Dynamic Appliances

How do Dynamic Appliances work?

AppLogic replaces expensive and difficult to integrate IT infrastructure such as firewalls, load balancers, servers and SANs with pre-integrated and pre-tested virtual appliances. Each appliance runs in its own virtual environment that boots it's own Linux OS and appears as a separate physical server to the software that runs inside the appliance.

AppLogic's catalog appliances are built using leading open-source infrastructure like Fedora Linux, Apache, MySQL, JBoss and many others. Users can modify catalog appliances or build their own appliances from scratch.

Some Examples

One of the first Dynamic Appliances 3Tera has created is called BCK – it is our backup enabler Dynamic Appliance. By simply dragging a copy of BCK into an AppLogic application and then setting the schedule, number of backup copies to keep, and the backup location – we currently support FTP and SFTP servers, Amazon S3, and DynaVol – the application will now be able to carry out its own backups with no operator intervention. It really is that simple.

Another powerful concept in Data Center management is the Patch Management Dynamic Appliance. This appliance manages the roll-out and roll-back of new virtual appliance code by monitoring the versions of appliances in the AppLogic catalog and comparing those to the versions of the appliances in your application. If a catalog update is detected you are prompted to confirm the upgrade. When the upgrade is finished the Patch Management Dynamic Appliance will automatically restart the now up to date appliance.

Portability

An important feature of Dynamic Appliances is their portability – when you make a copy of an applications or move it to a different data center (yes, all of this is possible with a single command in AppLogic), the new copy of the application preserves the operational capabilities on the Dynamic Appliance.

What other Dynamic Appliances have you developed?

For many 3Tera AppLogic users one of the most exciting solutions will be the SLA Dynamic Appliance. This appliance monitors the behavior of an AppLogic application and can request or release resources as required to meet performance goals.

We also have a disaster recovery Dynamic Appliance which can create and manage a redundant copy of an entire application and a Power Saver Dynamic Appliance which is a key component of the AppLogic power management system. When a data center switches over to backup power conserving energy can be critical in determining whether fuel supplies can meet the demand or will run short. The Power Saver Dynamic Appliance monitors a data center status application and when power switches from normal to backup power the Dynamic Appliance will shut down either all or part of enabled AppLogic applications and thereby reduce the power demand on backup systems.

What can users do with Dynamic Appliances?

More or less anything they can think of. One of our most advanced concepts is the MIG Self Migration Enabler. This Dynamic Appliance enables AppLogic applications to take snapshots of themselves and migrate from one AppLogic grid to another automatically. This solution could be used in conjunction with the Power Saver Dynamic Appliance to free up the energy demand at one data center by dynamically and automatically moving AppLogic applications to an AppLogic grid at another data center.

Can users create their own Dynamic Appliances?

Absolutely! 3tera provides all of the technical documentation and libraries required to implement custom Dynamic Appliances. We’re even making the source code of all of our own Dynamic Appliance such as the Backup and Power Saver Dynamic Appliance available as examples to be built on and extended.

Cost and availability

All 3Tera Dynamic Appliances will be provided free-of-charge to existing customers and will be available this November in alpha release.

Alpha Release Limitations

During alpha release AppLogic users will only be able to deploy a single Dynamic Appliance in an AppLogic application at a time. This will change when we enter the beta phase, when users will be able to deploy multiple Dynamic Appliances in each AppLogic application.

The future of Dynamic Appliances

3Tera envisions a whole range of standard Dynamic Appliances that will be available in the AppLogic appliance catalog that will make data center operations much simpler and easier. Combined with customer and consultant generated Dynamic Appliances we see a new era in data center operations emerging. This is 3Tera’s vision: A self managing virtualized data center infrastructure that makes configuration, provisioning, and management far more efficient and effective than it is today. 3Tera’s Dynamic Appliances are a key step in this evolution.