Distributed Tenant Hosting over Multi-Tenant Hosting

Dan Farber did a nice post on us recently, however made one comment about multi-tenant as if to imply that it's better. Distributed tenant is the way to go. While 'Salesforce.com's servers are taking a holiday', Etelos's Distributed hosting network is online.

About Etelos, Farber wrote, "Etelos doesn't have the cost and management advantages of a multitenant architecture - every deployment is a unique installation."  On the surface, the sound of this strategy may seem counter intuitive.  But when you understand that each businesses data and applications is mission critical, having every company using a system with a unique installation gives us total portability and scalability to meet their unique needs. It means we can move accounts in minutes from deployment to deployment so not to have to perform the same type of updates that Farber wrote about in his post today.

Today, Farber had an excellent post called 'Salesforce.com's servers are taking a holiday'...  My favorite gem is this, "Multitenancy has some cost advantages, but individual customers can't schedule their your own downtime."  Wow.  Following the shared hosting example of an apartment building that Benioff (Salesforce's CEO) uses in his presentations that I have seen, I would phrase it this way; "when the apartment building is under construction, we all feel the pain." 

So is there a better way to host your data in an on-demand model?

Etelos is all about Customer Choice in where your data is hosted.

We give customers all the features of On-Demand distribution, and all the benefits of custom built applications.  The secret?  The Etelos methodology for distributing code and the Etelos Application Server platform. We decided that the code problem we are going to solve is having thousands and thousands of instances of applications deployed and up-to-date. And in this way, long-term, the customer will benefit more with the freedom to choose where their application lives and how secure their data will be.  It's their data, it's their equity... shouldn't they have the choice?

So how does Etelos do it?   

The Etelos Ecosystem for distribution is broken down into three layers: choice in applications, customizable framework with support for multiple languages, and choice in hosting solutions, ie. distributed tenant hosting.

Of course, this block diagram makes it seem so simple.  Moving applications around to give customers this freedom is hard work. So the real diagram that demonstrates all the moving peices looks something more like this. 

The diagram above, shows the movement from applications through our processes from lower left, up into the support and store site... through packaging and distribution to customers whether hosting in a shared, independent, or personal location.  

All it means is this: with Etelos, you get your choice of Apps, choice of customization, and choice in hosting. 

Although I already said it, we work hard to make our distributed solution work.  The rewards are more up-time for users, and more choice for their data needs.  We are pretty proud of this model and it's the type of solution that businesses need to really benefit from all the freedom of web based solutions, and all the security of controlling their own data.

In closing, our updates were done without an outage tonight. I wonder if... 

So I as I close up this brief post, I am reminded that Salesforce is still hard at work, trying to get those servers back online to keep their customers and users happy. They said it would be tonight from 8PM to 2AM.  Six stressful hours. Good luck guys.

Meanwhile, Etelos has thousands of updates tonight improving the systems for tens of thousands of users.  From what I can tell, it has been uneventful with no interruptions. 

Hmmm... I like the distributed tenant thing better.