3Tera brings Windows to its cloud

3Tera has added support for Windows applications and appliances to version 2.4 of its cloud-computing platform AppLogic, the company announced Tuesday.

“This is the first commercial release that supports Windows. It has been in beta for a couple of months and customers have been using it in production,” said 3Tera CEO Barry Lynn.

The importance of Windows support has grown as the enterprise sector has started to get more interested in AppLogic. The company expects that customers will run the same applications in the cloud that they're currently running in traditional data centers, especially transaction-based ones, according to Lynn.

The platform already supports Sun Microsystem's Open Solaris, Solaris 10 and Linux, which is where 3Tera first got started.

3Tera has also added support for 64-bit systems, and any performance improvements from running an application on a 64-bit server will exist in the cloud as well, Lynn said.

With AppLogic, companies can mix and match 32-bit and 64-bit, according to 3Tera. “For your load balancer or your Web server, you probably don't need 64-bit, and for your database and your application server, where you do need the memory, you run a 64-bit environment,” said Peter Nickolov, CTO at 3Tera.

AppLogic 2.4 comes with several prebuilt 64-bit appliances, including MySQL, PostgreSQL and Tomcat.

3Tera has added a number of features on the management side in version 2.4 as well, including integrated policy engine support, better documentation in its visual editor (which is used to describe a deployment) and the integration of monitoring data with tools such as Hyperic and OpenView.

The policy engine support can, for example, be used to define service-level agreements. When the application exceeds a particular threshold AppLogic can start an additional server, and then stop it when the load drops, Nickolov said.

Users can also view the architecture of an application as described by 3Tera's Application Definition Language and not just the visual representation. The description can be used for troubleshooting or to create new architectures on the fly, according to Nickolov.

Enterprises and hosting companies that want to use the platform pay for the AppLogic software license, which starts at US$125 per month and server. They can then use the platform to deploy AppLogic in their own data centers either for in-house use or to build and offer cloud services in a hosted environment.

The upgrade to version 2.4 comes at no extra cost for existing customers.