There has to be a better way.

Now there is. It's called a Virtual Private Datacenter. You get the complete control and visibility of running your own datacenter. Without the hassle. At web hosting prices. On a month to month basis.

What makes this possible is a revolutionary new grid technology from 3Tera. It makes it easy to deploy, run and manage your infrastructure and applications using grids of commodity servers. All you need is a browser and basic IT skills.

We Eat Our Own Dog Food

Before we started offering Virtual Private Datacenters to our customers, we used them ourselves. In November 2006 we launched The GridLayer in three VPDs built from close to a hundred servers running 3Tera'sAppLogic grid operating system. Over the next 4 months, fully a third of our customers requested CPU, RAM or storage upgrades, or asked that the resources they paid for be reassigned between their multiple virtual private servers.

With the VPD, a single operator was able to do all this for months working part time, while holding his day job at Layered. We loved the improved availability and dramatic workload reduction. Customers were very happy to have immediate access to their newly-resized hosting environments without having to migrate data, rewrite code or change IP addresses.

How Does TheGridLayer (TGL) Work?

TGL delivers Virtual Private Datacenters and virtual private servers from grids of commodity servers. Each TGL grid consists of a pool of HP servers connected with a Gigabit backbone network and running 3Tera's AppLogic grid operating system.

With a Virtual Private Datacenter, you get complete control of your own private grid. Using our visual interface, you set up and assemble disposable virtual infrastructure, including firewalls, load balancers, web servers, database servers, NAS boxes, etc. visually, by pointing and clicking. You can build advanced clusters, deploy large and small applications, and save them as templates that can be provisioned in minutes. You can even build your own virtual servers and appliances.

Best of all, you can add more resources to your grid at any time - up to 48 servers per VPD, and your applications can use them without any changes.

If you buy a virtual private server, what you get is a VPS that runs in one of the Virtual Private Datacenters managed by us. A TGL VPS is very different from a VPS anywhere else. Customers often say it feels like a dedicated server, but with the high availability of the grid. You get root access, you install and/or replace any software. You can even build your own kernel from sources.

The resources you buy are exclusively yours. If you order 1GB of RAM, you get 1GB of RAM. If you order 60GB of storage, you get a private 60GB disk volume. You can get more CPU than you pay for, but never less. Most importantly, you can get your VPS resized at any time, without reinstalling software, migrating web sites, etc.

Key Features

Control

Whether you are running your own Virtual Private Datacenter, or just using one or more VPS in one of ours, you are in complete control. You can set up things exactly the way you want them, and keep them running. You can upgrade whatever you want, or keep tried and true configurations running for years. Oh, and you can do it all from your local coffee shop. The only thing you lose is the hassle.

On-Demand Scalability

With The GridLayer, scaling no longer means configuring new servers, reinstalling software, and moving your data. Instead, your application can be scaled from a fraction of a server to dozens of machines (or more!) with no need for code modification. That's because your application isn't bound to a particular physical resource.

Universal High Availability

Say goodbye to data loss and extended downtime. All data on The GridLayer is automatically mirrored across the grid it resides on. When a server fails, all your data remains available, and any affected appliances are automatically restarted elsewhere on the grid. This means your application will be back online within minutes, not hours or days. Best of all, it all happens automatically - you just get an email telling you what happened.

Convenient Snapshots

Forget about data-only backups. With TGL, you can back up a whole multi-server cluster, complete with the configuration settings, code, data and everything else. It's called an application snapshot. There is no need for restore - you can start the snapshot as a separate application - even side by side with your production system.

Efficient Use of Resources

A Virtual Private Datacenter is one of the most efficient ways to use hardware. You can deploy a wide range of services - from a simple virtual server for web hosting to complex n-tier applications in the same VPD, allocate resources simply, and manage them from the same web interface. With a Virtual Private Datacenter, you have total control over the allocation of every bit of processing power, storage space and bandwidth capacity.

Developement and Testing

Developers often write their code without access to the whole application. After all, deploying the application has been cumbersome . . . until now. With a Virtual Private Datacenter you can simply copy an entire n-tier application and run a new copy for each developer, each with a fraction of the resources of the primary application. These copies can be run on the same Virtual Private Datacenter without interfering with the primary application in any way. And when it's time to test the new code you deploy dozens, or even hundreds, of copies to speed testing.

Is a Virtual Private Datacenter right for you?

A VPD is an ideal solution for the following scenarios:

• Hosting resellers
• SaaS companies
• Web 2.0 startups
  
• Enterprise web applications

If you have a different use case in mind and would like to discuss it with a TGL engineer, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!