VMWorld 2009 is set to kick off next week and GoGrid will be there in the New Innovators Pavilion. Conference information can be found here. We hope that you will come and visit us at our booth there. The Expo itself is open on the following days and times (and we will be at the booth during these times):

• Monday, August 31st – 5:30pm-8:30pm
• Tuesday, September 1st – 10:00am-6:00pm
• Wednesday, September 2nd – 10:00am-6:00pm
• Thursday, September 3rd – 10:00am-2:00pm

While VMWare in the IT organization may be a good fit for many, there are obviously other alternatives for hosting a full IT infrastructure in the Cloud. GoGrid is one of the pioneers from that perspective. We not only provide Windows and Linux servers within the GoGrid Cloud, we also provide many industry standard components like hardware-based load balancing, private and public networking, dynamic mountable Cloud Storage solutions, an industry hardened and robust SLA and the ability to connect a cloud front-end with a dedicated or colocated backend server infrastructure. We like to call GoGrid a “cloudcenter” which is essentially a datacenter in the cloud. You can read up on the cloudcenter idea here and here.

At the show, we will be giving out high-value promotional codes good for trying out GoGrid’s Cloud Infrastructure for free. Of course, we will also have lots of SWAG (Stuff We All Get) to give away!

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Last week we at GoGrid officially announced that we had removed the Beta label from our core product. I was excited to receive a screenshot from an acquaintance showing how this announcement made the front page of Google News.

I hope that you have spent some time reviewing some of the new and updated features that were part of the GoGrid 2.0 announcement as well as the Out of Beta announcement including private server images (known as MyGSIs), 99.99% Uptime since the beginning of Q2 2009, and improved server deployment times, to name a few.

If you are already a regular GoGrid user, I would love to hear what you think about the MyGSI feature. Leave me a comment on this post, or send a Tweet to @GoGrid, @HighTechDad or @PaulLancaster. If you are new to GoGrid or Cloud Computing, I recommend that you contact one of the GoGrid Sales Specialists who can help further explain many of the standard and new features of the GoGrid Cloud. (Here’s a hint, the Specialists can give you a free trial for a new account on GoGrid with no risk involved! Just contact them via a Call, Email or Live Chat.)

Keep spreading the word about GoGrid and become a Fan of us on Facebook (use the new widget located on the GoGrid blog)!

You know about Cloud Computing right? And you know that GoGrid is probably one of the easiest onramps to hosting within the Cloud with our award-winning web-based portal, private server images called MyGSI, point-and-click deployments of Windows & Linux cloud servers, f5 load balancers and Cloud Storage. So, how can we further lower the barrier to entry to the Cloud? How about by providing a service that lets you ship us physical media like hard drives crammed full of data that you want in your GoGrid cloud? Let us load it for you to our Cloud Storage solution!

GoGrid Cloud Storage

First, you might be asking, what is GoGrid’s Cloud Storage anyway? It’s pretty simple actually. It’s an instantly scalable and reliable file-level backup and storage service for Windows and Linux cloud servers running in the GoGrid cloud. You basically mount GoGrid’s Cloud Storage, which uses a secure private network, using common transfer protocols like SCP, FTP, SAMBA/CIFS and RSYNC to move your data in and out of Cloud Storage. Your storage scales dynamically, on-the-fly, and you only pay for what you use.

Another nice thing, we give you an initial 10 GB of space for FREE! Each additional GB is $0.15/GB per month. More info can be found on the GoGrid product page as well as on this (older) blog post.

The New Data Transfer Service

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Tomorrow, strategic partner Stratonomic and GoGrid will be hosting a webinar where you can learn how you can enable the lowest cost Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions in the cloud (specifically the GoGrid cloud). Disaster Recovery is often either ignored because of high-cost concerns or the complicated nature of it. Doing it yourself can be extremely time consuming, difficult and frequently, customers don’t even know where to begin.

I particularly like how Stratonomic phrases it on their site:

(COST) EFFECTIVE FAULT TOLERANCE: Can your disaster recovery (DR) site handle all of your traffic, securely and reliably? Do you even have a DR site? Setting up and maintaining DR site in the cloud is not only extremely cheap, but it will let you sleep soundly at night. How cheap?  Save 75% in your OPEX, and over 90% in CAPEX compared to building out and hosting your own DR site. We like to call it DR on a dime.

Luckily, the Cloud offers a great solution for DR, and Stratonomic has created many various Disaster Recovery solutions within the GoGrid cloud that will fit most IT organization’s needs, all starting as low as $349 per month.

WEBINAR

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Last week, CloudWorld09 Expo took place in San Francisco and GoGrid’s CEO, John Keagy, did a presentation titled “How To Get Started in the Cloud” to a fully packed room in one of the sessions at the Expo.

The speaker abstract was as follows:

The Cloud Computing phenomenon is happening NOW – it’s a reality and can provide more flexibility for your web hosting – faster, easier and at a lower cost. Companies do not need to own their own server hardware or network infrastructure anymore. The ease of scaling up or out when the need arises, the speed which new web applications can be designed, prototyped, tested, and deployed, and the inherent cost savings (CapEx to OpEx) are truly attractive. Cloud Computing is not just a buzz term we are hearing more and more, but the next wave of hosting infrastructure. As the Cloud continues to gain acceptance, developers, designers, sysadmins and IT professionals need to understand the advantages, best practices and how to get started using Cloud Computing.

In this session, John Keagy, founder and CEO of GoGrid discussed:

• What is Cloud Computing – The Cloud Pyramid
• The Benefits of Cloud Computing & Hybrid Hosting
• What can Cloud Computing do for me and my business
• The Competitive Landscape & Key Differentiators
• Cost Savings of Cloud Computing – pay only for what you need
• How to determine when to utilize Cloud Computing
• How should you get started using the Cloud?
• How to identify what to put in the cloud first

The presentation is available below as well as on SlideShare.

It’s been a great 1.5 years since we originally launched the GoGrid cloud back in March of 2008. We had several market firsts during that time including:

• Award-winning Graphical User Interface via any standard, modern web browser
• Windows Server 2003 in the Cloud
• Windows Server 2008 in the Cloud
• API under a Creative Commons Share Alike license to help drive standards in the Cloud
• $100 credits during the beta period
• Hybrid Cloud/Dedicated Server Networks via Cloud Connect
• Microsoft SQL Server Express, Workgroup & Standard as GoGrid images

Out of Beta

During our beta period, we had several thousand customers instantiate a variety of infrastructures within the GoGrid cloud, ranging from simple 1 server implementations to complex hybrid multi-server, load-balance network infrastructures. We also have customers ranging from startups/bootstrappers to SMBs to Education to Government to Enterprise. It is truly astounding to see they different types of complex infrastructures or business solutions that people are coming up with using the GoGrid cloud.

So today, we officially announced that the core GoGrid infrastructure is out of beta. As a side note, we have always fully honored our Service Level Agreement (SLA) despite the fact that it explicitly says that it does not apply to anything under the “beta” tag. We believed it to be important to our customers to provide as much professional support and peace of mind as possible. We understand that not everybody is used to diving in head first into not only a IT technology shift (of cloud computing) but also putting faith in new products (like GoGrid or EC2 or any other cloud providers). However, the market has validated what we are doing as thought-leaders in cloud computing and we have been receiving great analyst coverage (Gartner Cool Vendor and “Visionary” Magic Quadrant placement).

Our “What’s New” page on the GoGrid site outlines a few of the key features and enhancements that were part of the catalyst for removing the beta label including: (more…)

Do you lose sleep at night thinking about if your web infrastructure is up and running? Do you sleep with your cell phone next to your bed, just waiting for that call saying “the website is down”? Today, GoGrid announced a strategic partnership with Stratonomic, the leader in cloud reliability solutions. Running a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution in the GoGrid cloud will give you the peace of mind (and a good night’s sleep) knowing that your site can fully fail-over to a secondary location in the GoGrid cloud.

To learn about how to create a Disaster Recovery solution within the GoGrid cloud using Stratonomic, please visit: http://www.gogrid.com/signUp/disaster-recovery/.

There is also a GoGrid and Stratonomic Webinar scheduled for August 25, 2009 at 2:00 pm ET. Please register for the webinar here.

The following press release was delivered today:

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CloudWorld Expo 2009 kicks off this week in San Francisco, and GoGrid is an exhibitor. Come visit us at booth #525 and see first hand our exciting new release of GoGrid 2.0 (which you can read about here). This show was previously known as LinuxWorld. Last year, we (GoGrid) won Best of Show and the year before that, our parent company, ServePath, won the Best Grid Solution Product Excellence Award.

We will be giving out high-value credits ($100 and up) for GoGrid at the booth so you are encouraged to drop by and meet with us. Do note that the Exhibit Hall is only open between the following hours:

Wednesday August 12, 2009
12:00 PM 1:15 PM
4:30 PM 6:30 PM

Thursday August 13, 2009
12:00 PM 1:15 PM
4:00 PM 6:00 PM

However, we will be at the booth during the various speaking times so if you do not want to hear a speaker, stick around after the Expo Hall “closes” for more personal time with us.

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Drum roll please! We are excited to announce the availability of GoGrid version 2.0, released today to all users. This is an important release from a product standpoint as it positions GoGrid firmly as the easiest to use hosting provider within the Cloud Computing Infrastructure marketplace.

What is new with GoGrid in the 2.0 release?

• MyGSI – GoGrid Server Images
• Improved Server Deployment Times
• IP Addresses in Passwords Tab

The 10,000 Foot View

Before I get into the 100 foot view, it is probably important to talk about what MyGSIs mean to you from a higher level.

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