Most purveyors of Cloud Computing claim that one of its great benefits is that it can turn capital expense into operational expense. 3tera’s AppLogic Cloud Computing Without Compromise, though, reduces all expenses, both CapEx and OpEx.
AppLogic encapsulates entire applications and everything those applications need to run – code, data, OS, middleware, DBMS, infrastructure, configuration, policies, etc. - into a single, easy to manage entity that is abstracted from the hardware. These encapsulated applications are “superimposed” on a server farm and dynamically allocate the resources they need to run. Therefore, specific hardware is no longer assigned to specific functions – any idle hardware can be used by any active application. Thus, hardware becomes much more densely populated, ergo, much less hardware is needed. This results in greatly reduced CapEx.
As such, all servers in the farm can be commodity servers all configured the same way. So there is no need for intensive server administration. In most enterprises and at most data center operators, one administrator can manage approximately 50 servers. With AppLogic, because the administrators are managing application instances each of which can consume any number – up to hundreds – of servers, the applications one administrator manages can be consuming hundreds of servers, thus, increasing administration efficiency by an order of magnitude. This results in greatly reduced OpEx.
And, as great as this is, it is only icing on the cake. The “cake” is this. Because applications can be run on arrays of existing commodity servers, the time it normally takes to provision and configure hardware for specific applications is virtually, pardon the pun, eliminated. Time to market is dramatically decreased creating huge revenue opportunity.
So, the next time someone proclaims, “You get what you pay for.”, tell them when you pay up for information technology infrastructure, you don’t have to pay more to get more. With Cloud Computing Without Compromise, you get an awful lot for what you DON’T pay for!