Building a Federated Cloud: Tier 3’s Cloud Software as a Service Vision

Today we announced a significant shift in Tier 3’s business model: in addition to offering our cloud “as a service” directly to enterprise customers around the globe, we are now offering our cloud software platform to service providers to enable them to stand up their own cloud services based on Tier 3’s enterprise cloud platform.

With more than five years of innovative engineering built in, the enterprise-grade features and high performance characteristics have set Tier 3’s cloud platform apart in the market. The power of this platform will be further amplified when it’s served as a global elastic fabric of cloud services – a growing footprint of federated, connected nodes that work in harmony to enable HA, DR and geo-specific services. Today we’ve announced a service delivery model, in conjunction with service provider partners, which enables just that.

Fast path to cloud revenue for midsize service providers around the world

The current cloud ecosystem is diverse and complex—and cloud customers are left to negotiate divergent services and service level agreements across providers. Accordingly there is real value and competitive advantage to be gained by those service providers who can easily provide comprehensive, global, yet easily managed and consumed cloud offerings to their customers – and even more so for those who can provide the type of enterprise-class features customers demand (HA, built in DR, high performance, security, compliance, etc.)

Yet the path to cloud services is also complex with providers whose best options are varying sets of “knit-it-together yourself” offerings that require significant custom engineering or development on their part. For many mid-size service providers the investment in expertise to create their own cloud service offering is simply out of their reach. The Tier 3 Federated Cloud simplifies the service provider go-to-market experience. By weaving together heterogeneous cloud services into a highly consumable package, the Tier 3 Federated Cloud enables service providers around the world a fast path to market–with a very low CapEx barrier to entry.Service providers can then hook into a growing global fabric of cloud services that speed time to market and enhance their service offerings—enabling them from day one to compete on a larger global stage yet offer the local sales, support and accompanying services to make their offering unique.

With the Tier 3 Federated Cloud, providers are able to maintain focus on their core competencies while Tier 3 manages the complexities at the core.

Enterprise-grade cloud services for global organizations

For enterprise customers, the move to a federated cloud model means access to innovative cloud services from service providers around the world—with all the benefits of Tier 3’s enterprise cloud platform:

• High availability
• Built-in disaster recovery
• 99.999% SLA across network, server, and storage
• And much more…

We know that access to local points of presence (POPs) is critical for large organizations with audiences, customers, and employees around the world. With Tier 3’s growing global footprint of datacenters, customers can deploy, manage and deliver their applications to specific geographic regions, decreasing latency and meeting ever-changing or evolving business, legal, or regulatory compliance needs.

The Tier 3 Federated Cloud gives customers instant global reach and IP with the local touch of individual service provider partners—with added capacity and strength every time a new service provider onboards.

Tier 3 is about more than just servers and storage; with the move to a federated cloud model, we have solidified the transformation from a cloud provider into a true cloud software and services company.

Tier 3 Creates Federated Cloud, Welcomes CFN Services as Federated Cloud Partner

First-of-a-Kind Federation Offers New Cloud Business Models to Providers Serving the Enterprise Market

BELLEVUE, Wash. — February 21, 2012 ― Tier 3, Inc. today made its Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) – enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud software – available to the service provider market, creating the Tier 3 Federated Cloud. CFN Services, a leading provider of high performance network and application delivery solutions, is the first Tier 3 Federated Cloud partner. CFN Services will leverage the Tier 3 platform to create a Global Financial Services Cloud (also announced today) and offer cloud services to the broader enterprise market.

With the Tier 3 Federated Cloud, Tier 3 is now offering a global fabric of elastic cloud services created through the federation of service provider nodes all running the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform. To join the federation, a service provider brings a node anywhere in the world to be managed by Tier 3. These service provider-owned, Tier 3-managed nodes then work in federation with existing Tier 3 nodes, enabling service providers to immediately offer enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud. This first-of-a-kind model allows providers to serve the enterprise market with the ideal combination of their own local solutions, sales and support, coupled with enterprise-class cloud services.

“Service providers see great opportunity in the fast growing market created by enterprises moving production workloads to virtual private clouds, but are stymied by the complexity of building an enterprise-class offering,” said Adam Wray, Tier 3 president and chief executive officer. “With five years of innovation in virtualization, automation and orchestration architected into our platform, Tier 3 offers service providers a fast path to market with a complete enterprise-class cloud. And, the quickly expanding Tier 3 Federated Cloud ensures that they can provide businesses with a global fabric of services backed by the same SLA, security and experience from day one. This is game changing for the regional mid-size and vertical service provider, as they can now compete with the global leaders.”

CFN Services Brings Tier 3 Federated Cloud Offerings to Market

CFN Services has joined the Tier 3 Federated Cloud Network and will provide cloud services leveraging the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform. This partnership expands the footprint of Tier 3 Federated Cloud to Europe and APAC in 2012.

CFN Services will leverage its global ultra-low-latency networks and distributed hosting environment connecting more than 70 datacenters worldwide to offer its “Powered by Tier 3” cloud. CFN will offer a financial services industry-specific solution, as well as a hybrid cloud solution for the broader enterprise market. CFN will extend the infrastructure supporting Tier 3’s Federated Cloud globally, connecting federated nodes in North America, London and Frankfurt immediately and APAC later in 2012.

“CFN is bringing to market a unique financial services virtual private cloud that empowers customers to innovate and integrate cloud-based solutions for improved performance, accessibility and efficiency,” said Mark Casey, CFN chief executive officer. “Our global footprint and high-performance infrastructure combined with a strong enterprise-grade cloud platform powered by Tier 3, enables us to support the delivery of low-latency, mission-critical applications our enterprise and financial services clients demand.”

Resources

• Tier 3 CEO blog – The Tier 3 Federated Cloud vision
• CFN Financial Service Cloud Announcement

About Tier 3

Tier 3 brings enterprise-class cloud services to enterprises globally via its Federated Cloud. The Bellevue, Wash.-based company provides an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud software platform, enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration layer to enable IT automation and agility. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability ― with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — Tier 3 Federated Cloud services are optimized for production environments and mission-critical applications. For more information, visit www.tier3.com

About CFN Services

CFN Services provides high-performance network and application delivery solutions for real-time, mission-critical applications. Leveraging FiberSource®, CFN’s global network optimization platform, the company deploys and manages low-latency networks and private cloud solutions to cost-effectively improve application performance in distributed IT environments. CFN’s global cloud platform connects more than 70 leading data centers across North and South America, Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit: www.cfnservices.com.

Tier 3 Media Contact:

Liam Rose, GolinHarris for Tier 3
lrose@golinharris.com
(415) 318-4380

CFN Media Contact:

Jennifer Handshew
jennifer.handshew@cfnservices.com
(718)-857-0120

Tier 3 Announces Compliance with SSAE 16 Type II Standards

New Auditing Standards Provide Greater Independent Assurance of Controls and Processes

BELLEVUE, WA – February 20, 2012 – Tier 3, the enterprise cloud platform provider, announced today that it has successfully completed the SSAE 16 Type II audit, ensuring that the company’s controls, processes and procedures conform to industry standards and best practices. The review was conducted by an independent auditing firm, and is effective from June 2011 through June 2012. SSAE 16 is a rigorous new standard that replaces the former SAS 70 audit. Tier 3 has been SAS 70 Type II audited since 2009 and began the SSAE 16 auditing process when it became the new standard.

Thorough, independent testing and reviews of controls across Tier 3 datacenters and other physical locations ensure the following areas meet SSAE 16’s demanding criteria:

• Oversight by executive management
• Operations and customer service
• Development and information technology organization
• Human resources policies and procedures
• Risk assessment monitoring

“By undergoing the rigorous SSAE 16 Type II audit and expanding the scope of the audits to include more platforms and locations, our customers know they’re receiving the highest standards in service and controls” said Chris Brandon, Tier 3 CFO. “This audit furthers Tier 3’s goal of enabling our customers to focus on their core business while we take care of their IT infrastructure.”

Because the audit was prepared using the SOC 1 “inclusive method”—incorporating reviews of Tier 3 datacenter partners and facilities—Tier 3 customers do not need to collect additional verifications for their own auditing requirements.

About Tier 3

Tier 3 delivers enterprise-class cloud software and federated cloud services to businesses globally. The Bellevue, Wash.-based company provides an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud software platform, enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration layer to enable IT automation and agility. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability ― with 99.999% uptime SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — Tier 3 Federated Cloud services are optimized for production environments and business-critical applications. For more information, visit www.tier3.com

Tier 3 Media Contact:
Liam Rose, GolinHarris for Tier 3
lrose@golinharris.com
(415) 3189-4380

Get Your vFabric On with Blueprints from Tier 3

Today Tier 3 announced access to a Starter Kit Blueprint for VMware vFabric on the Tier 3 Public Cloud. We know that most of you are busy enough with your job, so setting aside time to try the latest technologies is often hard to juggle. To make it a bit easier, we created the starter kit blueprint!

This blueprint enables you to quickly deploy a small vFabric environment and be up and running in no time–without the need to troubleshoot.

What is in it?

The Starter Kit Blueprint for VMware vFabric comes with four virtual machine instances and the advanced vFabric applications:

• vFabric tc Server: vFabric tc Server, the best place to build and run Java Spring applications, provides enterprise users with the lightweight server they want paired with the operational management, advanced diagnostics, and mission-critical support capabilities businesses need.
• vFabric GemFire® Server: GemFire is a distributed data management platform providing dynamic scalability, high performance, and database-like persistence. It blends advanced techniques like replication, partitioning, data-aware routing, and continuous querying to help you.
• vFabric Web Server: Unlike Apache, vFabric Web Server is pre-compiled, pre-configured and pre-patched, which reduces deployment times from a typical 3 days to 30 minutes. It has a consistent installation process and structure across all supported operating systems and installation is via self-extracting archive, with no requirements as to install location and no dependencies on graphics libraries. You can patch and upgrade multiple instances as well for further reduction in deployment and support costs.
• vFabric Hyperic® Server: vFabric Hyperic, a stand-alone component of vFabric Application Performance Manager, helps web operations teams monitor the application infrastructure for custom web applications across physical machines, a virtual infrastructure environment, or the cloud and provides immediate notification of application performance degradation or unavailability.

Each of the servers is configured with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPU by default but you can change the configuration easily in the Tier 3 Control Portal after deployment.

With Blueprints from Tier 3, deployment is very easy and can be done in 4 easy steps:

1. Logon to the Tier 3 Control Portal and go to Blueprints > Search for “vFabric Starter Kit”

2. Click on the vFabric Starter Kit Blueprint and on the next screen click Deploy Blueprint.

3. Next you will want to customize your blueprint by specifying the following information:

• Password for the servers
• Network to place the servers on
• Primary and Secondary DNS

4. Last step is to deploy the customized vFabric Starter Kit blueprint by clicking on the Deploy Blueprint button at the bottom of the screen.

The platform will now do all the orchestration and deploy a fully working vFabric environment for you.

To access the environment all you have to do is logon via VPN (we have instructions here).

For a full overview of an install with vFabric Starter Blueprint, watch our video taking you from deployment to configuration with Shantu Roy.

How do I get started?

Getting started is pretty simple. Go to Tier 3 and activate your account, which will give you access to this blueprint.

Learn more

• VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform:
• vFabric Overview
• vFabric tc Server
• vFabric GemFire
• vFabric Hyperic
• vFabric Web Server
• Tier 3 Blueprints:
• Blueprints Scripts and Software Management
• Blueprint Video
• Blueprint Datasheet
• Getting Started Guide

VMware has also published a blog post about our Starter Kit Blueprint. You can view that post here.

Tier 3 VPN Client Service Updates

Many of you have noticed the upgrade of your Tier 3 Client VPN service, which allows you to connect to the secure network that contains your servers and resources. Read on to learn more about the service and the enhancements made with this update.

Overview

Client VPN enables users to connect to their secure isolated network. Each account has its own isolated VPN service provided at no charge. This built-in service is managed by Tier 3’s highly trained network operation center. If you have any issues please look at the status system or contact support.

To complete the Client VPN initial configuration, simply download the certificate—used when connecting to the VPN service—or complete the two-factor authentication that we’ve linked to below. To learn more about ways to connect such as persistent VPN connections or direct connections please go here.

Current Limitations

There are only a few limitations on this service as it is based on the OpenVPN project.

• Maximum concurrent users: 20 (if you need additional users, please contact support)
• Maximum connection: 1Gbps

Performance and Tuning Enhancements

We’ve made a host of performance and tuning enhancements to the Client VPN service that will result in a better user experience. We decreased CPU utilization on each unique instance from 80% down to ~7%, or roughly 1/10th the CPU usage, through the use of an updated kernel, VMware tools, and OpenVPN packages.

We also made changes to the instance that should increase network performance as well as allow the VPN servers to recover in the event of storage latency.

Now More Support!

You can find new documentation that we’ve added our knowledge base for troubleshooting, configuration, running multiple VPN connections, as well as the two factor authentication guide.

Come See Tier 3 at Cloud Connect Santa Clara!

The time has come at last for the Tier 3 team to make the (not so) long and (potentially) perilous journey to Santa Clara for UBM TechWeb’s Cloud Connect conference. Read on to learn about the sessions and tracks we’ll be leading, where you’ll find the Tier 3 team, and what you can do to pick up a free expo pass and discounted tickets.

First up: in a free session, Cloud Foundry’s James Watters and Jared Wray from the Iron Foundry team at Tier 3 will discuss open PaaS services for enterprise developers. They’ll give a live demo from the stage and share the best practices they’ve learned from real experiences deploying PaaS on a public cloud—which you can take and apply today to your organization’s private cloud. Read more about the session here.

But that’s not all… Explore the performance potential of cloud computing at Cloud Connect’s Performance and Availability track—chaired by Tier 3 VP Wendy White and featuring speakers from XSP, Zynga, and CFN. Wendy’s blog post summarizing each of the track sessions will help you plan out which sessions to attend as well as reveal the hidden connections shared by natural disasters, race cars, and high-stakes trading. Intrigued? Check out the post here.

To join the free session led by Jared and James (and get some great swag on the expo floor), register here for a free Expo Pass (use priority code CPNACC95). Want the full conference experience? The same code will get you a 25% discount off of your all-access admission.

Finally if you’re feeling friendly, stop by booth 308 to say hello to the Tier 3 team, learn about the latest developments in enterprise cloud, and snag some choice giveaways. We look forward to seeing you in Santa Clara from 2/13 – 2/16!

Tier 3 Recognized in the Magic Quadrant for the Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Segment

Evaluation Based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

BELLEVUE, Wash. — December 20, 2011 ― Tier 3, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform provider, announced today that it has been selected by Gartner, Inc. for inclusion in the “Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.”

“We believe this inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for public cloud affirms what Tier 3 sees in the market: the growing demand for cloud offerings that serve unique customer communities. Our Enterprise customers expect a cloud platform designed for their unique needs — most notably high availability, security, disaster recovery, and advanced automation for IT agility,” says Adam Wray, Tier 3 CEO. “We consider our position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant evidence that Tier 3 is delivering a cloud platform for mission-critical applications and services to our Enterprise customers today and is well positioned to challenge for a leadership position in 2012. We are proud to be among the small number of leading providers selected by Gartner for inclusion in this report.”

Gartner bases its evaluation on the “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.” Ability to execute measures the vendor’s financial viability, market responsiveness, product development, sales channels and customer base. Completeness of vision reflects the vendor’s innovation, whether the vendor drives the market and if the vendor’s view of how the market will develop matches Gartner’s perspective.

The Magic Quadrant for the Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service was introduced earlier this year and covers multi-tenant cloud applications with a focus on scale-out cloud hosting, virtual lab environments, self-managed virtual data centers and turnkey virtual data center segments.

Resources

• View a complimentary copy of the Magic Quadrant for the Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Segment from Tier 3.

About Tier 3
Tier 3 helps large and mid-size enterprises bring applications and services to the cloud. The Bellevue, Wash.-based company provides an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud, enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration layer to enable IT automation and agility. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability ― with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — Tier 3 is optimized for production environments and mission-critical applications. Tier 3’s innovative infrastructure delivers superior performance and resource optimization while expert support provides a virtual extension of in-house IT staff. For more information, visit www.tier3.com

About the Magic Quadrant
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Tier 3 Contact:
Wendy White
VP of Marketing, Tier 3
wendy.white@tier3.com
(877) 388-4373 x834

Media Contact:
Liam Rose, GolinHarris for Tier 3
lrose@golinharris.com
(415) 318-4380

Say Hello to Iron Foundry—An Open-Source, .NET PaaS Framework

At Tier 3, we’ve been big supporters of Cloud Foundry—the VMware-led, open-source PaaS framework—from the beginning. That said, we’re a .NET shop and many of our customers’ most critical applications are .NET-based. So today we’ve decided to contribute Iron Foundry, our own .NET fork of Cloud Foundry, back to the community as an open-source project. This project includes both the primary framework as well as both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer and a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry. (Video demos for the command line interface and Visual Studio plugin are located at the bottom of this post.)

Because developers can run their own instances of Iron Foundry in-house or with any service provider who supports it, developers finally have a truly open, interoperable .NET PaaS solution that can be run inside and outside the firewall. And because you can run your own instances of Iron Foundry, it’s easy to have a full test, QA, and staging environment before pushing to production. In addition, operations teams now have the freedom to choose among various service providers that meet their needs in areas such as security, compliance, availability, location, etc.

For developers who are interested in trying Iron Foundry, we have put together a “try it now” test bed package on IronFoundry.org that offers the compute resources needed to run one web and one database instance per developer free for 90 days on Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Iron Foundry is Cloud Foundry + .Net. This means developers have access to standard tools—enabling them to write .Net code against a MySQL backend, for example, or just write against a simple name-value pair datastore like Redis. Another advantage that Iron Foundry inherits is the ability to add instances to an application on the fly with the app being pushed automatically each new node.

The core source code will be available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. You can also download and install Iron Foundry with Cloud Foundry from our web site at www.ironfoundry.org.

Read the full press release here.

Iron Foundry Video Demo

Tier 3 Contributes .NET Framework Support for Cloud Foundry™ Platform as a Service to the Open Source Community

“Iron Foundry” fills PaaS market gap for popular enterprise developer framework, accelerating cloud deployment for mission-critical enterprise applications

BELLEVUE, Wash.—December 13, 2011—Tier 3, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform provider, today announced that has contributed to the open source community a .NET Framework implementation of the Cloud Foundry™ Open Platform as a Service (Paas). Named Iron Foundry, this contribution gives the industry’s fastest growing open source PaaS an implementation based on the popular development framework, .NET.

Tier 3’s Iron Foundry contribution consists of the three key components required for developers to quickly leverage the open source project for their own PaaS implementation or to leverage Iron Foundry to deploy applications to the cloud immediately. In addition to a core .NET Framework fork of Cloud Foundry, which Tier 3 is committing to keep it in synch with the main Cloud Foundry branch, developers can also access IronFoundry.org for both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer as well as a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry. Tier 3 will also make the core code available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.

“At Tier 3, we believe that PaaS is so universal and so foundational to the adoption of cloud for web applications that it should be an open source framework,” said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, Tier 3. “As enterprises accelerate the deployment of their mission-critical applications to the cloud, the need for a .NET-based Cloud Foundry PaaS in the marketplace was acute. As fans of the open source nature of Cloud Foundry – and as a .NET based-cloud platform ourselves – we were excited to take on this opportunity to support the enterprise developer and open source communities and to foster innovation for the cloud.”

“Tier3’s contribution of .NET Framework support is another powerful example of the open Cloud Foundry ecosystem in action,” said Jerry Chen, vice president of cloud and application services at VMware. “The availability of the .NET Framework on Cloud Foundry will greatly expand .NET developers’ ability to deploy their applications across a wide variety of clouds.”

In addition to the core Iron Foundry code project, Tier 3 is also committing substantial support to the Iron Foundry community to help contributors and implementers. To ensure that contributors have access to engineering and technical support, Tier 3 is committing time from Tier 3’s own expert engineers via the IronFoundry.org community forums. Additionally, to accelerate adoption, Tier 3 is donating a full test bed environment via a “try it now” feature on IronFoundry.org consisting of one web and one database instances per developer for 90 days. The test bed is powered by Tier 3’s enterprise-class cloud platform and requires only email address, password, and acceptance of the Tier 3 PaaS EULA.

About Tier 3

Tier 3 helps large and mid-size enterprises bring applications and services to the cloud. The Bellevue, Wash.-based company provides an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud, enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration layer to enable IT automation and agility. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability — with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — Tier 3 is optimized for production environments and mission-critical applications. Tier 3’s innovative infrastructure delivers superior performance and resource optimization while expert support provides a virtual extension of in-house IT staff. For more information, visit www.tier3.com.

New Relic Monitoring Comes to Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform

New Relic has made their technology available as a Blueprint on the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform, resulting in a simple yet robust deployment and monitoring system that is available at the push of a few buttons. New Relic Standard is accessible through Tier 3’s management control portal or its API, making it easy for organizations to monitor end-user experiences and PHP, Ruby, Java, .NET, and Python applications in real-time.

Watch the introductory video to learn more about Tier 3′s New Relic Blueprint:

New Relic has done a tremendous job of taking the monitoring to a new level. Monitoring has always been a core offering of the Tier 3 platform, but now that monitoring holistically looks at the application—the bread and butter of a solution—thanks to New Relic’s technology. You used to get network data, SNMP gathered CPU, Memory and IO data, as well as the database and its handling of queries. At that point you had to look at these disparate forms of data to infer what could be wrong with your app, finally trying multiple things to see if the pain points disappeared. New Relic turns this process on its head to provide the end user with very valuable data with all the dots already connected.

Now throw in the simplicity of deploying a whole system (server/environment) from a template that allows for runtime parameters… Mangnifico! Tier 3 Blueprints are much more than a configuration management tool. Picture Blueprints as the foundry for environments: give it some raw materials—like an IP address, CPU and memory configurations, custom software packages—and out comes your custom environment all set to go. Effectively, Blueprints allow for a virtual mold that has been handcrafted by subject matter experts to be used in a runtime configurable fashion.

Customers can access New Relic Standard immediately with every enterprise server deployment, upgrade to New Relic Professional via a simple upgrade feature in the Tier 3 portal, or select to deploy New Relic as a Blueprint for additional customization.

See a New Relic Blueprint deployment in action on Tier 3′s Enterprise Cloud Platform: