Tier 3 founder Jared Wray, named CenturyLink Cloud CTO, might help modernize CenturyLink’s cloud services with more automation and self-service features.
CenturyLink, the telecommunications provider that in the past acquired cloud business enterprise Savvis, has purchased cloud employer Tier 3 and should immediately add its services to the CenturyLink Cloud. No purchase price was disclosed for the privately held company located in Bellevue, Wash.
Jared Wray, founder and CTO of Tier 3, becomes CTO of CenturyLink Cloud, and lead what is going to be the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center in Seattle. The goods, roadmap, and vision at that center turns into CenturyLink’s roadmap for the longer term, said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis cloud unit.
“Tier 3’s innovative automation and self-service platform are game-changing for our global enterprise clients,” said Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis unit.
The moves represent an accelerated commitment by CenturyLink to compete for cloud computing customers. Savvis was an important player in colocation facilities and managed services going in cloud computing. Nevertheless it didn’t start offering pay-as-you-go infrastructure service, like Amazon Web Services, until Oct. 10 after which only in beta form. In advance of that, it dealt inspite of its public cloud customers through monthly contracts, as a managed merchant would do. Savvis IaaS was dubbed SavvisDirect on Oct. 10; it was slated to become generally available later this year.
Savvis also offers Symphony Cloud Storage, which competes with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon S3 cloud storage services.
[Are looking to learn more about CenturyLink Savvis’ global reach? See Savvis Expands Worldwide Data Center Footprint.]
Tier 3 apparently built up more native cloud automation and self-service features in its infrastructure under Wray than Savvis did, since they’re becoming the same old bearers for the brand new CenturyLink Cloud.
“Our mission is to produce world-class managed services to global businesses on virtual, dedicated, and colocation infrastructures,” Von Deylen said within the announcement. The references to dedicated and colocation services reflect older parts of Savvis’ business. Dedicated hardware means servers which are utilized by one customer, not multitenant public cloud servers with their competitive economies of scale.
Wray have been an advocate of agile development, open source code, and DevOps, where operations has a say in how development proceeds, in running cloud infrastructure. He founded Tier 3 in 2006. CenturyLink Cloud will adopt those practices, in line with Von Deylen. “This acquisition underscores our continued commitment to delivering one of the most complete portfolio of cloud services,” he said.
Features of Tier 3 services include dynamic scaling of workloads, built-in disaster recovery, self-optimizing infrastructure, quality-of-service measures, performance level guarantees, and security. Gartner, in its Magic Quadrant on cloud suppliers, ranked Savvis slightly higher, as a challenger to the market’s leaders. It ranked Tier 3 as a gap player, however was the niche player that was closest to getting into the Challengers or Visionaries quadrant.
Of Tier 3 specially, Gartner’s summary said: “Tier 3’s availability-oriented features are of particular note. They include automatic replication of VMs right into a second data center, and storage that’s integrated with rolling backups and disaster recovery options. Tier 3’s largest VM size is 16X (16 virtual CPUs) with 128 GBs of memory.”
Tier 3 provides Blueprints, which are scripted by the client to supply virtual servers with particular characteristics, including provisioning to multiple data centers upon being commissioned.
“Tier 3 will attract organizations that need a user-friendly and capable cloud IaaS offering that meets the desires of developers but additionally provides the governance and management efficiencies desired by IT operations,” the summary concluded.
Wray had experience managing large Web infrastructures and consulting in financial services before founding Tier 3. He previously founded Dual, an interactive development firm, with Microsoft and Nintendo as clients.
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