?  How are you going to get over the concerns around security and privacy?

Well, as I said in an earlier post, many enterprises will be running Clouds behind their firewalls, in their own data centers.  But what about external Clouds?

Hmmmm.  Is Cloud Computing really just a trendy term?  Or are we onto something here?

When something is in a cloud, it is shrouded in secrecy.  You can’t see it.  You can only imagine what it is, if it is there at all.

At 3tera, we believe the optimal Cloud exists in multipal data centers, geographically dispersed.  This adds to the question, “What is in the Cloud?” another question sort of - “What Cloud is it in?”.

Lets imagine that all the clouds in the sky are somehow connected (at the molecular level, they most probably are).  Each of these Clouds are made up of millions upon millions of water droplets.  Now imagine if you had to find a single particular water droplet in the sky and you had no idea what cloud it was in.  Now, add to that, the ability of that water droplet to move from one cloud to another.  Do you think you could find it?

So, I maintain that concerns about Cloud Computing privacy and security become very overstated when dealing with Clouds in multiple locations.  In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that running stuff in those kind of Clouds is far more private and secure than running the same stuff in traditional data center environments.

Imagine a sophisiticated hacker who wants to attack the First National Bank.  Imagine that First National runs all of its applications in two data centers.  All the hacker needs to do is penetrate one or both of those data centers.  Once inside, he can monitor First National’s transactions indefinitely and methodically plot what type of transactions to spuriously submit and when to submit them.

Now imagine if First National’s applications run in multiple data centers worldwide, and each application did not necessarily always run in the same data center.  What would the hacker do?  I suppose he might accept that challenge, but if he was really out to get a bank, he’d move on to Second National.

You know, statistically, homes with burglar alarms get robbed much less often than homes without them.  Of course this is due to the fact they they are more secure.  But it is also due to the fact that a burglar will look for an easier target and not even try.

The same is true for Cloud Computing, if the Cloud is done right.  At 3tera, we like to say that Cloud Computing is not a substitute for good architecture.  But if the Cloud is architected like the sky - multiple sub-clouds interconnected, that IS good architecture.  “Sky Computing” is private and secure!!!

Finally, there’s a practical side to all this.

External Clouds will be operated by companies whose business is data center operations, not companies whose business is financial services, pharma, health care, manufacturing, etc.  These companies, to remain competitive, will constantly update their data centers with the latest technologies.  These technologies assuredly include those that keep data private and secure.

So, to all of you early adopters of Cloud Computing, I say, “Bravo!”.  By being brave you are achieving world class security and privacy for your precious information technology assets, without incurring huge data center capital expense.

Your applications and data can be naked sitting ducks, or moving targets in flak jackets.  The choice is yours.