I love my new 3tera t-shirt! And if you were here in Vegas, you might have gotten one too - along with a 3tera demo, assuming you haven't already test-deployed its AppLogic grid computing software. According to VP Marketing Bert Armijo, 3tera is currently at 3 EPE (I like evals per employee as a new unit of measure) - and counting.
When I met CEO Vlad Miloushev yesterday, he said that AppLogic is the most carefully research product he's ever built. Its features evolved over 500+ discussions with prospective customers, and its pricing model (per GB total RAM within grid, per hour) is continuing to be evaluated. The good news is, ServePath has started signing up paying customers on its newly launched, 3tera-powered UtilityServe. The end users are in the SaaS business.
During my Web Hosting Magazine days, I heard so many "we're doing great" trade show pitches that I became really attuned to hidden anxiety beneath the PR-speak. "We've been enthusiastically received" sometimes means "now if only we could close some deals". With Vlad, though, there was none of that. He seemed really, truly pleased with 3tera's progress. And when I ran into Phil Shih from Tier 1 Research later on, he agreed that there's not much of a future for stand-alone dedicated servers; more good news for 3tera.
I also met some folks from Hitachi who are here from Japan. They said while at least 50% of the country's population have Internet access, most people prefer to access the web via mobile devices. Also, outsourced web hosting isn't popular at all. Most companies maintain in-house Internet infrastructure.
And I had a long conversation about offshoring with Daryl Webb from Caledonian Investments of New Zealand and Singapore. Apparently some Indian companies now perform outsourced work in the Philippines and Vietnam, and lots of Singaporean have set up shop as bridges between companies in the West and contractors in China with solid technical experience but inadequate language skills.
The world is flat - and as I learned at a Taipei museun exhibit, it has been for some time. The Qin Dynasty, whose first emperor commissioned the Great Wall of China, was apparently founded by Turks.
What I see as 3tera's shortcoming, from what I've been told, is that nodes can't be added onto it past what it was originally setup for. For example, lets' say you setup a grid to support 30 machines. Then you start signing customers up to use it. Let's then say you saturate the grid with usage and need to expand upon it. from what I'm told you can't expand the grid any further. It has to be taken down again to be able to expand upon it. I hope i'm wrong in this case. I'd hate to think a grid couldn't have nodes added to it at will.
Posted by: Sports Racer | September 20, 2006 at 10:53 PM
Hmm... one of the bullet points on http://www.3tera.com is "Add or remove servers and storage without disrupting applications". So I think the software does allow you to expand the grid. One possible rate limiting factor is the fact all servers need to be connected to the same switch (or stack of switches). I'm guessing the addition of switches might require the grid to be restarted?
Posted by: Isabel Wang | September 23, 2006 at 08:36 PM