VSM:Today, Virtual Strategy Magazine is interviewing Bert Armijo, the Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Product Management; and Barry X Lynn, Chairman and CEO, both of 3Tera.
Barry, can you tell us a little bit about 3Tera and its newest developments?
BL: 3Tera is a company that’s been around for about three-and-a-half years, but we were in stealth mode until the fall of 2006 when we announced our first product, AppLogic, which is a meta-operating system for Grid. Our mission is to provide the best platform for cloud computing and utility computing, and the most flexible and the most open platform. So, we introduced our first product, as I said, in the fall of ’06 and we started picking up a lot of momentum in ’07, and by the end of ’07, we had well in excess of a hundred customers and now we’re kind of on our way.
Our initial offering that we announced in 2006, was a grid operating system which was used as a utility computing platform by hosting providers who are providing virtual private data centers and also being used by early stage companies like SaaS companies and Web 2.0 companies who want to pay for information technology resources they consume, rather than making initial investments in IT infrastructure. We’ve also licensed, on a subscription basis, the product to several enterprises that pay for it on a month-to-month basis, based on the number of servers it’s deployed on. We’re evolving now from a utility platform, providing virtual private data centers to companies, to a full cloud environment, and recently we announced our Cloudware architecture, which we also refer to our cloud computing without compromise architecture, and this the first platform that truly is open cloud computing. There’s many cloud computing vendors out there, they’ve all done great things, or many of them have done great things; cloud computing is the fastest-growing technology out there, but what we see is that most of the cloud computing offerings out there are very specific in their architectures, so you can deploy your service in a cloud, as long as it conforms to this architecture that we’ve specified.
Our Cloudware offering is much more open and very agnostic as to vendor, whether you’re doing open source, whether you have open source components or not, whether you have Windows components, Linux components, Solaris components, whatever middleware you choose, database management systems you choose, we want to be able to say that you can deploy anything within a cloud, ultimately having vendors publishing their software into Cloudware-enabled clouds so people can use them.
VSM:Barry, you just mentioned Cloudware. Bert, let’s take it to you. You guys just recently announced Cloudware. Give us some more detail about what it is and what the advantages are to using it.
BA: As Barry mentioned, over the last two years, since we announced AppLogic, we’ve been able to demonstrate the ability to run and scale and manage applications using utility computing models, literally using resources that are hosted out in the cloud. What we decided to do with Cloudware, having demonstrated that ability now to actually open the system up and so, what we’re going to be doing over the next year-and-a-half or so is decomposing AppLogic into a set of component parts. So, right now AppLogic is a holistic system, it provides everything from the OS that runs on the server, through the control interface that the user uses, to the catalog of components that are available, and we’re going to start to split those into different pieces. So the execution engine will be one piece, the control interface will be another, the catalog will be a third piece, they systems management, the security, the metering and billing systems will be yet another component.
Then, we’re actually going to specify interfaces and open those up for public debate on how those components interact, so that if somebody wants to use a different execution engine instead of our AppLogic grid, they’ll be able to do so and still be able to actually run it through our control interface. If somebody wants to use their own control interface, they’ll be able to do that as well. And so, for instance, if somebody wanted to use EC2 as a back end, and still run it through AppLogic as a control interface, that would be supported by our architecture. The reason for doing this, as Barry mentioned, is that right now there’s whole lot of talk about cloud computing, and it’s a new and very vibrant space and there’s a lot of things happening and that makes it very exciting, but what we’re seeing right now is that a lot of the clouds out there are rather closed-off at the moment; you can use their resources, you can use some of their tools, but the ability for all third-parties to add their capabilities, their intellectual properties into those clouds is somewhat limited. So, what we wanted to do with AppLogic and Cloudware is to actually start opening that up, and, very much like the Internet grew from a very simple specification to incredible capabilities today because nobody was tied off, nobody planned how these things worked, we just opened the specs up and let people build. We want to do the same thing now in the cloud, and so since we’ve shown the ability to do some of these things, we think we’re a natural company to kind of throw out some of these interfaces and specification and let people start to see how these are built, and figure out how to add their capabilities.
VSM:So how does this cloud solution differ from 3Tera’s previous products and from the competitors within the market, Bert?
BA: Essentially, the cloud offering will be built on top of AppLogic. AppLogic, we feel, is the best utility computing platform in the world today, and so it will become a basis for Cloudware, the Cloudware will ride on top of it and will add additional capabilities in terms of users subscribing to the system more easily, other parties being able to publish their content, being able to actually add their billing information in and then collect money through the system. So, AppLogic will form a platform for Cloudware, but there will be much, much more developed on top of it.
In terms of how it differs from what other people are doing at the moment, I think the principle difference is that it’s going to be open. We’re going to publish all the specifications, and we’re actually going to allow people to attach their own unique capabilities into the system. There’s nothing that says that we have to be the company that’s running data centers or that is publishing catalogs, there are companies that are much better at that than we are. So, for instance, our partners like, Layered Technologies in Texas, 1-800-Hosting, Fortress ITX, already run large data centers, we don’t need to rack and stack servers. There’s people that are exceptionally good at that, exceptionally efficient and they already know how to run the security for the data centers. So, their ability to publish their resources would be a good way for them to participate in the cloud. Our partners like Nirvanix, who are offering storage services…right now that storage service is basically offered as a separate service, but with Cloudware, it will actually be able to be a part of the system and people will be able to adopt it use it much more easily and much more efficiently. I think it’s this capability of letting people add their unique IT, their unique capabilities into the cloud, that will really differentiate Cloudware from what’s going on in the rest of the industry.
VSM:You outline some great advantages to utilizing Cloudware. Are there any challenges that arise?
BA: Well, as with all technology shifts, there are challenges as things run a little bit differently sometimes. We have endeavored, as we developed AppLogic, to try to make it as similar to the way that traditional data centers run as possible. For instance, we offer persistent storage. We offer all of the usual components that you would expect from load balancers and VPNs, and NAS storage, all available within the utility environment. You can then create infrastructures just as you would in a traditional data center. That said, it is running someplace else, and so people have to get used to this ability to take advantage of resources that are not in their environment. We think it actually gives people a lot more power, but what we see is it usually takes a couple of weeks to a month or so for people to kind of adapt to the concepts and fully embrace them. Once that happens, then the real power of the system is available to them.
VSM:Barry, who should be looking at Cloudware as a solution?
BL: Well, you know I always kind of feel funny when I’m asked this question, and then have to answer honestly, as I always do, because to me it’s analogous to when you go into a restaurant and you say to the waiter, “So, what’s good today?” and they say, “Everything’s good.” And then you wonder if that’s really true, right? The reality is that everything’s good and everybody should look at it, right? Let me be more specific about that.
Before, when I was talking about our company, I was saying that we really differentiate ourselves by being a completely open platform and we allow any infrastructure into our platform, we don’t restrict you, we don’t restrict what middleware you use, what operating system you use, what database management systems you use, we just support it in a cloud environment. So, if you think about what a cloud environment is, it’s the ability to offer services on a pay-for-what-you-consume basis, right? So what that basically means, if you want to take the two extremes, the one-man developer shop or the SMB shop. Right now in order for them to build technology solutions for themselves, they’ve got to piece together some really cheap components because that’s what they can afford.
Well, if you’re now making world-class infrastructure available in a cloud to them where they only pay for what they consume, they now can afford world-class infrastructure instead of this cheap stuff that they have to settle for. Now, if you want to go all the way to the other extreme and talk about huge enterprises, these guys already have world-class infrastructure, but they are totally over provisioned. They have to make sure that they have enough infrastructure to deal with their highest peak volumes and then some. If they start running things in clouds, they maintain that world-class infrastructure and they also only pay for what they consume.
The analogy I often like to use is if we really want to think about cloud computing and utility computing the right way, think about electricity as a utility running in a cloud. Electricity is a service that runs in a cloud; the utility is all the generators and capacitors and things that make it up. When I plug in my toaster in the morning, I get 110 volts, 60 hertz, electricity, and when some big industrial plant plugs in in the morning, like General Motors or something, they get the same electricity I get. Yet, I pay less because I use less. Why shouldn’t this be true of computing today? Where it doesn’t really matter how big you are, you have access to the best, and you have access to the same infrastructure if you’re small, that the big guys have access to. The difference is that you only pay for what you consume so the small developer shops pay less because they consume less; the big developer shops pay more because they consume more, but everybody gets the same, the most state-of-the-art infrastructure. So, if you take that logic to the next step, it is hard not to say that everyone who is developing or deploying applications shouldn’t be looking at 3Tera’s cloud computing solution itself for some part of it.
VSM:Bert, how and when will 3Tera be delivering Cloudware?
BA: Cloudware will be delivered over the course of about 18 months. It’ll start with the release of our 2.3 AppLogic system this month, where we’ll actually be incorporating Solaris into AppLogic for the first time. At the same time, we’ll also be publishing the specification to our ADL language, the Application Descriptor Language, which is one of the core elements of AppLogic and the way it’s able to manipulate infrastructure and literally be able to move applications around the world at will. That will be the first of the specifications that we’ll start to open up and let people actually see. Then it’ll follow on in July as we release Windows capabilities for AppLogic and that’s the first time we’ll actually start creating additional specifications for how the components within AppLogic actually communicate, and allow people to actually start to see the inner workings of the system.
VSM:Barry, we know that you’ve been in the industry for a while. Based on your professional opinion, what do you see in store for the virtualization industry as a whole?
BL: Well I think it’d start that answer by saying that I never really put the term “virtualization industry” together in my head. I think virtualization is a tool. For example, if you look at our AppLogic and our Cloudware platform, we have virtualization technology imbedded in it, much the way a plumber has a wrench embedded in his tool belt. I’m not exactly sure what the “virtualization industry” is, but what I do think is that more, and more, and more, our services and our applications are becoming abstractions that can be managed completely separate from the hardware that they run on. By definition, that is kind of a definition of virtualization, but today, people think about virtualization and think, ‘Well, I’ll create a virtual machine, and I can run this process on this slice of a machine, and then I have many more slices of that machine that I can run other things on.’ We think of it a little bit differently. Many people think of an application as a bunch of code that does stuff. We think of an application as a bunch of code that does stuff, all of the data that it needs to do stuff, all of the infrastructure that it needs to do stuff (infrastructure meaning things like gateways, firewalls, appservers, data base servers) and all of the configurations of that infrastructure. Now, if you can encapsulate all of those things into a single entity that’s moveable and can be copied, and keep it as an abstract and keep it separate from the hardware, then you’ve really virtualized and application. That is really what I think is going to be the key to the future of cloud computing, and the future of what 3Tera is doing, and frankly, I see 3Tera as the only people who are really, truly virtualizing full multi-tier apps today.
VSM:Bert, do you have anything to add to that one?
BA: I think that virtualization technology in the PC arena is still relatively new. Of course, it’s an old technology idea brought around in the 60s, and quite frankly, the best virtualization is that which disappears. We all use virtualization every day in many forms, we just don’t think about it that way. When we go use and ATM card, that’s virtual money, when we dial a phone number, that’s a virtual identity for the person we’re trying to call, but we don’t think of them that way, we simply have become part of an abstraction that we use to actually buy things or communicate. And I think that’s what needs to happen here, in the data center, as well.
The virtualization needs to become so well done that it simply disappears for the user and they’re able to work with higher-level entities, as Barry said, the entities that we choose to focus on is the application. We’ve chosen that because we think that’s what people actually care about. When somebody complains, they don’t complain because they can’t get enough bandwidth between server A and server B in the data center. What the user cares about is that, ‘I can’t get to CRM, I can’t get to ERP, I can’t get to payroll.’ They care about the application availability. And so, having that ability to actually act upon the application level really enables them to respond directly to user requests instead of trying to respond to the needs of the technology at a lower level. Virtualization is a key enabler of that, but in terms of what people need to manage, we don’t think people need to manage virtualization, we think it needs to simply become part of the environment.
VSM:And finally Bert, where can our listeners go to find out more information about the Cloudware solution and 3Tera’s other offerings?
BA: Well, there’s always the Web, that’s the best place and they can look at www.3Tera.com
