This week I met with the VP Marketing of 3TERA, Bert Armijo. We spoke about utility computing. I am not an expert in this area but the discussion was interesting. I thought my notes might be useful to at least one CN reader so they are listed below. Bert walked me through a demo of their program which looks like a Visio for web apps except of course it's live. You setup whatever you need within the environment (web, firewalls, etc.), click "go" and it creates everything on the fly. Management of each device is also handled within the interface.

• Bert started by explaining that, "The next Google won't own a server"
• Big companies are spending billions on web infrastructure and 3TERA aims to change that
• Their OS is named AppLogic and sits on top of a web hosting server (it appears as if you still need to provide the hosting)
• After setting up AppLogic, the web app becomes one unit instead of many parts
• Basically you can run web apps without having to know anything about the hardware itself

Pricing starts at $500 which is suitable as a development environment. The full starter package runs about $1,700 and most customers average in the $6-7k range.

Here is my net takeaway from the conversation. If you are building a (possibly) massive Web app, this type of utility computing might be worth looking into. Here are some additional resources on utility computing:

• Wikipedia
• UtilityComputing News – looks a bit out of date but has links to articles about UC

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