CA Technologies has brought out the first upgrade of AppLogic since its acquisition of 3Tera in February. Its 2.9 AppLogic release will allow a cloud infrastructure to be built and rapidly "compose" a service to run on it.
AppLogic is already in use at 80 3Tera customers who were in existence before the company was sold to CA. They include European Internet services provider DNS Europe, the San Diego cloud integration services firm Cirrhus9, and St. Louis-based managed service provider Contegix. These 80 customers run 400 public and private clouds on the software, said Jay Fry, VP of marketing for CA's cloud computing business.
The 2.9 release is geared to expand the capabilities of both enterprises and hosted services providers, a group of new customers. CA announced the 2.9 release Monday at the opening of Managed Service Providers World in Los Angeles. "It provides a way for both enterprises and MSPs to get to the cloud fast" via an evolutionary approach, Fry said in an interview.
Once AppLogic is implemented on at least two xc86 servers at a host site, a user may define virtual servers and pull an application from an AppLogic catalogue to deploy on them. An application can also be composed in AppLogic from reusable parts by dragging and dropping pre-built components.
The latest release includes an expanded capability to build "a model-driven business process," said Matt Richards, senior director of product management, in an interview. The user diagrams the desired process, assembling parts from existing infrastructure and connecting lines between them in an AppLogic graphical user interface window. AppLogic supplies the underlying servers, storage, and network configuration for the service, said Richards.
With the AppLogic approach, an initial cloud installation on an x86 server cluster can be achieved "in four hours" and new business services can be designed, built, tested, and moved into production in 30 days, he claimed.
In addition to designing processes to run in the cloud, AppLogic now includes the ability to supply high availability as a feature of the application or composite service. In addition to the redundancy built into a server cluster, AppLogic provides storage mirroring across multiple servers so that a hardware failure doesn't result in a data loss.
A service is managed as one software object or software appliance in AppLogic. Because of that, it can be started, stopped, replicated, copied, backed up, and migrated to a different data center from one user interface. By having a copy in a second data center, the customer has more guarantee of business continuity if the primary application fails, Richards said.
CA is a systems management vendor that has started to include x86 server clusters and cloud-type systems as part of the systems it will manage. It launched earlier this year the Cloud Connected Management Suite, based on products from recent acquisitions. In addition to 3Tera, it has purchased NetQOS, Cassatt, Oblicore, and Nimsoft, all of which produce software related to cloud computing.
