Folks - I have some bad situation and some good.... so, please read. I hope this helps some of you investigating hosting/infrastructure options.

I want to share with the forum readers a situation I had run into. Having learned so much from this forum, I would like to contribute my experience.

I am part of a new startup with several internet services under development. We have investigated various options of infrastructure setup in preparation for our new services. Like many, we have the obvious requirements in mind, such as scalability, fault-tolerance, etc... We considered various setups, including dedicated servers with load balancers, SSI such as OpenSSI and Open Mosix, Amazon EC2/S3, and we finally decided to try 3Tera's AppLogic grid as soon as we found out about its availability.

We had prior experience in large infrastructures that handled financial institution transactions, so we understood some of the pitfalls/complexities involved in ongoing operations. So, a main concern we had was, we wanted something that can help us use our time and resources efficiently, so that we don't spend a lot of time in maintenance and operations.

We wanted ways that can keep us focused on working on our business, not battling with IT operations. When we took a look at 3Tera's product, we thought that it provided us with the phenomenal capability to easily scale, and allow us to have an infrastructure set up with high level of hardware utilization with minimal waste.

So, very quickly, we committed and signed up with a service provider that supported 3Tera's AppLogic. We were happy with what we saw, and basically considered the infrastructure decision as a closed issue.

Well..... not too long after we committed, we got a huge surprise! We received a notice from the service provider that they can no longer support the grid service, and we were given several days to migrate whatever we had off of the grid onto somewhere else. Luckily, we were not yet in production mode, but.... we had to first get our test environment off and figure out what infrastructure to go with and where/how to move. And we had LESS THAN 4 days to do all that!!!!

Our grid app was made to have NAS, ruby on rails with lighttpd, load balancers, firewall, mail gateway, log servers and mysql databases. Even though we also have our own rack servers on hand ready to ship and deploy to whatever datacenter, the thought of trying to migrate all those app functions to dedicated servers or private racks with our own servers....., we didn't think that we could do it in 2-3 days.

I quickly contacted 3Tera, and explained the situation we were facing. Although I didn't have a direct relationship with 3Tera, the 3Tera team immediately assured me that they will do whatever they can to help. At that point, I was considering looking at alternative solutions again. But.... to us, the 3Tera AppLogic is truly an elegant solution, and the level of attention from 3Tera convinced me to give it another shot and see what happens.

Quickly, 3Tera team was able to put me in contact with Layered Technologies, and explained to me how Layered Tech has been committed in ramping up their learning and support of 3Tera's AppLogic grid product.

By the time the first few conversations were over with 3Tera and Layered Tech, Layered Tech built up a new private grid for us to migrate to. Both 3Tera and Layered Tech teams offered to migrate for us, but I wanted to see if 3Tera's product is really as good as they claim....so, I tried to migrate our grid app myself.

The migration turned out to be an extremely simple process, that basically involved issuing a migrate command on the old grid, instructing it to migrate the app to the new grid. The command took some time to finish executing, as it had to move quite a bit of data. But once completed, all we had to do was reconfigure the app on the new grid with new ip addresses for the app, the gateway, netmask and dns ip address, which only took a few minutes. Amazingly, we were then able to fire up our grid app on the new grid! No hardware issues to deal with what-so-ever!

The whole situation all happened within a bit over 2 days elapsed time. I'm talking about everything including :
- start of contact with 3Tera,
- thru Layered Tech building up new grid,
- to complete migration of grid app from old grid to new grid that included loadbalancers, NAS, app software, firewall, mail gateways, mysql, etc....

Everything migrated from 1 set of hardware in one data center to a newly built grid hardware in another data center all around 2 days elapsed time! Total time I spent on dealing with this whole situation was only a few hours!

Throughout that time of migration, both 3Tera and Layered Tech took the initiative to follow closely and provide answers to questions. They treated me as if I had been a customer for them for years! It's like the attention and services I get at my Mercedes dealership!

I'm absolutely amazed and really appreciate the level of support that both 3Tera and Layered Technologies provided me. They did not have to be involved to help me, but they chose to and were able to beautifully resolve my crisis. Not only they were able to come to my rescue, but they were able to turn a bad situation around for me in what I believe within an impossible timeframe. To me, the 3Tera product is phenomenal, and the people behind both 3Tera and Layered Technologies showed me how great these two companies are to their customers.


For selfish reason, I wish these two companies their long term success, because I'm staying with them, and investing our future in them. I for one have no desire to battle hardware and operational issues. I want my team to focus on developing our business, and I believe these two companies, 3Tera and Layered Technologies are key components to our solution to help us maintain our focus. For those of you that are looking for a solution to your web business - I hope this helps you in saving you some time and energy, and allows you to focus on what's most important - developing and operating your business.

I'm open to PM. Thanks for reading, and good luck to you!