There are cloud offerings and then there are cloud offerings. As of today, Tier 3 just loaded up some big guns. Over the years Tier 3 has provided an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play using various geographically located data-centers with high level disaster recovery, high availability (99.999%), utility compute, and high speed storage to enterprise customers. Today Tier 3 has stepped beyond just that service offering and is moving toward what I’m assuming is a Cloud Foundry enabled Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering to pair with their IaaS.
Tier 3 is in a great position with their current offering to outpace others with regard to on-premise and cloud-based federated systems across geographic or limited to specific geographic areas. But it doesn’t stop there. Tier 3 sees this as merely the onset of bridging resellers and white label sellers together to bring more geographic capabilities and extend future capabilities more rapidly. This will enable capex spending to be distributing or removed from the bottom line of companies looking to use these systems. This advantage however won’t make their existing investments redundant and economically unattractive. This is a huge win in enterprise spaces since so much capex has already been expended on systems that now exist under the “legacy” of the businesses. This magical pairing of IaaS and PaaS will dramatically improve the ability for enterprises to make progress into and take advantage of cloud computing.
Tier 3 Global Geographic Layout
Of course all of these capabilities are problematic with the slower pace of development and lock in with .NET Applications. Well Tier 3 hasn’t sat idly by to wait for the next thing to move .NET along, instead Tier 3 forked the Cloud Foundry PaaS Software Solution and built Iron Foundry that works seamlessly with the Cloud Foundry Software to enable .NET. In addition to .NET Support the Iron Foundry Project has also enabled SQL Server Support and it looks like they’re working on even more.
I personally, have been impressed by the rapid progress of Tier 3 & the team there. Myself as a developer, I look out and see an active social media presence by the developers (and even CTO Jared Wray @jaredwray), the active forum and code commits against the Iron Foundry Project and there is no doubt that Tier 3 is making some huge strides into the enterprise cloud computing space! Further proof of their amazing progress is available with Tier 3′s news about attaining the VMware vCloud Powered Validation.
Stay tuned to Cloud Ave for more about Iron Foundry and Tier 3. Also, if you are a coder, jump into the Iron Foundry Project and check it out for yourself!
(NOTE: This is a Cloud Ave exclusive.)
Related articles
- Tier 3 Takes on Microsoft in the Cloud with an Open Source Platform (ostatic.com)
- .NET comes to Cloud Foundry (gigaom.com)
- Tier 3 to Bring Enterprise-grade Virtual Private Cloud to New York with New Data Center (prweb.com)
- Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform Attains VMware vCloud Powered Validation (prweb.com)
