Today, GoGrid and Appistry announced a new partnership initiative. The full press release is below:

Appistry Extends Cloud Computing Reach

New Partnerships and Pricing Simplify the Delivery of Critical Applications Via Third-Party Clouds

ST. LOUIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Appistry, a provider of cloud application platform software, today announced a new partnership initiative and pricing that makes it easier for enterprises to deliver highly scalable and reliable applications via third-party “public clouds.” The announcement extends the reach of the company’s flagship product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF), which powers cloud-based applications for Global 2000 companies, high-profile government agencies and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

The announcement is part of the company’s strategy to address the complex challenges enterprises face developing, deploying and managing applications in both public and private clouds. Appistry’s cloud application platform simplifies cloud computing and allows enterprises to more easily realize its full promise — elastic scalability, solid reliability and automated management.

Leading analyst firms and industry experts have said better tools are required to help enterprises successfully make the move to the cloud-based architectures popularized by firms such as Yahoo and eBay.

According to Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst Frank Gillett, “Vendors such as Appistry… offer various versions of software tools and architecture to enable firms to build cloud IT architectures without the handcrafting that Web giants resort to.” (December 2007, “There are Three IT Architectures, Not One”)

As part of a new partnership initiative, Appistry is extending the availability of its application platform to a number of leading cloud infrastructure providers. Through the program, these providers will allow customers to:

• Access pre-configured versions of its Appistry EAF Community Edition on Microsoft Windows or Linux;
• Create new Appistry-powered virtual machines on-demand, to scale-out applications with a simple mouse click;
• Purchase full Appistry EAF licenses directly through each partner via direct end-user billing, when and where available.

(more…)

Cloud Computing has entered mainstream media…but if you ask people what it is, many can’t really tell you. My job as the Technology Evangelist at GoGrid is to try to help people understand it, whether they be technical or not. We have several channels that we have been trying to communicate what cloud computing is, and each method talks to a different audience. However, I sometimes forget that not everybody is technical or loves technology as much as I do and when I start talking to those people, their eyes glaze over.

Here are some of the current ways we, here at GoGrid, are talking about Cloud Computing:

• The GoGrid product site – for general product information
• This GoGrid blog – industry and GoGrid specific topics
• The GoGrid Wiki – for technical documentation
• The GoGrid Forums – where GoGrid users can ask questions or post tips
• NoHardware.com – showing Cloud Computing in a different light

Well, a few months ago, we realized that we needed something even simpler and more understandable, generalized enough for anyone to understand. What Tim (GoGrid UI Designer) and I came up with is below (also hosted on YouTube here):

(more…)

I don’t typically write about vaporware, but in this case, I will make an exception not only to finally get to use the phrase “cloud computing is truly vaporware” but also to seriously introduce this new GoGrid feature. Contrary to the definition of “vaporware,” Cloud Storage on GoGrid will be coming soon, so I wanted highlight many of the items in this upcoming release.

First, a picture is worth a thousand words. Below are a few screenshots of what is our vision of GoGrid’s Cloud Storage. Please note that these screenshots represent current ideas and may not actually represent the first implementation or subsequent updates.

Now for the juicy details:

• Technical
  (more…)

Today, GoGrid and RightScale announced a major new strategic product partnership. The full press release is below:

RightScale First to Deliver Integrated Management for Multi-Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing Momentum Builds with RightScale Support for FlexiScale, GoGrid and Rackspace

Interop New York Conference Expo (PRWEB) September 17, 2008 — RightScale, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, today announced a major new strategic product and partnership initiative as it broadens its cloud management platform to support emerging clouds from new vendors, including FlexiScale and GoGrid, while continuing its long-standing support for Amazon’s EC2. RightScale is also working with Rackspace to assure compatibility with their cloud offerings, including Mosso and CloudFS. RightScale will be the first in the industry to offer an integrated management dashboard, where applications can be deployed once and managed across these and other clouds.

Businesses can take advantage of the nearly infinite scalability of cloud computing by using RightScale to deploy their applications on a supported cloud provider. They gain the capabilities of built-in redundancy, fault tolerance, and geographical distribution of resources – key enterprise demands for cloud providers. With RightScale, customers can leverage the leading cloud management platform to automatically deploy and manage their web applications – scaling up when traffic demands, and scaling back as appropriate – allowing them to focus on their core business objectives. RightScale’s automated system management, pre-packaged and re-usable components, leading service expertise and best practices have been proven as best-of-breed, with customers deploying hundreds of thousands of instances on Amazon’s EC2.

“Cloud computing is a disruptive force in the business world because it provides pay-as-you-go, on-demand, virtually infinite compute and storage resources that can expand or contract as needed,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, Inc. “A number of public providers are already adopting cloud architectures – and we also see private enterprise clouds coming on the horizon. Today’s announcement of RightScale’s partnerships with FlexiScale and GoGrid is an exciting indication of how mid-market and enterprise organizations can really take advantage of multi-cloud architectures. There will be huge opportunities for application design and deployment — we are at the beginning of a tidal shift in IT infrastructure.”

FlexiScale is the only UK-based cloud computing provider and offers a unique infrastructure on demand with 99.99% SLA and many special features. For example, each customer gets their own virtual disk so that data is segregated and they can do their own low level encryption, while virtual network traffic is also segregated to deliver added security. FlexiScale uniquely offers permanent on demand storage and was the first cloud provider to support Windows. With a strong reputation for customer service, it also enables the creation of custom packages such as golden images.

Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre and creator of FlexiScale commented: “Without this new ability to move swiftly and easily between platforms, customers could feel locked in and much more hesitant to try and use cloud computing. RightScale’s partnership initiative is a great example of how having near interoperability between systems will enable customers to be less hesitant of moving to a new technology, which is great for everyone. It means the industry can and will grow quicker than if it was only a handful of individual companies providing distinct services that weren’t compatible with each other.”

(more…)

John Willis just produced an Interesting podcast with Michael Crandell (CEO of RightScale). In this podcast, John interviews Michael about RightScale’s recent announcement of the GoGrid/RightScale partnership as well as other partnerships and ideas.

More info on the GoGrid/RightScale partnership can be seen here.

If I could sum up the podcast, it would be how RightScale (with a partnership with GoGrid and others) are delivering the “on-ramp” to allow companies to migrate to the Cloud and provide portability to the cloud by providing a multi-hosted cloud infrastructure.

The podcast can be heard here. Highlights, according to John are:

• Services is key to the clouds
• No Windows support at this time (ed. note: Windows Server 2003/2008 in the Cloud is currently available on GoGrid)
• Infrastructure cloud partners
• Clarification on Rackspace/Mosso
• RightScale and Eucalyptus Wasup?
• Changes to the RightScale Business Model

(more…)

Perhaps that subject was not strong enough. The Financial Sector is currently weathering a hurricane, recently suffering the largest drop since 9/11. Merrill Lynch fell into the hands of Bank of America. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy and looking for a buyer with Barclays buying some of their assets. The Airline industry is failing. AIG and other financial companies are looking for some sort of an economic bailout. HP is eliminating 24,600 jobs. And this was all over just a few days. If one extends the look a bit further, the perspective is just a grim: gas prices going up, the dollar losing value and housing going down. One simply cannot be surprised by any of this.

The Tech Sector is getting hammered as well, but this time, it isn’t “our fault.” The Dot Com bust managed to drag down the other sectors last time, but we learned our lesson. Long gone are unproven businesses and their associated models. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are taking long looks at business, not just getting in the car for a drive but doing a full check under the hood, looking at the road both ahead and behind and fully vetting the drivers and passengers. To get money as a start-up is truly an accomplishment nowadays. You have to have a proven business model, installed user base, and a clear direction of where your company and your industry will go.

I recently attended TechCrunch 50 which showcases 50 startups and allows them to present their business or service to a panel of experts. I saw about 1/2 of the companies’ presentations and I noticed that the companies where they couldn’t articulate or prove their monetization strategy, these companies got an earful of criticism from the experts. Similarly, at a meetup in San Francisco, the question asked every presenter is “How are you making or going to make money?” It’s a very simple question, but one that must be answered or the company loses credibility.

Perhaps we should apply these same simple questions to the Financial, Housing and Airline Industries? I guess the markets are already doing that.

It will take a long time before all of these markets start to recover, and corporations and businesses are currently challenged to prevent the hemorrhage of money and capital expenditures within their IT infrastructure. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Cutting Tech’s Energy Bill” by William M. Bulkeley that discusses how large companies are looking at ways to cut electricity usage within the Enterprise. With energy costs directly and indirectly rising, it’s critical for the embattled IT manager or director to make fiscally sound and environmentally responsible decisions to keep their business moving forward will simultaneously ensuring that their technology progresses.

(more…)

From Monday through Wednesday (Sept 8-10), GoGrid will be an exhibitor at TechCrunch 50. The TechCrunch Expo was started last year with a simple goal: “find the best start-ups and launch them in front of our industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.” This is an event where 50 start-ups are launched into stardom. There is also a “DemoPit” where 100 early stage startups are introduced to the public.

We have always felt that it is important to give startups an opportunity to succeed by allowing them to focus on their business and not their hosting. GoGrid is great for startups for so many reasons: usage-based billing, scalability, free support, and the on-demand nature of requisitioning and provisioning hardware in real-time. Furthering our commitment to startups, GoGrid (and ServePath) also host a not-for-profit meetup in San Francisco called StartUp SF. This event is designed to provide people who are engaged in initial stages of a startup, thinking about launching a new company or just excited to exchange ideas with like-minded professionals, with tactics and strategies to head down the road of success. We will be having the StartUp SF (v1.3) meetup at the conclusion of TechCrunch 50 from 6-9pm (just at the right time to have some food and drinks and hear some design team strategy tips from guest speaker, Scott Nazarian, from the premier design shop, frog design).

For those who want to follow the action of TechCrunch 50, uStream has provided a live feed of the event (shown below):

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

Hope to see some of you at the TC50 event! Drop by our booth and come to StartUp SF after TC50 on Wednesday night after the event.

Recently some questions were presented related to security of the GoGrid portal, passwords and how GoGrid support handles passwords. We take these matters with utmost priority and consequently have immediately implemented some short and long terms procedures, policies and programmatic fixes to address them.

GoGrid is a secure environment

For starters, I would like to reiterate the fact that the entire GoGrid portal, including the Support chat therein, are 128-bit SSL encrypted. This has been in place since GoGrid was initially launched and a hard-stop requirement when we did launch.

Also, all GoGrid passwords are 1-way hash-encrypted within our databases and have been this way since the public launch of GoGrid.

New Procedures and Password-Recovery Development

In order to rectify this current password security concern, we have implemented the following items (effective immediately): (more…)