Telco CenturyLink is moved to tiers: Biz gobbles Tier 3 cloud shop

Cloud provider Tier 3 has been snapped up by CenturyLink, fleshing out the telco's cloud portfolio and marking another sign of confidence in the Cloud Foundry platform technology.

The acquisition was announced on Tuesday and gives CenturyLink a sturdy .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service in the form of the Iron Foundry Tier 3 service, along with Tier 3's main hosting and backup biz.

It follows CenturyLink's gobbling of platform-as-a-service minnow (and Cloud Foundry aficionado) AppFog back in June.

"Tier 3's innovative automation and self-service platform are game-changing for our global enterprise clients," said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink’s Savvis organization, in a canned quote. "This acquisition underscores our continued commitment to delivering the most complete portfolio of cloud services."

Tier 3 recently added reconfigurable networking to its cloud technology to bring self-service network administration to its ESX-based cloud.

Though CenturyLink blusters in the acquisition about the significance of the buy, Tier 3 is rather small. As of August the company had 30TB of RAM under management across an undisclosed number of Dell servers, putting it at 2,000 servers max, versus 100,000 for Rackspace and, we reckon, millions for Amazon and Google.

Tier 3 founder Jared Wray is going to take the role of Chief Technology Officer for the CenturyLink cloud organization, and will likely work alongside AppFog chief Lucas Carlson.

The company says there will be no change to any existing SLAs, and "minimal changes to the cloud services you use today". Financial terms were not disclosed. ®