Making the cloud more consumable for enterprises

With few reference points for enterprise cloud computing consumption, many new and interesting companies are popping up to make cloud resources available, with the aim of simplifying the processes.

3Tera's CEO Barry X. Lynn wrote a guest post on ZDNet that got me wondering about how software companies can leverage tools that make the cloud more consumable for users and, specifically, enterprises. Lynn takes the view that operations will be abstracted completely from data in the future, which affects both enterprises and the software that they run their businesses on.

While enterprises are growing comfortable with applications in clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones. They will start building the new applications in clouds and as they change existing applications, will consider migrating them to the cloud in the process. This will afford them the advantages of much faster time to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple data centers (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not data center operations. (They will leave that to the companies whose core business IS data center operations.)

I spoke to Barry about how 3Tera works and got a demo of the service. My overall impression is that this is a very powerful tool set that is way ahead of how people are utilizing cloud-based resources today. I'm just not sure that the approach is the right one for the masses.

3Tera's Applogic allows you to abstract the hardware from the software and adds a management layer. Anything that can run in a physical data center can run in an Applogic cloud without having to change any code.

Applogic encapsulates all the virtual resources as "applications"--OS, apps, servers, etc., and let's you superimpose the combined components as an image on a cloud or grid. Applogic will then consume the appropriate the resources from the underlying hardware and software.

Applogic provides a browser-based Visio-like UI that lets you create these "applications" by dragging in resources that create a definition file that describe the overall package. You don't need to know anything about the infrastructure that an application or service is running on; you just need to define the level of resource availability and service level required.

All of that makes a lot of sense, providing a virtualized infrastructure with the software and hardware running separately but creating a complete environment.

The question in my mind is if this "virtualized layer" is what enterprises want. The other question is if cloud consumers will be interested in this type of Visio-like approach or will they just want to "mount" cloud resources that are managed from behind the firewall.

Of course, the biggest question is if the cloud is anything more than "mainframe in a browser."

[lmasanti]

quote:
"The question in my mind is if this "virtualized layer" is what that enterprises want."

If some kind of [] virtualization can spread resource usage among the cloud providers (Amazon, Google, etc.) maybe it turns to be the answer to the cloud: develop once, run anywhere.
An interesting thought would be to be able to back-up or disaster-support in another cloud provider.

[BarryXL]

Imasanti:

Thank you for your interest. Your ideas are clever and I am guessing you see things much as we do at 3tera.

AppLogic is not a virtualized layer, but a meta OS that sits on top of a grid of commodity servers. The applications sit on top of AppLogic. Of course virtualization is used as a tool. Components of applications most often consume less than a whole server, ergo the need for virtual machines. So, there is a hypervisor embedded in AppLogic among its dozens of services.

AppLogic is designed to be completely non-proprietary. Any application component that runs in a physical data center will run, unchanged, in a 3tera AppLogic Cloud. And, those Applications can include services from other Clouds.

AppLogic encapsulates entire apps that can be managed like files - copied, stored, restored, moved and migrated to other Clouds using just a single command. And with 3tera's Disaster Recovery Suite, DR becomes a simple drag and drop operation.

Check us out at http://www.3tera.com

Barry X Lynn
Chairman and CEO
3tera, Inc.

[BarryXL]

Dave:

Thanks for the thoughtful rendition of our conversation. If I may, I'll make two comments.

First, you question 3tera's AppLogic suitability for the masses. If asked is it suitable, I'd say "yes and no", depending upon your pov. Remember, unlike prominent Cloud providers (service providers) such as AWS EC2, Google AppEngine, etc., we are a software company (not a service provider). Our software, per se, is not designed for the masses. It is designed to be a Cloud provider's platform. So, we enable Cloud Computing for the masses. As such, whether the Cloud is provided by one of our customers or by us in concert with our partners, that Cloud is certainly suitable for the masses as well as enterprises and anything in between. The masses do not license our software. They do though subscribe to Cloud services offered by our customers, or sold by us that are hosted by our partners. Those solutions are most suitable. Of course, our software can be licensed by any concern with its own data center to be run internally behind its firewall. But that is not typical of the masses.

Finally, I enjoyed your '"Of course, the biggest question is if the cloud is anything more than "mainframe in a browser."' I think, though, AppLogic is better described as "data center in a browser".

Thanks again.

Barry X Lynn
Chairman and CEO
3tera, Inc.