May 8

Tier 3 Expands Enterprise Cloud Platform with Multi-Framework Web Fabric and Data Fabric

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New Platform and Database Services Join Tier 3 Enterprise Infrastructure Service, Setting New Bar for Comprehensive Cloud Platforms

BELLEVUE, Wash. — May 8, 2012 ― Tier 3, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced the next release of the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform, now with the industry’s most comprehensive set of enterprise-grade cloud services in a single consolidated platform. The Tier 3 cloud now features Web Fabric, a multi-framework enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) and Data Fabric, a high availability database as a service (DbaaS).  These services join the company’s existing enterprise-grade infrastructure services for a powerful, first-of-a-kind combination that enables businesses to accelerate “greenfield” application development and deliver critical legacy business systems in one cloud platform.

Businesses around the world today rely on Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud – a VMware vCloud® Powered Service –  to run their back office and line of business applications in a secure virtual private cloud, counting on the platform’s availability, security, performance and built-in disaster recovery capabilities. Now with Tier 3’s multi-language (“polyglot”) Web Fabric, businesses gain the application development and deployment agility of cloud-based on-demand runtime environments, enabling developers to focus on business innovation without sacrificing stringent enterprise security requirements.  Tier 3 Web Fabric also gives customers the ability to:

  • Leverage Cloud Foundry and Iron Foundry to support the broadest set of languages and frameworks (including .NET, Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, and Python) while ensuring interoperability across clouds. 
  • Directly deploy and scale any web application while automatically tapping into enterprise-grade capabilities such as high availability, disaster recovery as well as advanced application monitoring from New Relic.
  • Deploy Web Fabric in a secure environment ensuring no risk of "shared" access from other customers and enabling it to run side-by-side with Tier 3's infrastructure services (IaaS) in private VLANs to better support direct integration with business applications and systems.

“The needs of the enterprises are diverse as they expect not only superior performance and reliability but also enterprise-grade security. While commodity clouds are well suited for greenfield applications, they are not ready to meet the enterprise demands with mixed environments,” said Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst, Rishidot Research. “With a multi-pronged approach to infrastructure, platform and data, Tier 3 can enable enterprises to take advantage of the cloud without any disruption to their existing processes. In this context, this announcement is a significant as it represents a step forward in cloud services designed specifically to meet the needs of modern enterprises.”

To further enhance IT agility, Tier 3 is also introducing the first in a series of fabric services, the Tier 3 Data Fabric. Delivering enterprise-grade database services (DbaaS), Data Fabric can be called by Tier 3 virtual machines or Web Fabric or even external applications, and works with a broad set of databases including Redis, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, My SQL, and VMware vFabric™ Postgres.   Data Fabric features a high availability mode, auto-scaling, and high performance with automated built-in backups to help reduce the burden of operational task management.  Tier 3 will release other fabric services such as messaging, queuing, and caching throughout 2012.

“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the industry to multi-service clouds systems.   Enterprise IT departments are rapidly adopting enterprise-class hybrid cloud platforms for business-critical legacy applications, but true PaaS adoption has been stalled due to stringent requirements for security without sacrificing HA, performance and scale and management complexity,” said Jared Wray, Tier 3 founder chief technology officer. “The Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform with Web Fabric and Data Fabric is game changing for mid-size to large enterprises.  They can now leverage the flexibility of a complete set of enterprise-grade public cloud services together in the same service and from behind the corporate firewall — standard virtual machine capabilities for enhanced agility and a services fabric to streamline the rapid development of new features.”  

“The Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform’s new capabilities of Web Fabric, based on VMware vCloud®, Cloud Foundry™, and Data Fabric can provide robust and flexible cloud services to a wide range of enterprises,” said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware. “By using Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform, underpinned by VMware’s cloud infrastructure, organizations can realize the benefits and value of multi-cloud services.”

Availability

Tier 3 Web Fabric is generally available May 8 and Data Fabric is in beta until June 1.  Tier 3 is demonstrating its Enterprise Cloud Platform including Web Fabric and Data Fabric May 8-10 at Interop Vegas booth 615.

Resources

Supporting Quotes

  • “Users of cloud systems-infrastructure services (IaaS) are increasingly looking for more “cloudiness” in their services and turn to cloud application-infrastructure services (PaaS) for automated application elasticity, multi-tenancy and higher-function self-service,” commented Yefim Natis, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Inc. “To meet this requirement many IaaS providers add middleware capability to their offering (IaaS+) and some develop a native PaaS offering.  Both approaches will find some demand in the market in the short term, though the native PaaS will emerge as the definitive cloud platform service in the long term.”
  • “Infrastructure services ease the transition from legacy client-server computing, while cloud platform services like Tier 3’s Web and Data Fabrics are the natural evolution of cloud computing, freeing developers to concentrate on the applications rather than the supporting infrastructure,” said Chris Sharp, general manager, cloud and content for Equinix. “Platform Equinix offers customers a rich environment to build and integrate private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions. Customers now have access to Tier 3’s infrastructure and platform services via dedicated private connections from Equinix data centers and over the Internet via multiple carriers.”
  • "The Tier 3 Web Fabric with Iron Foundry offers a unique value to organizations by providing unparalleled choice in development frameworks,” said Richard Seroter, InfoQ editor and Microsoft MVP. “Enterprises can now leverage one of the best possible platform-as-a-service frameworks while taking advantage of Tier 3's top notch infrastructure offering.” 
  • "As enterprises rapidly embrace cloud services, they want to ensure their cloud-based apps are delivering the highest standard of performance and availability,” says Bill Lapcevic, Vice President of Business Development, New Relic. “ With our application monitoring as a standard feature in Web Fabric, together Tier 3 and New Relic are providing our customers with the best tools for identifying and resolving potential performance issues in their business-critical applications."      

About Tier 3

Tier 3 delivers enterprise-class cloud services to businesses globally via its federated Enterprise Cloud Platform.  The Bellevue, WA-based company provides a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade virtual private cloud services enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration and automation to enable IT agility. Architected for security, performance and high availability ― with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — the Tier 3 Cloud is ideal for the entire business application portfolio from development to production environments and mission-critical applications.

VMware, VMware vFabric and Cloud Foundry are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

May 7

Why Operations Folks Should Code

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By Jared Wray, founder and CTO. Find Jared on Twitter.

Since the onset of Cloud Computing we’ve seen many changes in how we consume IT services. In her recent article “IT operations in the age of cloud: Brace yourself for change,” Alex Barrett outlines one of the most dramatic shifts in IT: operations teams. At Tier 3, we know that shift is well underway as we see it today in the way we hire IT personnel: from operations to developers, no longer are these roles isolated from each other.

Instead of just repeating the message “you need to learn to code,” here are the tips, tricks, and resources that we use at Tier 3 to enable the transition to DevOps.

Don’t know how to code even a little bit? Start with a very simple project such as figuring out how to parse a log file with a language that you are interested in. Once you get that, go talk to a developer and ask him to review your code. Perhaps ask him then to pair program with you to add another feature on it for one hour as it pays off immensely.

Know how to code a bit? That is great! Next step is to take an honest look at your skill and find a project where can help your company by doing some very easy coding. Once you get done with a small project try something harder such as installing Cloud Foundry with Iron Foundry in an environment. Once you get that working, figure out how it works and make some modifications to suit your needs. Remember that the key is to implement something where you have access to code and can review and modify the code base.

Already supporting an application? If you have access to the code, start to dig in and ask questions of the developers. Take one little feature at a time and take notes. This is really great as it adds more value to the company and also starts a dialog on how to blend things together. Next time the application fails make sure to really dig in with the developer to discover the root cause. Ask how they fixed it–down to the code level–so you can better understand the bug.

Interested in learning a specific language? Learning a new language is awesome and there are many sites that are focused on getting you ramped up. Here are some of the more popular languages and sites to start learning from:

Use Open Source to Learn: Open source is a good way to find a community of developers and engage with them. Many of these projects have meetups around the world that you can attend. Find a project you like and want to use at your company or for personal use, but make sure you will use it. If you find a bug and it is open source contribute (don’t be afraid to as this is how you learn!) Here are some great places to look at open source projects:

Jump on and find something you are passionate about!

Some Programing/Agile Books: These books are used to really get in the mind set of programming:

You will be surprised how fast you start to understand application architecture and coding best practices as you have seen the end result of this with some of the applications that you have supported. If you get stuck use the community, developers around you, and sites such as Stack Overflow to ask questions and get answers.

A DevOps role is one of the most valuable things we see in the industry as the operational experience and development know how and ability is a force to be reckoned with. These roles are very valuable and can benefit not only your company but also increase your compensation and job security dramatically.

Mar 27

Equinix and Tier 3 Partner to Accelerate Cloud Adoption in Enterprise

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Companies team to deliver enterprise-class hybrid cloud solutions

Redwood City, Calif. and Bellevue, Wash. — March 27, 2012 — Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, and Tier 3, the enterprise cloud platform provider, today announced a partnership to create an enterprise-ready gateway to the cloud by offering Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform via Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. The partnership enables enterprise customers to take advantage of the business agility and cost efficiency cloud technologies offer by using Tier 3’s enterprise-grade Infrastructure as a Service across Platform Equinix™. Initially, Tier 3’s solution will be available in Equinix’s Chicago and New York data centers with plans to expand globally, first into Europe and later to Asia.

“Platform Equinix provides secure, scalable and highly interconnected data center services across 38 strategic global markets. Our network choice combined with access to a wide array of leading cloud services solutions, gives customers a rich environment to build and integrate private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions,” said Chris Sharp, general manager, cloud and content for Equinix. “Our partnership with Tier 3 further strengthens Equinix’s position as the destination of choice for enterprise cloud deployments through high availability, security and business continuity required for a hybrid or virtual private cloud solution.”

Tier 3 serves the enterprise market with a public cloud solution known for its high-availability, and built-in business continuity as well as security features that enable isolated environments for each customer. Through a secure, cross connect, customers inside Equinix data centers will be able to quickly deploy a Virtual Private Cloud solution from Tier 3. This creates an extension of the customer’s enterprise, transforming the public cloud into a virtual private environment that meets IT’s stringent requirements for security and compliance.

“2012 is a tipping point year for hybrid cloud adoption as businesses move production workloads to the cloud. Virtual private cloud offerings such as the one created by the combination of high availability and security in Tier 3’s enterprise cloud and the high performance, low latency connectivity of Platform Equinix, are uniquely positioned to serve this growing demand,” said Adam Wray, president and chief executive officer at Tier 3.

Resources

About Tier 3

Tier 3 brings enterprise-class cloud services to businesses 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 Equinix

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects businesses with partners and customers around the world through a global platform of high performance data centers, containing dynamic ecosystems and the broadest choice of networks. Platform Equinix connects more than 4,000 enterprises, cloud, digital content and financial companies including more than 690 network service providers to help them grow their businesses, improve application performance and protect their vital digital assets. Equinix operates in 38 strategic markets across the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific and continually invests in expanding its platform to power customer growth. http://www.equinix.com.

Mar 2

Building Servers with the Tier 3 API

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By Troy Schneringer, Senior Developer. Find Troy on Twitter.

Any service provider worth its salt has to have an API. It’s one of the first questions we ask our providers and understandably one we get asked a lot as well. With our latest release we also updated our API, so I figured what better way to show off the API that with a sample of how easy it is to build a server.

First using Visual Studio 2010 we’ll install RestSharp using NuGet (if you don’t have NuGet installed stop reading and do yourself a favor and install it).

Install-Package RestSharp

Then create a rest client pointing at the Tier3 API.

private RestClient Client = new RestClient("https://api.tier3.com/rest");

Now we are ready to call the API. Once you create an API user in your account you can use it to logon and store the authentication in the client cookies.

var request = new RestRequest("/auth/logon");
request.Method = Method.POST;
request.RequestFormat = DataFormat.Json;
request.AddBody(new { APIKey = "b3b41e0818ad4dfdb9d43c964f680de1", Password = "plAtform6{+*" });

var response = Client.Execute(request);
var content = DeserializeContent(response);
if (content.StatusCode != 0)
throw new ApplicationException(content.Message);

if (Client.CookieContainer == null)
Client.CookieContainer = new System.Net.CookieContainer();

response.Cookies
.Select(c => new Cookie(c.Name, c.Value, c.Path, c.Domain))
.ToList()
.ForEach(c => Client.CookieContainer.Add(c));

You’ll notice a few helpers methods I created to deal with deserializing the JSON response into a dynamic object. I’ve included that code at bottom for reference.

Let’s queue up the server for creation

var request = new RestRequest("/server/createserver");
request.Method = Method.POST;
request.RequestFormat = DataFormat.Json;
request.AddBody(new
{
Template = "WIN2008R2STD-64",
Alias = "DEMO",
Description = "API Demo Server",
HardwareGroupID = 123,
ServerType = 1, // 1-Standard, 2-Enterprise
ServiceLeve = 2, // 1-Premium, 2-Standard
Cpu = 2,
MemoryGB = 4,
ExtraDriveGB = 0,
PrimaryDNS = "4.2.2.2",
SecondaryDNS = "4.2.2.3",
Network = "vlan123_172.1.123"
});

var response = Execute(request);
if (response.StatusCode != 0)
throw new ApplicationException(response.Message);

CreateServer returns a RequestID for which we can use to query for the status of the server build. And since all server provisioning is done through Blueprints, we can use the GetDeploymentStatus method on the Blueprint API to check on how things are going.

var request = new RestRequest("/blueprint/getdeploymentstatus");
request.Method = Method.POST;
request.RequestFormat = DataFormat.Json;
request.AddBody(new { RequestID = 1149 /*content.RequestID*/ });

while (true)
{
var response = Execute(request);
if (response.StatusCode != 0)
throw new ApplicationException(response.Message);

if (response.PrecentComplete == 100)
break;

Thread.Sleep(60000);
}

And finally we Logout.

var request = new RestRequest("auth/logout");
request.RequestFormat = DataFormat.Json;
var response = Execute(request);
if (response.StatusCode != 0)
throw new ApplicationException("Failed to Logout");

And there you have it! 4 easy steps to provision a server from code. There are a ton of other things that you can do with the full API, but I’ll leave that up to you to discover.

As promised, the helper methods

private dynamic Execute(RestRequest request)
{
var response = Client.Execute(request);
return DeserializeContent(response);
}

private dynamic DeserializeContent(RestResponse response)
{
using (var reader = new StringReader(response.Content))
{
using (var json = new JsonTextReader(reader))
{
return JsonSerializer.Create(new JsonSerializerSettings()).Deserialize(json);
}
}
}

Originally posted on Troy’s blog.

Feb 27

Platform Update Enables Easier Management, Monitoring, and Reporting

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Tier 3 builds on an agile development methodology and we update our platform about once every six weeks, but this month’s release is a doozy! Over the last 48 hours we’ve released a major platform update that includes:

  • Group server management tools
  • Enhanced reporting
  • Self-provisioning monitoring
  • Scheduled tasks for all types of servers and groups of servers
  • More than 400 additional new features and bug fixes

New Group VM Capability Eases Server Management

Tier 3 Groups is a new feature that allows users to logically group virtual machines by environment type, application, or any other user-specified criteria for easier server management. (Watch the demo video above.) With Groups you can manage large-scale deployments without the burden of configuring and monitoring each server individually. You can nest groups up to 32 levels deep—with policies and permissions automatically inherited by sub-groups and override functionality at every level.

  • Schedule or perform management tasks (such as stopping and starting, rebooting, or setting to maintenance mode) across all servers in a group or sub-group
  • Set default server configurations (e.g. OS version, DNS settings, VLAN) when a new server is provisioned within a group
  • Adjust an environment’s footprint as needed by archiving and restoring a group of VMs with all policy and configuration settings intact, or take a group’s snapshot for enhanced disaster recovery capabilities

Enhanced Reporting for Deeper Performance and Usage Insights

For even easier auditing and resource monitoring, we now offer comprehensive group reporting across memory, CPU, and disk usage and performance. You will also be able to set capacity limits on those resources by group. Additionally group reporting lets users view support events, ticketing, and hourly and predicted monthly costs—and also gives customers a historical view of server or Group bandwidth, CPU, memory, and storage usage, as well as ping-ability. Users can choose to add alert recipients at the group or server level.

Many More Great New Features

Additional features in this platform update include:

  • Updated server naming to reflect the two types of environments – Enterprise and Standard
  • Scheduled tasks have come out of the “Lab” and are now available across all groups and servers—allowing users to schedule management tasks for better server administration
  • Enhanced cloud orchestration capabilities in our Blueprint feature include additional server-level control, as well as a richer search function to make it even easier to find Blueprints matching your business and technology needs
  • UI Customization allows customers and partners to tailor the color and graphics of the Control Portal – bringing your branded look and feel to your internal control portal
  • API updates including new API documentation
  • We’ve launched a SAML single sign on beta project; customers interested in having this activated should talk to their account rep

We hope you find these recent updates useful.

Log in or sign up today to get instant access to all the new features.

The Tier 3 Platform Team

Feb 24

When Provisioning Breaks, Blueprints Shine

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By Jared Wray, founder and CTO. Find Jared on Twitter.

There is nothing worse than getting that email or error warning you that provisioning has failed. And inevitably this happens at the very last stages of getting an environment automated.

You ask yourself: What happened? Why did it fail? And then: Did I build my own logging? Did the person that built the orchestration provide logging (and, if so, where is it)?

After asking yourself all of these questions, you realize that the orchestration/provisioning layer only shows you a simple “failure” message and no details of where it failed or why.

Frustrating.

With Blueprints, even failure is amazing…

“Blueprints” is Tier 3’s environment templating engine. It allows you to combine virtual machine templates, infrastructure tasks, script packages, and software packages to create a fully deployable environment — such as building a Microsoft Exchange server environment with just the click of a button.

The other Blueprint feature that is simply incredible is the debugging and details that you have access to when deploying a Blueprint. This includes access to not only the status of the deployment, but also the tasks being executed. If something fails, you know where and why.

Here is an example of a blueprint being executed that fails on step 9 of 18. Normally this would be difficult to troubleshoot, but here it is reporting where it failed and what the error message is from the log.

When building your own Blueprint the feature gives you great debugging insight: you can test and see where your deployment is breaking down instead of just guessing what the problem is.

You can also restart tasks at any level to keep testing and make adjustments as needed. Here is an example an error in the log:

2012-02-02 15:53:25.9724 [Error] [vFabric Gemfire Install] – ./install.sh: line 4: /gemfire_install.expect: No such file or directory
2012-02-02 15:53:33.7689 [Error] [vFabric Gemfire Install] – Error building
2012-02-02 15:53:34.2220 [Error] [Build Server GEM] – Error building
2012-02-02 15:53:34.6907 [Error] [Root] – Error building
2012-02-02 15:53:35.0657 [Trace] [] – >>>>>>>>>> Blueprint completed with errors <<<<<<<<<<

Tasks can contain sub-tasks, which would usually make for very complex troubleshooting. But with the Blueprints deployment system you will be able to view the tasks and the sub tasks that have completed or failed.

This is a great feature for doing complex deployments with advanced troubleshooting built right into the system.

These tools are available via Tier 3’s management control portal interface, or you can use our API to do deployments and management of the Blueprint layer.

Want to learn more?

Feb 21

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

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By Adam Wray, President and CEO. Find Adam on Twitter.

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.

Feb 21

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

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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

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

Feb 20

Tier 3 Announces Compliance with SSAE 16 Type II Standards

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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

Feb 14

Get Your vFabric On with Blueprints from Tier 3

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By Jared Wray, founder and CTO. Find Jared on Twitter.

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

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