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!

GoGrid has many SMB, Government and Enterprise customers currently using our cloud. There are many turnkey and custom solutions we can offer to meet your business and IT needs.

Drop by the booth to discuss the various option available to you. We look forward to chatting!

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

If you have a large data set that you want to get into GoGrid’s Cloud Storage, transfer you data to an external hard drive and snail mail it to GoGrid. When we receive the external hard drive, the data will be manually transferred into GoGrid’s Cloud Storage within your account. There is a one-time fee of $99.99 to execute the transfer. Please note that you are not billed for the data transfer.

Sounds too good to be true! Of course, you could have transferred the data to a server running in your GoGrid cloud (remember that INBOUND transfer is FREE with GoGrid) but that takes a lot of time depending on how big your pipes are on your end (ours are quite large, btw!). This manual process is a bit easier on your bandwidth and leaves the grunt work to us.

Frequently Asked Questions

I’m sure you have questions about this service. I know I did, so I asked our Product Management team to provide some answers to the following questions. If you have others, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact a GoGrid Sales Rep (or your Service Team).

1. Is the $99 fee per hard drive and per occurrence?
   Yes, the $99 fee is per hard drive and per occurrence. There is no charge for the data transfer itself (e.g., based on GBs)
2. Is there a limit to the amount of data I can load?
   There is no limit to the amount of data you can load.
3. Is there a limit to the number of hard drives I can send?
   You can send us as many hard drives as you see fit.
4. Is there a particular type of hard drive that is supported or not supported?
   The hard drive MUST be an external hard drive with a USB connector. Please include the USB interface cables, power supply and return shipping postage and address information.
5. How long does the process take? Hours? Days?
   Typically this depends on the amount of data as well as the number of hard drives, but normally, you can expect the data to be loaded within a day or two.
6. How can I check on the status of my data load?
   GoGrid Support will email you once your data has been fully uploaded to your GoGrid Cloud Storage.
7. Is my hard drive returned to me? If so, do I pay for shipment?
   We can ship back your hard drive provided that you include pre-paid return postage, a mailing address and detailed contact information.
8. Do you go through any type of verification process to ensure that all of the data is loaded properly?
   We will load any and all data that is contained within the hard drive.
9. What format does the data have to be in?
   We accept just about any type of format (raw, uncompressed, graphics, text data, compressed, etc.). There is truly nothing complicated about preparing the data. Simply copy it over from your existing data repository and ship it as is.
10. What filesystem should the drive be formatted in? Does it depend on the Operating System?
    The hard drive should be formatted in a common filesystem format like FAT32 or NTFS. Proprietary filesystems will not be accepted.
11. Do you scan the drives for malware or viruses?
    It is the responsibility of the customer to provide virus and malware-free data, subject to the GoGrid Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.

Hope those Q&As help! If you have any questions not answered here, please leave a comment. So, you can now get your data into the Cloud without breaking a sweat (we will do the sweating for you)!

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

The webinar information is as follows:

Date: Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM to 11:45 AM (Pacific Time)
Registration: Online Registration form located here
Presenters:

Ben Sharma, CEO, Stratonomic Stratonomic was founded by folks who have dozens of years of experience in building out and operating very large scale web operations with 1000s of servers in very large scale datacenter environments. Over the past several years, as cloud computing has become more robust and feasible, this group has been deeply involved in beta test programs from various cloud providers. Their hands on and insider experience with cloud computing vendors is unparalleled. Ben Sharma has held many executive roles in web engineering and operations. Notably he was the VP of Network Operations and Engineering at Speedera Networks (now part of Akamai) and oversaw the buildout of the world’s second largest content delivery network at the time. He has degrees in Economics and Engineering from Caltech.

Kole Hicks, Product Marketing Manager, GoGrid As Product Marketing Manager for GoGrid, Kole Hicks is responsible for setting strategic objectives for GoGrid as well as organizing various marketing activities to support the GoGrid brand. Kole is constantly in contact with GoGrid customers and partners in order to gather information about the current product and he acts as the customer evangelist when it comes time to place new features on the roadmap. Prior to joining GoGrid Kole worked as a Product Planner for Microsoft working on a range of products and initiatives.

More information about the GoGrid/Stratonomic strategic partnership can be found in this press release as well as on the GoGrid site. There are a variety of turnkey services that this partnership provides, including:

• Secondary data center location
• Database replication
• File system synchronization
• Dynamic DNS failover
• Global load balancing across primary and secondary sites
• Monthly verification test
• Monthly verification test report
• Verification server(s)
• 24 hour alert notification to your Web/IT team in the event of a disaster
• Primary site monitoring from 2 separate locations

We hope that you can attend this important Disaster Recovery solution webinar.

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.

If you have any questions about the content presented, please feel free to leave a comment.