I think that we may have broken a record in having one of the most news-filled newsletters in GoGrid history. And, I don’t think we were able to put everything in there. One feature of particular note is that of RAM Scaling. Now, within GoGrid, you can scale your cloud servers up or down as you need. This month’s newsletter has information about this important feature and a whole lot more, so for those of you who are not currently receiving the GoGrid newsletter, the full content is below.

Below is a copy of the October 2010 Customer Update newsletter that went out to all GoGrid customers:

Hello,

All of us at GoGrid have been working on providing more and more value to you not only in our feature and system enhancements, but also with educational webinars and trainings. In this issue of the GoGrid newsletter, you’ll discover ways in which we can form a partnership to help you leverage more from your GoGrid cloud.

This edition includes:

New Features and System Enhancements

• RAM Scaling Now Live
• API Enhancements
• GoGrid Firewall Enhancement
• Performance Boost with Intel’s Westmere Chipset
• New Terms of Service

Partner News

• New Partner Images for the GoGrid Exchange
• Updated Partner Images

Webinars

• Live GoGrid Training Session
• Cloud Hosting 101
• Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud
• Capture Your Share of the Cloud Market: Learn How With GoGrid’s Channel Program
• BuycPanel (title pending)
• Deploying NOSQL in the Cloud
• Scale Your Applications in the Cloud Without Downtime or the Headache

Events and Other News

• FailCon
• SYS-CON Cloud Expo

New Features and System Enhancements

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RAM Scaling

The ability to scale your RAM up or down is now available! Our RAM scaling feature allows you to upgrade to the maximum amount of RAM available for your operating system on your Cloud servers. RAM scaling only applies to RAM, so your core and disk allocations remain untouched. Also, all your settings and configurations (except RAM of course) remain the same when you scale your RAM.

Changing the RAM of any cloud server is easy. Use the API to programmatically change your RAM allocation or simply log in to the portal my.gogrid.com and follow these four steps:

1. Select the cloud server you wish to scale up or down
2. Click the Upgrade button.
3. Choose your desired RAM allocation.
4. Click Submit.
Note: the minimum amount of RAM available for downgrade is equal to the amount allocated when you originally provisioned that particular cloud server.
Read more on our blog.

FREE Live Training! Sign-up for our live training session on October 26 at 11:00 a.m. PDT, where a GoGrid Technical Account Manager will walk you through our new features and provide some use cases and best practices.

Register now: go.gogrid.com/webinar/20101026

API Enhancements

You now have even more control over your cloud servers via the API. Check out the new enhancements:

• Edit Server Description via API – using a simple API call, you can now fully edit the description of your GoGrid Cloud Server. See the API documentation on how to do this.

• Change Cloud Server Classification via API – you can now change the server classification via the GoGrid API. Options are: Web/App Server or Database Server. This will affect where your Cloud Server appears in both the Grid and List views. See the API documentation on how to do this.

The GoGrid Customer Portal and API now also present the number of Cores and Disk Space allocated to your servers. Read more about RAM Scaling and API enhancements on our blog.

GoGrid Firewall Enhancement

We are now accepting pre-sale sign-ups for our enhanced Fortinet Hardware Firewall. This new configuration now supports your existing public IP addresses, our free F5 load balancers and will be available directly in GoGrid’s networking infrastructure. Confidently secure your GoGrid cloud or hybrid infrastructure behind Fortinet’s enterprise-grade hardware firewall. Contact your Account Manager to add this essential security component to your infrastructure.
The Fortinet hardware firewall is $200/month, which includes one type of VPN.

Performance Boost with Intel’s Westmere Chipset

To continue improving GoGrid performance, as well as build an internal foundation for growth while upgrading our infrastructure with cutting edge technology, we’ve changed a few things:

1. We’ve upgraded our hardware, including outfitting our host machines with Intel’s Westmere chipset and fast SAS drives. As a result, you should see even greater I/O performance and in some cases greater CPU performance, an improvement upon our existing hardware, which is already rated the best in the industry. It will take us 4-6 months to completely build out enough Westmere capacity to handle 100% of new server adds. As a result, it is possible for new servers to be provisioned on non-Westmere nodes.
2. In order to achieve this performance boost, there will be a change to the cloud server disk allotment. As of September 15, all cloud servers will receive 50 GB of local storage for every 1 GB of RAM, a reduction of 17% compared with the 60:1 ratio we offered on the older hardware. As always, please note that the amount of usable storage presented by your cloud server’s OS may be slightly less than 50 GB.

Terms of Service

Please note that section 10 (g) of our terms of service has changed. Essentially, we have made improvements to the way we communication terms of service with you. We will now be notifying you via the GoGrid website and a written notice.

Please see www.gogrid.com/legal/terms-service for more information.

Partner News

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The GoGrid Exchange continues to grow with new and exciting partners.  Check out the new and updated Partner GoGrid Server Images (PGSIs) available in the GoGrid catalog.

NEW to the GoGrid Exchange:

• Genero: a platform-independent application development and deployment environment, optimized for data-intensive business applications suitable for businesses of all sizes. Genero applications work well in enterprise environments, interoperate with other languages and platforms, scale well, and lend themselves to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

• Genero DB: a high-performance, fully transactional, ACID and SQL Compliant RDBMS optimized for modern computer architectures, designed for high throughput in high-content many-user, high-workload environments. Available both as part of the Genero GSI and on a stand-alone basis for use with other programming languages, Genero DB’s scalability makes it an ideal data management infrastructure product for cloud-based applications.

• Toad® for MySQL is a freeware development tool that improves the productivity of developers and administrators running MySQL on Windows.

• BitNami Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system featuring document management, Web Content Management, Collaboration Management, Records Management, and Image Management.

• BitNami Opina is a web management tool for poll management. The application is designed so any user is able to create questionnaires, publish them to obtain responses, and process results.

• BitNami EnanoCMS is a content management system that strives to have less bloat and more float than other solutions. It includes powerful administrative capabilities and a variety of plug-ins to add portals, forums, blogs, and other functionality.

• BitNami Moodle is a Course Management System that is designed using sound pedagogical principles to help educators create effective online learning communities. It can scale from one computer to a 50,000-student university and is used in 175 countries around the world.

• Aneka is an integrated middleware package that allows you to seamlessly build and manage an interconnected network in addition to accelerating development, deployment, and management of distributed applications using Microsoft .NET frameworks on these networks.

• ZPanel is a free-to-download Web hosting control panel written to work effortlessly with Microsoft(R) Windows(TM)-based servers or computers. This solution can turn a home or professional server into a fully fledged, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage web hosting server.

UPDATES to the GoGrid Exchange:

• OpenVPN™ Access Server enables secure and granular remote access to your private cloud network resources.

• BitNami Redmine Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of Redmine and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Customer Portal by selecting the BitNami Redmine image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami SugarCRM Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of SugarCRM and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Portal by selecting the BitNami SugarCRM image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami Joomla! Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of Joomla! and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Portal by selecting the BitNami Joomla! server image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami Drupal WordPress 2.8 preinstalled and preconfigured out of the box.

• BitNami Drupal 6.15 preinstalled and preconfigured out of the box.

• BitNami MediaWiki Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of MediaWiki and its required dependencies. MediaWiki is a wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Webinars

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GoGrid Live Training Session

Would you like to have a little more hands-on training? Sign-up for our free live training session where a GoGrid Technical Account Manager will show you the advantages of our new features and provide some use cases and best practices.
Date: October 26
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101026

Upcoming Webinars

Cloud Hosting 101

Do you know anyone who would like to equip themselves with the information needed to take their company into the cloud? Suggest our Cloud Hosting 101 educational webinar. With this educational webinar, we’ll present the basics of cloud hosting, discuss how companies can benefit from the cloud, and what steps to take to get started.
Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101110

Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud: Manage Traffic Spikes and Uptime

Join GoGrid’s Sales Engineer for a presentation and discussion on the top use cases and best practices for load balancing in the cloud.
Date: Thursday, October 28, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101028

Capture Your Share of the Cloud Market: Learn How With GoGrid’s Channel Program

Interested in becoming a GoGrid Reseller? Learn more about the available opportunities with our channel program.
Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 or Thursday, November 18, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/reseller/upcoming

Joint GoGrid and Partner Webinars

Become a Hosting Provider with cPanel and GoGrid

Need to automate and offer competitive hosting services? cPanel is the industry standard for turning servers into a fully automated point-and-click hosting platform. By combining GoGrid and cPanel you get a one-stop shop for your hosting and platform administration needs allowing you to instantly license cPanel and deploy infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.
Date: Thursday, November 4, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101104

Deploy NOSQL in the Cloud

Building a Web 3.0 application? Planning to leverage socially connected data, location based data or web analytics? Looking for alternatives to SQL data bases? Join InfiniteGraph and GoGrid for an educational webinar where we’ll provide you with a powerful data management system to help you build better applications.
Date: Thursday, November 9, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101109

Scale Your Applications in the Cloud Without Downtime or the Headache

Are you ready to scale your applications and business but aren’t sure how to move forward? Join our Cloud experts from GoGrid and Cloudkick for an educational webinar where they’ll present best practices for scaling in the GoGrid cloud.

Date: Thursday, November 11, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101111

Events and Other News

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FailCon 2010

GoGrid will be sponsoring FailCon on October 25. FailCon is the premier conference on start-up failures and how to prepare and recover from them. From their site: “You aren’t a real entrepreneur until you’ve had to deal with failure, and recovering from it – financially, emotionally and practically – can be challenging. Hear how major players in the industry have dealt with failure, recovered from it, and kept a positive, tenacious, and energetic attitude through it all.”

SYS-CON 7th International Cloud Expo

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley will feature 200+ technical breakout sessions and General Sessions across four days from the leading Cloud industry players in the world. All the main layers of the Cloud pyramid (see: http://pyramid.gogridcom) will be represented in the 7th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo – the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications. This event is a must-attend for senior technologists including CIOs, CTOs, directors of infrastructure, VPs of technology, IT directors and managers, network and storage managers, network engineers, enterprise architects, and communications and networking specialists.

GoGrid will be exhibiting at booth #510 as well as presenting a few sessions throughout the conference.

As always, you can find more information about GoGrid by visiting the following links:

• GoGrid Product Site – www.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Blog – blog.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Wiki – wiki.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Forums – forums.gogrid.com

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly at maria[at]gogrid.com.

Thank you,

Maria Gallegos

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming from GoGrid!

We are excited to announce the availability of the GoGrid iPhone application, a new way to quickly and easily control your GoGrid Cloud infrastructure on the go. Current GoGrid customers can now enjoy robust and complete control of their GoGrid environment using this new iOS application, designed to work on the iPhone and network-connected iPod Touches. The application can be downloaded from iTunes now.

The GoGrid iPhone application leverages GoGrid’s OpenSource API for full control of the essential GoGrid functionality and mirrors the capabilities currently available within GoGrid’s award-winning web portal. Management abilities include:

• View/Add/Delete/Restart GoGrid Cloud Servers
• View/Add/Edit/Delete F5 Load Balancers
• View Status of Objects and IP Addresses
• View Server User and Passwords
• View and Filter GoGrid Job History
• View Current Billing Information
• Multiple Datacenter Support
• Multiple Account Support
• Access additional information about GoGrid

First, some things to know about the GoGrid iPhone application:

• It is FREE to download
• You MUST have an active GoGrid account in order to use it
• It requires a network connection
• You MUST have an API key and secret configured within your GoGrid account (I recommend using a “Super User” role for this)
• You can configure multiple API keys (e.g., accounts) within the application
• It support API version 1.5 (we are working on an update to include the recently announced RAM scaling features and VM reclassification & description editing)
• It provides most all of the functionality available within the API (and you can even edit load balancers!)

So let’s dive into the application functionality.

Your Initial Setup

When you first launch the GoGrid application, you are asked to create an optional 4-digit pass code. This is recommended as it provides an additional layer of protection of your various GoGrid environments.

Once you create your pass code, you will be prompted to enter in a GoGrid account. In order to do this, you MUST have an API key and secret already set up within your GoGrid account. To do this, simply log into the GoGrid web portal (http://my.gogrid.com) and go to the API tab and create a new API key. After that, go back to the iPhone application and fill out the following screens to create your account.

Fill out the following fields:

• Account Name – this does not update anything on your GoGrid account and is merely a local name within the GoGrid iPhone application
• API key – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal
• API secret – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal

Once the API key and secret are validated (and note, you must have a network connection for this and other actions you do within the application), you will see it listed in the Accounts section. You can Edit as well as Add other accounts as needed now or in the future.

Select the Account you want to manage and click the Log In button. The “doors” will close and within a few seconds open again and you will have access to your GoGrid account.

Now on to the Management screens.

The Various Management Screens

There are a series of management screens available for you to control your GoGrid architecture. The screens are:

• My Cloud
  • Cloud Servers
  • Load Balancers
  • IP addresses
• Job History
• Account
• Settings & More

When you click on the “My Cloud” icon at the bottom bar, you can view your Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and IP Addresses. In the Cloud Servers screen, you can scroll through all of the GoGrid Cloud Servers you have currently deployed in our data centers:

If you flip the screen to the left, you see all of your Load Balancers:

Flipping one more time shows you all of the IP Addresses in your data centers that are either in use or available.

The Job History tab shows all of the events that has taken place within your GoGrid account. Items like creating or deleting objects or restarts will be displayed here.

The Account tab provides a snapshot of your current Billing Summary and your RAM and Bandwidth usage. You can also get the User Names and Passwords for your active servers further down this screen.

The Settings & More tab includes a variety of other non-cloud-management items.

So let’s dive into some of the functionality available within this application.

Cloud Servers

The GoGrid iPhone application provides you with the ability to:

• View all of your Cloud Servers including details of each server
• Create new Cloud Servers in various data centers
• Restart your server
• View Password information about your server
• Delete your server

The graphic below shows a listing of all active servers within your GoGrid account. You can scroll up and down to view the entire list.

Clicking on a specific server brings up all of the details of that server. Within this view, you can also Delete, Restart or view the User Names/Passwords associated with this server.

To create a new Cloud Server, simply click on the Add button at the top of the screen. Next, select the Data Center you want your new server to be located at:

Clicking the Next button will bring up a list of available Cloud Server images within that datacenter. Depending on the datacenter, you will see a list of available GoGrid base server images, Partner Server Images (PGSIs) or your own Personal Server Images (MyGSIs).

Note, you can also Filter the list of images by clicking on the Filter button.

Now, click on the Server Image that you desire. Details (including any associated additional cost) is presented:

Click Next to continue. The next screen contains the Server Details. Here you enter the Name of the server, a brief Description and then select the IP address and RAM allocation for your server.

Clicking on the IP address field bring up a selector of available IP addresses in your GoGrid Account for that data center:

Similarly, you select the amount of RAM you would like your server to have from the available options presented.

Once you have filled out the Server Details form, click Finish create your Cloud Server. The new server request will be then queued for deployment (and you can see the request under the Job History tab discussed later).

Load Balancers

Similar to the management of Cloud Servers, you can also manage the Load Balancers within your GoGrid environment. You have the ability to:

Flipping from the Cloud Server section of My Cloud to the Load Balancer section presents you with a listing of your active Load Balancers. Here, like with the Cloud Server section, you can scroll up or down to see all of your Load Balancers:

Clicking on a Load Balancer brings up the details of that specific Load Balancer.

Clicking on the Delete button at the bottom will delete the Load Balancer. Clicking on the IP List will show all of the IP addresses that are bound to that Load Balancer (e.g., the IP addresses of other servers in your GoGrid network):

To Create a new load balancer, be sure that you are NOT in the detail view of a Load Balancer. You need to be in the general listing of Load Balancers and you will see the Add button at the top. Click Add to start the process. First you select the data center where you want your Load Balancer to reside:

Then you fill out the Details of that load balancer including the Name, brief Description, Virtual IP address of the LB, the port that you want the traffic at, the Connection Type and then the Persistence.

Choose the Type of Load Balancing you want (Least Connect or Round Robin):

And then the Persistence (None, Source Address or SSL Sticky):

Click the Next button to enter in the Real IP addresses of the servers you want the traffic to go to. First click on the Real IPs box to bring up a list of IP addresses to choose from. These could be IP addresses that are either available (e.g., not tied to server) or in use (used by a server). Then click on the Port field and enter the port number for that IP address. Finally click the Add (+) button to add that IP address and Port to the Load Balancer.

You can add multiple IP addresses and ports to the load balancer. When you are completed, click the Finish button and your load balancer will be queued for creation.

In the Job History tab, you can see the Load Balancer’s creation status.

If you want to edit a load balancer, simply click on the load balancer you want to edit. When you see the details, you will see the Edit button at the top of the screen:

The process to Edit the load balancer is much like that of creating a new load balancer so please follow those steps.

IP Addresses

The IP Addresses section of the My Cloud lists out all of the IP addresses that are either In Use or Available for you to use within your GoGrid infrastructure. As with the Load Balancers and Cloud Servers section, you can scroll up and down through the listing.

Clicking on a specific IP Address provides you with additional details.

You can also Filter your IP addresses by Data Center and whether they are In Use or Available.

Job History

To the right of the My Cloud tab is the Job History tab. This contains a running history of all actions (and states – represented by the color dots – green, yellow and red) that have taken place on objects (e.g., Load Balancers, Cloud Servers, Cloud Storage, Account, etc.) within your GoGrid Cloud.

Clicking on a specific Job or Event will bring up details about that event:

And clicking on the Show Timeline will give you the details of that particular event.

You can also Filter events by Type, Date and Status.

Filtering will produce a subset of results.

Account

The Account tab gives you insight into the Usage on your account as well as provides the details of Users Names & Passwords that are also shown in your GoGrid portal. For example, you create a new server using the GoGrid iPhone Application, the User Name and Password for that server will appear within this section (as it is done automatically when servers are created).

Shown above is the Billing Summary which is the same as the billing widget that currently resides within the GoGrid web portal. In it you can see:

• Your Billing Cycle
• Amount of RAM currently allocated in your Plan (if you are on a Volume Discount plan)
• The amount of RAM currently in use
• The amount of GB hours used to date in your billing cycle
• Your Transfer allotment based on your Plan (if on a Volume Discount plan)
• The GBs of data transfer used to date in your billing cycle

Under the Password section, you can click through to passwords by server name. Viewing the details of the server shows the IP address, User Name and Password. These fields can be copied by simply clicking on them. This is useful if you need to send someone the server credentials via SMS or email.

Settings & More

This is sort of the catch-all section of the application with a lot of items that do not directly interface with your GoGrid account.

Here you can:

• Change the Password of your GoGrid iPhone application
• Add, Edit or Delete GoGrid accounts managed on your iPhone application
• Submit a questions or issue related to the GoGrid iPhone application
• Contact GoGrid Support on questions related to your GoGrid account (NOT the iPhone application)
• Read About GoGrid (but you already know a lot about us if you are using this application)
• View mobile versions of our Twitter and Facebook accounts
• View the mobile version of the GoGrid blog
• View our current Service Level Agreement (SLA) – note, the iPhone Application is NOT covered by our SLA currently
• View information about the application developer (flaka.soft)

So, What Do You Think?

A lot of hours were spent on the design and development of the GoGrid iPhone application. It was our desire to create a simple yet powerful solution for GoGrid users to control their infrastructure running on GoGrid. Being able to command your GoGrid infrastructure on the go from wherever you are gives IT professionals, sysadmins and developers an added level of convenience and security.

This was an important personal project of mine as well, so much so that at the beginning of the year, I flat out told our CEO that if we did not have an iPhone application by the end of 2010, I would quit! (I guess I will be sticking around for a while now!) Being able to provide management tools to GoGrid users (e.g., award-winning Web Portal, API and now iPhone application) makes their lives easier and being able to fully control their GoGrid cloud on the go, where ever they are, is truly compelling and paramount to a successful cloud service.

If you are a GoGrid user, be sure to download the GoGrid iPhone application from iTunes NOW! Let us know what you think and if you like it, be sure to give us some ratings and write a review in iTunes!

One of the most powerful aspects of Cloud Computing is the ability to scale your infrastructure. But did you know that there are two components to scalability, horizontal and vertical. GoGrid has been offering easy horizontal scaling since we launched.

So what is scaling and how are you able to do this with GoGrid. Let’s break it down with a quick, high-level definition and then show you how you can do it on GoGrid

What is Scaling?

Horizontal scaling simply means the ability to expand your infrastructure out, for example, adding additional servers to your infrastructure. You can currently do this using the GoGrid web portal or API or even using one of the solutions offered by our partners in the GoGrid Exchange. Similarly, if you use our MyGSI feature to create a Golden Master of your server, you can quickly scale out vertically with cloned instances of that MyGSI. Conversely, you can also scale your infrastructure back by removing servers from the mix.

Vertical scaling means that you can add additional resources to your individual infrastructure components, for example, adding addition RAM or cores to a server.

How To Scale Your RAM on GoGrid

So, how do you scale your infrastructure on GoGrid? As I mentioned, you’ve always been able to horizontally scale your infrastructure and now we are pleased to announce the availability that you can vertically scale using our new RAM Scaling feature. GoGrid customers can now scale the RAM up or down on GoGrid Cloud Servers within their existing and new infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.

At GoGrid, it is our goal to live up to the phrase “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™“, so we have designed our RAM Scaling feature to be as easy to use as possible.

For starters, the RAM Scaling feature is backwards compatible, meaning that you will have the ability to scale your GoGrid Cloud Server RAM on your existing infrastructure. You can increase as well as decrease the amount of RAM allocated to a particular Cloud Server Instance. An important point to note prior to diving into the details is that there is a “minimum” threshold amount that is set to the original amount of RAM you selected when you first created your Cloud Server. However, you have the ability to scale the RAM up to a larger amount (if available) and then back down to that original level.

Below is an example of how the RAM scaling works. In this case, I started with a server that had 512 MBs of RAM (the original configuration). I then scaled it up to 4 GBs and then back down to 2 GBs of RAM. Note that throughout the process, I always have the ability to scale back to the original RAM allocation.

Once the Cloud Server is available, you can see its original configuration by holding your mouse over the server.

You can also see the server creation history in the Job History tab:

Let’s take a look at the process involved in upgrading the server to have 4 GBs of RAM. First, you click on the Cloud Server you would like to upgrade and you will not a new icon in the task menu:

Simply click on the “Upgrade” icon and you will be presented with your RAM scaling choices. As mentioned above, your minimum RAM options is the amount of RAM the server was originally spun up with. Your maximum  RAM option is the maximum available for your OS. In this case, my server has a 32-bit OS and was originally created with 512 MB of RAM:

Select the new amount of RAM you want allocated to that particular server and click “Submit”. Within 5 minutes or less, your server will have the new allocation in effect. In some cases, the RAM scaling process may take as long as 30 minutes. Below is the updated server:

If your server is powered up with you click “Submit”, it will be gracefully shut down and then restarted, so please be sure that you have already shut down any running processes on your server directly. If the server is powered down, it will remain shut down after upgrading. You can always view the status within the Job History tab:

Conversely, if you want to scale your Cloud Server’s RAM down, you would go through the same process of selecting the server, clicking the “Upgrade” icon and choosing a lesser value of RAM. You can scale it back down to the original creation allocation (in the example above, that would be 512 MB).

You can also perform RAM scaling within the List view by selecting the server you want and clicking the “Upgrade RAM” link at the top of the list:

Hopefully you can see what a powerful feature this is for your GoGrid cloud. It enables you, on demand, to instantly add RAM to your RAM-hungry environments. But it also gives you a way to “upgrade” your existing infrastructure.

Some things to note:

• The Scalability is ONLY for RAM. It does NOT affect your Hard Disk size nor your CPU/Core allotments
• You CANNOT scale below the original amount that your server was configured
• The functionality is FULLY SUPPORTED via the GoGrid API
• Be sure to power your server down or prepare your server for a graceful shutdown by stopping or ending any running applications or processes.

Other Changes in this Release

In addition to the important RAM scaling feature, we also released the following enhancements:

• Edit Server Description via API – using a simple API call, you can now fully edit the description of your GoGrid Cloud Server. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• Change Cloud Server Classification via API – you can now change the server classification via the GoGrid API. Options are: Web/App Server or Database Server. This will affect where your Cloud Server appears in both the Grid and List views. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• More Details about Cloud Servers – you can, in addition to RAM, IP address, and OS, now see the number of Cores and Disk Space of your servers. This is true on the Grid view and List views:
  
  
• Minor Redesign to the Tool Bar in the List view

We believe that with this release, GoGrid continues to show leadership within the Cloud Infrastructure Hosting space. If you have suggestions or other features that you would like to see implemented, please leave a comment to this post.

Have you ever wondered what this “new” term “NOSQL” means? Is it something that you need to seriously look at when you are crafting your cloud environment? Is it a viable alternative to MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostreSQL or other database applications? Do you even know how to get started with it?

If any of the questions above left you scratching your head AND you are in the Silicon Valley on October 26th, you might want to head over to the following meetup “A NOSQL Evening in Palo Alto“.

Many industry experts are saying that NOSQL will be or is the database of choice for Cloud Computing because of its scalability and ability to handle data-intensive applications better. Many popular websites that are high-traffic or deliver lots of rich media are adopting and re-architecting their infrastructures to take advantage of NOSQL.

From the Event Page:

Tim Anglade (founder, A NOSQL Summer), hosts a 2-hour discussion and Q&A with representatives from some of the most prominent NOSQL vendors and projects. The topics will look back on the origins of the movement and its growing pains, discuss the current technological & business states, as well as look ahead to the opportunities for improvement and expansion.

So if you ever wanted to hear the lessons learned by an emerging tech industry, or wanted to have an inside look into the non-relational revolution, come join us for a unique evening at beautiful Dinah’s Garden Hotel, in Palo Alto, California.

Confirmed Panel Participants, by alphabetical order

• 10gen: Roger Bodamer — SVP, Products and Engineering
• Basho: Andy Gross — Vice President of Engineering
• CouchOne (formerly CouchIO): Mikeal Rogers — Employee Number One
• Cloudant: Mike Miller — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
• Cloudera
• GoGrid: Paul Lancaster — Business Development Manager
• InfiniteGraph: Warren Davidson — Director, Business Development and Strategic Alliances
• NorthScale: James Phillips — Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Products
• Riptano: Jonathan Ellis — Founder
• Scality: Randy Parker — Sr. Director, North America

We’re running out of space on the panel but many other NOSQL project leaders and executives will be in the audience, including the CEOs of Neo4J and InfoGrid. Each company with also have several additional team members in attendance at the evening.

Space is limited, please RSVP in advance.
Date: Tuesday, October 26
Time: 6PM-10:30 PM (Pacific)
Location:
Dinah’s Garden Hotel
4261 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, CA

Registration: http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-NoSQL/calendar/14727419/

Schedule

• 6:00pm: Doors open. Mingle over drinks and appetizers.
• 7:00-9:30pm: Discussion and Q&A with the panel with a break in the middle (coffee, fruit and cookies will be available at the break).
• 9:30-?: Trader Vic’s is literally feet away from the conference room. We’ll be hosting a dinner there for the panelists and special guests, but you’re welcome to join us in the restaurant (just let us know in advance, so we can reserve more tables for you).

This might be a really great meetup to attend if you are looking at Cloud Computing and databases therein.

If you are reading this blog post, you probably have heard the term “Cloud Computing“. But in the off chance that you haven’t, or perhaps you know of a colleague or co-worker that needs to get brought up to speed on the power of the cloud or what it can do for your company, I wanted to be sure that you knew about an upcoming webinar that we at GoGrid will be hosting called “Cloud Hosting 101“.

To be clear, this is NOT a webinar for those people who are well versed in the technical benefits of the cloud, nor how you can build N-tiered complex infrastructure with just a few mouse clicks. It is more about:

• getting a primer on the benefits of cloud computing for your business,
• how customers are using the GoGrid cloud to achieve success and,
• to learn how to get started with a cloud presence on GoGrid.

Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101014
Presenters: Michael Sheehan (GoGrid Technology Evangelist) & Maria Gallegos (GoGrid Product Marketing Manager)

If you have questions that you would like us to answer on the webinar, be sure to submit them as a comment on this blog post. We hope that you or your co-workers can attend. Do note, we do have other webinars coming up over the next few months so be sure to check back.