3Tera Cloud Journal

Having had 3Tera in its possession since February, CA Technologies has revved its AppLogic turnkey cloud infrastructure widgetry and come out with a 2.9 platform to broad its appeal.

It's supposed to let cloud-minded managed service providers or large enterprise themselves look like Amazon, Rackspace or Azure by creating composite business services with all the tools needed for an application to run, including optimized infrastructure, configurations, software, code and data.

Customers are now supposed to be able to build cloud infrastructure in as little as four hours, and use a "drag and drop" model-driven catalog of reusable applications - out of the "build once, reuse many times" school - to rapidly compose, deploy and manage complex online applications, significantly reducing time-to-market for new business services.

CA says new production services can be up and running in less than 30 days.

AppLogic uses commodity hardware to combine compute resources, storage, networking, high availability, security and policy management into a single system managed through an intuitive interface.

It only takes two x86 servers to create a private cloud environment to run new or existing applications.

Composite services are handled as one object that's started, stopped, replicated, copied and backed up. The entire business service can even be migrated to a different data center for business continuity.

The widgetry is used by 80-some companies, mostly customers 3Tera came with, to run 400 public and private clouds. They depend on 3Tera for their IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and virtual private data center offerings.

Available this month, AppLogic 2.9 adds high availability for networking, storage mirroring so data won't be lost and replication built into the catalog appliances; increased security; improved storage health monitoring; and increased support for database replication.

CA says AppLogic now has more features than most people need. It's also opened up 3Tera's APIs and imports via the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).