Yesterday 3tera announced alpha availability of a new concept in data center operations, Dynamic Appliances. Unlike traditional data center management systems that require months to deploy and staffs of system administrators to maintain, Dynamic Appliances allow you to easily embed data center operations directly into your applications, where the decision rules for operation are simplest to define and maintain.

So, what is a dynamic appliance? Simply put, a dynamic appliance is a packaged data center operation like backup, or migration that operate within your application. They work by leveraging AppLogic’s ability to package distributed applications into manageable entities. For instance, instead of containing large amounts of code to monitor application performance, the SLA dynamic appliance taps into AppLogic’s monitoring system to make operational decisions. Likewise, to effect change on the application, the dynamic appliance simply issues commands to AppLogic.

IMHO this breaks the last binding between an application and the data center. AppLogic users have been able to migrate entire applications, complete with data and infrastructure, between data centers for almost a year. Now, the application can take it’s operational definition with it as well.