Grid Meter » 3tera's Grid Sandwich

October 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

3tera's Grid Sandwich

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In a recent article Derrick Harris builds on the ever present theme of getting more visibility for Grid applications. The article begins with "Among the reasons often cited for enterprises not adopting Grid computing is a lack of Grid-enabled applications coming from the ISV community". Derrick cites the example of Callidus, a company who is indeed producing a Grid enabled application.

I've received some great responses to my own Grid Sandwich article in GRIDtoday. The underlying theme is that we need to start thinking from the application layer down at the same time as the network layer up when building Grids. One specific application I call out is the Apache Web server, which I believe would be pretty interesting on a Grid both for load balancing and redundant distribution of the data being served.

It turns out there is a company doing just that, 3tera", and they took the Grid sandwich approach packaging a concise solution both from the application on down AND the network on up.

3tera touts themselves as "the first grid operating system that runs and scales existing web applications." They approached this by creating a framework that encapsulates key applications like Apache and MySQL, among others, which are elements of the foundation for web applications. This framework, called AppLogic, has a unique GUI interface for tying web application building blocks together to create a web application Grid. So if you've built a web app, scalability, redundancy, fault tolerance, etc... all the wonderful promises of Grid are just a few "drags and drops" away.

Now the catch is you have to play on their network, or at least the network of their partner, Utility Serve, so if you have a room full of hardware and are looking for an in-house solution, you will have to convince 3tera to come and install their Grid OS in your house, which they have indeed done for others. The neat thing about their managed hosting solution is that the Grid OS component is billed based on memory usage. Which reminds me, Service Level Agreements and billing strategy discussions for Grid are something I'd like to see a little more talk about in the near future.

But what about non-web based applications? As long as these applications are Linux based and there are no hardware dependencies, the folks at 3tera assure me that it is a straight forward process to get them up and running as AppLogic apps and that they are standing by to help.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on October 31, 2006 08:57 AM

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