Tier 3 Press

Tier 3 Introduces The Farm

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Easy-to-Use On-Demand Web Hosting Platform Increases Scalability and Reduces Downtime

SEATTLE, Wa. – April 22, 2010 – Tier 3, a leader in the delivery of managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions, today announced The Farm, a scalable web-hosting platform that enables customers to quickly and securely deploy their websites on demand, without having to worry about downtime or performance issues.

The Farm is based on the Tier 3’s patent-pending Auto Scale technology. Auto Scale can automatically scale web applications to hundreds of virtual servers, enabling customers to increase or decrease their websites’ resources on demand in a secure environment, without having to worry about cost or over provisioning. With this capability, The Farm automatically enables your site on a secure computing platform with technologies such as CDN and Load Balancing. As a result, customers can deploy web applications easily and cost effectively, in minutes instead of hours.

“Developers, ad agencies, ecommerce providers, and small businesses need to be up and running quickly, with the ability to handle traffic in order to realize revenue. The Farm is a cost-effective way to manage this,” said Jared Wray, CEO of Tier 3. “By providing a high-performance, robust enterprise platform that is truly scalable and easy to use, customers can continue to manage their businesses without the hassle or costs involved with other Web-hosting platforms.”

The FWA (Favorite Website Awards) recognizes the best in cutting-edge website design. The FWA currently accommodates 3.6 million site visits and almost 100 million hits on a monthly basis. In order to support its growth plans to eventually reach five million site visits per month, founder and owner Rob Ford needed a reliable hosting solution that could scale without compromising uptime.

“The Farm is a powerful and reliable hosting service that I have come to depend upon to execute on the FWA’s growth plan,” said Ford. “It gives me a solid backbone for my business, which has grown year over year – even through the latest recession.”

Prior to becoming a Tier 3 customer in 2004, the FWA experienced hosting issues that included a lot of down time and poor technical support.

“Tier 3’s technical knowledge and experience working with some of the biggest brands in the world are evident in the amazing uptime I experience and the swift manner in which my rare requests for technical support are resolved,” continued Ford. “I am so glad I switched my hosting to Tier 3’s The Farm. It is a decision I have never regretted.”

So far, Tier 3 customers that have deployed The Farm have at least doubled the performance of their websites. Tier 3 has worked with enterprise technologies from companies such as NetApp, VMware, Cisco and Limelight to deliver this superior offering.

Additional features of The Farm include:

Clustered database layer
Support for PHP, and .NET
Applications such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento!
HIPAA, PCI, and SAS 70 Type II Compliant.
Instant Content Delivery Network with no code changes
Enterprise bandwidth at a lower cost
Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and MySQL 5

The Farm is available at a starting price of $131 US per month. To purchase the farm, customers can visit www.Tier3.com to sign up. A free, 30-day trial is also available.

About Tier 3

Tier 3 serves as an extension of its customers’ IT departments by providing enterprise-level managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions to global organizations spanning a variety of industries. By extending their network to Tier 3 facilities, companies can focus on their core business while speeding time to market, improving quality, and reducing cost. With its unmatched architecture and platform, Tier 3 is changing the way organizations view their information technology investments, delivering infrastructure solutions that are critical assets to the companies they serve.

Tier 3 is recognized as a leader in the managed services and virtualization market by VMware and other consulting firms.

Founded in 2000, Tier 3 is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with datacenters located in Seattle and Salt Lake City. For more information, please visit www.tier3.com , or email sales@tier3.com.

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Media Contacts:

Marisa Marzano

Big Sky Communications

(705) 484-5105

marisa@bigskypr.com

Tier 3 teams up with Limelight Networks to provide content delivery services

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Tier 3 Customers Will Benefit from Limelight’s Private Backbone to Provision Storage for Rich Digital Media Content

SEATTLE, Wa. – December 16, 2009 – Tier 3, a leader in the delivery of managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions, today announced that it will provide content delivery services from Limelight Networks, Inc to its global customer base. The arrangement will enable Tier 3 to access Limelight’s global network of data centers and direct connections to over 900 access networks so that customers’ content can bypass the public Internet for more reliable speed and greater quality of service.

"With the combined forces of Tier 3 and Limelight Networks, our enterprise customers will reap the benefits of flexible, scalable and cost-efficient solutions for their content delivery needs without having to worry about timely access to the network," said Jared Wray, principal of Tier 3. "We pride ourselves on offering premium services that will enhance our customers’ experience, and our arrangement with Limelight certainly fits the bill."

Limelight Networks provides scalable, on-demand managed infrastructure solutions that route traffic along a private, fiber-optic backbone to bypass Internet traffic congestion. Tier 3’s virtual servers and web farm will be integrated with the following Limelight solutions so that customers can quickly and easily provision their content delivery infrastructure:

LimelightDELIVER – a fast, reliable, and scalable distribution service that meets the growing global demand for immediate access to rich digital media content
LimelightSTREAM – a comprehensive streaming service that delivers rich media quickly, at a capacity of 2.5 terabits per second
LimelightSITE – a new content delivery platform that accelerates website
LimelightHD – builds on LimelightDELIVER and LimelightSTREAM service suites, leveraging the same robust network to speed delivery of HD video to customers’ screens

"Tier 3 has consistently demonstrated its commitment to its customers, and the company’s decision to work with Limelight is further testament to this," said Adam Wray, Vice President, Alliances, Limelight Networks. "The need for consistent, high-performance delivery of rich digital media assets and entire web sites is the first step towards improving the profitability of online businesses. Tier 3 has recognized this and is taking the necessary steps to ensure its customers have a high-quality, scalable solution to handle these needs."

About Limelight Networks, Inc.
Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) is trusted by the world’s most innovative enterprise, entertainment, technology, and software brands to improve the performance and profitability of web sites and end-user experiences. Our scalable, on-demand managed infrastructure solutions provide global reach and consistently high availability, by routing traffic over a private fiber-optic backbone rather than through the often-congested, unpredictable public Internet. For more information, visit our web site (http://www.limelightnetworks.com), read our blog (http://blog.llnw.com), or follow @llnw on Twitter.

About Tier 3
Tier 3 serves as an extension of its customers’ IT departments by providing enterprise-level managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions to global organizations spanning a variety of industries. By extending their network to Tier 3 facilities, companies can focus on their core business while speeding time to market, improving quality, and reducing cost. With its unmatched architecture and platform, Tier 3 is changing the way organizations view their information technology investments, delivering infrastructure solutions that are critical assets to the companies they serve.

Tier 3 is recognized as a leader in the managed services and virtualization market by VMware and other consulting firms.

Founded in 2006, Tier 3 is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with datacenters located in Seattle and Salt Lake City. For more information, please visit www.tier3.com , or email sales@tier3.com.

Lab Services are Live!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

TIER 3 DEBUTS VIRTUAL LAB AUTOMATION SOLUTION WITH LAUNCH OF LAB SERVERS

Cloud-Based Virtual Lab Service Speeds Time to Market, Improves Quality and Reduces Costs

Seattle, Wa. – December 1, 2009 – Tier 3, a leader in the delivery of managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions, today announced the launch of Lab Servers. Lab Servers is a hosted service that allows developers to create a fully automated environment for quick and easy provisioning of their development infrastructure.

Unlike other vendors’ virtual lab offerings, Tier 3’s Lab Servers work in pre-production as well as in production environments. This cloud-based service is ideal for companies that currently house their own development servers, or that rely on online web servers for their development, testing, and demonstration needs. Lab Servers simplifies the development, testing, and sales demonstration environments by creating a self-service, on-demand environment and the ability to go directly to production quickly, with no upfront costs.

"With Lab Servers, users can leverage virtualization technology, and all of its benefits, in a very cost-effective manner in order to meet their business objectives," said Jared Wray, principal of Tier 3. "Lab Servers offers a rapid return on investment by moving the resources directly to the developers, quality assurance, and sales teams with little to no effort from the company. With Lab Servers, users also have the confidence of knowing their applications are safe, providing the peace of mind they were lacking with other solutions."

Tier 3 Lab Servers allows customers to provision servers via control panel or API, create templates, clone lab instances, group servers into projects, track pricing by groups or projects, archive off the environment for later use, and much more. Lab Servers is compliant with the Statement on Auditing Standard (SAS) 70 Type II; the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS); and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

"Since implementing Lab Servers, we no longer have to worry about acquiring resources needed to get the job done and the support required to maintain such an environment, so our network administrator and our development team can focus more efficiently on other tasks," said Andy Evans, founder and CTO of Obeo. Obeo is a North American supplier of full-service online marketing products for the residential real estate market. "We can move directly from the development to the production stage very quickly. And because everything is backed up before we deploy, we have the flexibility to easily move back to the development stage if the need arises. Overall, Lab Servers is a reliable service that has saved us time, money, and stress."

Lab Server pricing begins at $0.17 per hour. When the server is turned off or paused, customers will only be charged for storage

About Tier 3

Tier 3 is recognized as a leader in the managed services and virtualization market by VMware and other consulting firms.

Founded in 2000, Tier 3 is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with datacenters located in Seattle and Salt Lake City. For more information, please visit www.tier3.com , or email sales@tier3.com.

Media Contact:
Marisa Marzano
Big Sky Communications
(705) 484-5105
marisa@bigskypr.com

The Black Book of Outsourcing recognized Tier 3 as one of the Top Ten

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Black Book of Outsourcing recognized Tier 3 as one of the Top Ten 2008 MID TIER INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS) (&CLOUD COMPUTING*) companies for 2008.

Each survey is open annually from early March to mid-May, collecting the responses on 26 key performance indicators from users of outsourcing and their satisfaction relative to their vendor experiences. From its inception in 2004, the Black Book Survey has set the standard for unbiased customer-based ratings of outsourcing vendors and advisors worldwide. In this, our fifth year of outsourcing data gathering, validated respondents have grown by 16% in 2007 to over 24,000 currently. Additionally, the number of qualified outsourcing database of vendors has also grown to 4,638 and 166 consultants/advisory firms.

The Black Book of Outsourcing has teamed up with its media partner The Wall Street Journal to announce and publish the 2008 “Top 50 Best Managed Outsourcing Vendors” results in its online entity www.WSJ.com in early June after the database completes the audit phases.

Link to list: http://theblackbookofoutsourcing.com/vendors-infrastructure-midtier-iaas-cloud-computing-2008.htm

2008 MID TIER INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS) (& CLOUD COMPUTING*)

2008 RANK

1. Amazon
2. SAVVIS
3. 3TERA
4. BLUELOCK
5. LAYERED TECHNOLOGIES
6. TIER 3
7. MOSSO
8. ADAPTIVITY
9. JOYENT
10. NIRVANIX

Tier 3 moves forward with SAS 70 Type II Audit

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Seattle, WA – Tier 3 LLC, a leader in the delivery of world-class managed services and on-demand infrastructure solutions, today announced that the company has signed its contract for Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70 Type II certification. Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)—and widely recognized across industries—SAS 70 represents that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of their control objectives and control activities.

Achieving this certification will mean that Tier 3 has demonstrated that it has adequate controls and safeguards in place to protect data belonging to the company’s hundreds of customers. The independent service auditor’s report details the controls placed and operating effectiveness for Tier 3’s infrastructure solutions, helping assure current and potential customers that data entrusted to Tier 3 is secure, the necessary controls are in place, and these controls are functioning properly.

"We’re proud to deliver enterprise-quality services to our clients. This audit reflects our extraordinary commitment to providing our customers with reliable solutions that uphold the integrity of their data to the highest possible standard,” says Jared Wray, principal of Tier 3. “We plan to conduct a Type II audit every year to provide ongoing assurance that our operating and information technology control objectives will always be met.“We’re proud to deliver enterprise-quality services to our clients. This audit reflects our extraordinary commitment to providing our customers with reliable solutions that uphold the integrity of their data to the highest possible standard," says Jared Wray, principal of Tier 3. "We plan to conduct a Type II audit every year to provide ongoing assurance that our operating and information technology control objectives will always be met."

"Even for organizations that aren’t subject to Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, our SAS 70 Type II audit (scheduled completion date December 2008) eliminates the need for customers to conduct their own audits of our systems, which is going to save them valuable time and resources," says Wray. "This is what’s at the heart of everything we do—providing customers with trusted, secure solutions that help them better manage their spending and advance their core mission."

About Tier 3

Recognized as a leader in the managed services and virtualization market by VMware and other consulting firms, Tier 3™ is changing the way organizations view their information technology investments, delivering infrastructure solutions that are critical assets to the companies they serve. With an unmatched architecture and platform, Tier 3 offers enterprise-level managed services to businesses of all sizes around the world, and serves as an extension of customers’ IT departments, enabling them to focus on their core business by extending their network to Tier 3’s facilities.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Tier 3 opened its doors in 2000 and currently has datacenters in Seattle and Utah. Please visit www.tier3.com or email sales@tier3.com for more information.

XSP Adopts Tier 3 Platform to Meet Demands, Streamline Development, and Acceptance Testing

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

BIRMINGHAM, AL. – September 16, 2008 – XSP, the leading global provider of Corporate Actions software, announced today that it has selected Tier 3 (www.tier3.com), an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, to host and maintain its data center and technology Infrastructure requirements. As a strategic partner, Tier 3 will also provide an environment for hosting its User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and software automation labs. This selection was predicated on Tier 3’s ability to rapidly provision and secure technology assets as well as providing a high degree of flexibility with its On-Demand platform.

This partnership with Tier 3 establishes a foundation allowing XSP to provide its clients with additional flexibility for deploying the XSP platform, leading to a further streamlined implementation process. Tier 3’s On-Demand platform also enables the XSP solution to be configured and deployed in a purely virtual environment. This simplifies the deployment process by safely replicating virtual XSP images from the Tier 3 On-Demand platform to a client’s virtual server infrastructure without the duplicated effort and expense associated with migrating solutions from a development environment to a UAT environment and ultimately to production.

The XSP v5 platform is XSP’s state-of-the-art solution developed to automate each step in the processing of Corporate Actions. From data management to notification and response capture to entitlement management, global financial institutions gain immediate return on investment (ROI) with its flexible, modular approach and rules-based workflow engine. Re-engineered using advanced Microsoft technologies, the XSP v5 platform is built around a service-oriented architecture, utilizing Microsoft .NET components and Web services for global enterprise-wide processing. A SWIFTReady-labeled application, the XSP v5 platform is SWIFT 15022 compliant and combines cutting-edge technology with feature-rich functionality to mitigate operational risks and costs for end-to-end straight-through processing (STP).

Jared Wray, Principal, Tier 3, said, “As a rapidly-growing company with high client demands, XSP requires a dynamic environment capable of supporting ongoing technical innovations to the XSP v5 platform to continue advancing their leadership in the marketplace. Tier 3 provides them with a highly-scalable and secure enterprise-class platform without the associated costly hardware and infrastructure acquisition normally associated with IT. Tier 3 has expertise in all aspects of providing Infrastructure as a Service and we handle all the details so XSP can focus on their core business."

Dan Retzer, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer, XSP, said, "XSP requires an alternative to the traditional approach to IT infrastructure and data center support that is capable of keeping pace with our demands for growth, security and flexibility. Most Managed Services providers only partly meet our needs. We realized that the technology reached sufficient maturity for us to seek a provider that specializes in virtual technology for greater uptime and performance. Tier 3’s platform provides a proactive approach to delivering our internal applications, as well as meeting our clients’ demands for streamlining the UAT and implementation process.”

VMware Infrastructure 3 Reduces Outage Frequency

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

VMware Infrastructure 3 reduced the frequency of outages for core infrastructure services by 100 percent, saving 416 man hours per year in unplanned maintenance. VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High Availability (HA) are fully automated and performing flawlessly. VMware HA is really a simpler and cost-effective alternative to complex, traditional clustering technologies."

Faan DeSwardt, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Wyse Technology

Link to PDF

Pendo Systems Moves Investment Accounting Engine to Tier 3

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Pendo Systems Moves Investment Accounting Engine to Tier 3 Infrastructure as a Service Platform

Acquires On-Demand VMware based Compute Resources not Available from Managed Hosting Providers

Seattle, WA, December 17, 2007 – Tier 3 the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform experts, today announced that Pendo Systems, an investment accounting engine provider has chosen Tier 3 (www.tier3.com) to help deliver its application as a service (BasisPoint®). In preparation for Pendo Systems planned move to SaaS delivery, the company realized it needed more and better services usually found with the typical Managed Service provider. Pendo Systems found those services in Tier 3’s IaaS Platform. In addition, Pendo Systems sought not only an IT platform to deliver BasisPoint, but to also provide an environment for their customer’s whose application needs demanded a dedicated/customized environment. They found both in Tier 3. Pendo Systems will also be reselling Tier 3’s services as a dedicated platform to their clients.

Pendo Systems’ core product, BasisPoint®, is a global enterprise-grade investment accounting engine that is multi-currency, multi-basis and multi-client. The BasisPoint software features a unique, sophisticated functionality that is rapidly becoming the new standard in investment accounting system delivery.

Kaj Pedersen, COO, Pendo Systems, said, "We had been delivering our application to our clients on premises, client hosted. We understood that to be more competitive in today’s software environment we must move our product delivery method to a service. We also knew that as our user base grew, we needed more service than the typical managed service company could provide, like extending our VLAN to the datacenter and providing server scalability on the fly. Tier 3 IaaS platform provides a proactive approach to delivering our applications, multi-point customer experience monitoring and application monitoring. Choosing to deploy with Tier 3 is the best direction we could have chosen."

Jared Wray, Principal, Tier 3, said, "Pendo Systems’ story makes clear how Tier 3 is different from other managed hosting providers. Like Pendo Systems, any Web company that is running a live application to provide a service to users via the Web needs much more than a place to park its Web pages and underlying program code. Tier 3 has expertise in all aspects of Web application delivery and we handle all the details, so Pendo Systems and on-demand companies like it can focus on their core businesses."

About Tier 3 On-Demand
A comprehensive, Infrastructure as a Service platform, Tier 3 platform enables companies to quickly and securely offer applications on demand. Tier 3’s platform is a complete platform for SaaS delivery. Going beyond managed hosting, the Tier 3 On-Demand platform includes:

» Best-in-class scalable software, hardware and network infrastructure

» Application monitoring and tuning

» 24x7 level 3 application admin support

» VM Ware standardized platform delivering High Availability and Scalability on the fly.

» Quick migration from Physical to Virtual Servers

» Infrastructure analytics that offer insight into the performance and usage of the on-demand application

» Utility based pricing, a pricing model that allows businesses to scale up and out as need while being able to accurately forecast costs

About Pendo Systems
Pendo Systems has launched a comprehensive back office investment accounting system for insurance companies, banks, mutual funds and other large financial services organizations. Running on Microsoft solutions framework, including Windows 2003 Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 systems, it is several generations ahead of the aging legacy accounting systems now in widespread use. Firms can resolve the problems of old and inflexible systems and avoid the frequent work-arounds while reducing total cost of ownership with this new system based on a modern technology platform. As firms increasingly spread their investments around the globe, Pendo Systems can support them with BasisPoint which is multi-national, multi-currency and multi-client.

Pendo Systems, Inc. 245 Park Avenue, New York New York 10167 866 650 9816 Email: info@pendosytems.com http://www.pendosystems.com

About Tier 3
Tier 3™ delivers Infrastructure as a Service for companies, with hundreds of applications, millions of users and millions of transactions supported daily. Tier 3’s IaaS, the best platform for dedicated, managed hosting, is defining how managed services should be offered. By choosing Tier 3 as their Web application delivery partner, companies are freed from investing in and managing the complex and costly infrastructure and services necessary to deliver applications over the Web. They can instead focus their resources on developing, marketing and selling their applications and services. Tier 3 On-Demand is suitable for companies at any stage of growth, with any type of on-demand application. Tier 3 offers a unique pricing model, a unit-based pricing model that allows businesses to begin with a modest minimum commitment and scale expenses as revenues increase.

Headquartered in Seattle, WA, Tier 3 has datacenters in Seattle and Utah. For more information about Tier 3, visit www.Tier 3.com or email sales@tier3.com