So you’re looking at purchasing cloud infrastructure for your business? That’s great! While we believe cloud infrastructure is a viable solution for everybody, each company needs to find an implementation and provider that best meets their specific need. We call it crafting your “Cloud Fingerprint“. Every cloud infrastructure solution is unique to the business looking for a solution. If you choose a provider that tries to convince you that their solution is the only way to go, you might want to consider looking around for another vendor. Your cloud provider should really be your cloud partner. And, they should work with you in crafting your unique cloud solution, not try to jam a round peg into a square hole.

Before breaking out the checkbook there are several things to consider internally and questions you should ask your potential cloud provider to make sure you are getting the best solution for your business.

Internal Question for your Company

Cloud infrastructure comes in many different shapes and sizes. Having a clear understanding of how your organization will be using this infrastructure will help narrow down which providers will have solutions that fit your need. Here are some questions to ask yourself before approaching vendors:

1. What appliances (e.g., servers, load balancers, firewalls, networks, etc.) need to be supported?Every infrastructure topology is unique, just like your business. In order to create the best infrastructure solution, you need to consider what virtual and physical appliances are required or optional to your cloud solution.
2. What security requirements do you have? Is a shared environment acceptable or does your cloud infrastructure need to be single-tenant?Cloud computing can come in multi-tenant and single-tenant options. Single-tenant infrastructures are 100% dedicated to your company, but they do come with an additional price. And within public clouds, you can segment off a portion of your infrastructure (e.g., dedicated or colocated environments) that is single-tenant (see Hybrid Hosting).
3. What are some of the different use cases that need to be supported?Understanding how much computing power your company needs, when your company needs it (seasonal) and which departments will use cloud infrastructure is useful in selecting cloud infrastructure packages. Your first step is to clearly define these business models and use cases so that a custom solution can be created to meet your needs.
4. Who will manage the implementation?Many companies are happy with a do-it-yourself option in terms of creating a cloud infrastructure for their company. But there are plenty of time and cost constraints that come with these types of implementation. You can also choose a cloud provider that consults with you to understand and help you implement your environments in the most cost and time-effective way. And once the implementation is live, who will be there to support it? Your internal team or the cloud provider? (Be sure to look at SLAs as well.)
5. Are there regulatory requirements to consider?If there are compliance, regulatory requirements or unique/customer hardware considerations that are critical to your cloud implementation, be sure to map those out ahead of time.

Questions to Ask your Cloud Provider

Now that you know exactly what YOU are looking for, it’s time to find a cloud provider that builds solutions tailored to your needs. Simply sharing your business’s needs to an infrastructure-as-a-service vendor will get you recommendations and solutions, but they may come with some unexpected surprises. It’s a best practice to know the vendors process and procedure to make the purchase and implementation as smooth as possible. Here are some things to consider:

1. Is it a scalable solution from both a company-installation standpoint and an end-user usage standpoint?You need to be sure that whatever cloud provider (or partner) you choose can grow with your business, otherwise you do not get the advantages of cloud computing. Is your cloud partner large enough to scale with your needs? And can users of your cloud account scale the infrastructure as well on-demand and just pay for what they use? (Beware of the “false cloud” where you have to shell out money in terms of capital expenditure – buying hardware to power your cloud is NOT cloud computing.)
   
2. Are they simply a reseller of someone else’s technology or are they an innovator in the space?Several of the big players in the cloud space are simply resellers of Infrastructure as a Service. Or, they have an older infrastructure solution and they are simply slapping the word “cloud” in front of it (this is known as “cloud washing.”) If your needs are simple, they can be great partners. If your computing needs are more complex, it makes sense to partner with a company who is considered an innovator.
3. Do they require capital expenditures?Believe it or not, several cloud providers will require capital expenditure and on-site hardware. Again, it is not a cloud solution if you have to buy hardware to power it and then manage that infrastructure yourself (“false cloud”). Having to buy physical hardware to power and grow your company’s “cloud solution” really just causes more work for your IT staff and isn’t cloud computing.
4. Do they provide technical expertise when creating the implementation?The hardest part of cloud computing is the implementation or migration process. Make sure you have the support you need during the transition. Will your cloud partner help you overcome any technical hurdles or offer best practices?
5. Is their offering based on industry standards or are you required to architect your infrastructure design to meet THEIR requirements?This is big. Some cloud providers require you to re-architect your infrastructure design to meet the requirements of their stack. This can often lead to more work for your company.

We hope that these questions will help you find the right solution for your company when you are looking to acquire cloud infrastructure. We’ve identified even more considerations in our white paper, “Skydiving Through the Clouds”.

Download “Skydiving Through the Clouds”

As part of our continuing global expansion, today GoGrid announced a new partnership with Digital Realty Trust (DRT) and their 365 Main property in San Francisco.

The Press Release is available online as well as below:

GoGrid Continues Expansion with New West Coast Data Center

Accelerated Customer Demand fuels new facility at Digital Realty Trust’s 365 Main Street Facility in Downtown San Francisco

San Francisco, CA – February 28, 2011 – GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure provider, today announced its third data center expansion in six months with the extension of its platform into Digital Realty Trust’s 365 Main Street property. GoGrid is occupying a significant amount of data center space in 365 Main Street, which is adjacent to GoGrid’s headquarters. The new facility allows GoGrid to meet increasing demand for GoGrid infrastructure cloud solutions and also serves as a vehicle to offer new Cloud Computing services and management tools. The agreement between GoGrid and DRT includes the building of a new, direct and private fiber conduit linking GoGrid’s infrastructure in the two adjacent buildings.

“We’re pleased to be working with GoGrid on this important expansion of its data center infrastructure,” said Joe Goldsmith, Vice President of Sales at Digital Realty Trust. “While the supply of quality data center space is very limited in downtown San Francisco, 365 Main Street offers highly flexible space to support data center expansions for companies like GoGrid that are growing rapidly. We look forward to being a long-term data center partner of GoGrid.”

GoGrid will utilize 365 Main Street’s infrastructure that includes raised floor space, security, cooling, network, power, fire suppression and other state-of-the-art features. The new data center space in 365 Main Street provides GoGrid an increased data center footprint and close proximity to GoGrid’s corporate headquarters and primary San Francisco data center which in turn allows corporate customers to receive new and enhanced infrastructure services within the GoGrid technology network.

“With triple-digit growth from GoGrid cloud services the additional data center capacity provided by Digital Realty Trust will allow GoGrid to meet our customers’ needs head on — ensuring that we remain ahead of our skyrocketing growth curve,” said Mark Worsey, Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology at GoGrid. “The 365 Main Street data center provides us with an ideal location to expand our presence as part of our global rollout.”

GoGrid currently operates a data center in San Francisco, CA. In February 2011, GoGrid announced the opening of a European data center and in June 2010, GoGrid announced expansion into an Equinix, Inc. data center located in Ashburn, VA.

About Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. enables customers to deliver critical business applications by providing secure, reliable and cost effective data center facilities. Digital Realty Trust’s customers include domestic and international companies across multiple industry verticals ranging from information technology and Internet enterprises, to manufacturing and financial services. Digital Realty Trust’s 96 properties, excluding two properties held as investments in unconsolidated joint ventures, comprise approximately 16.8 million square feet as of December 9, 2010, including 2.3 million square feet of space held for redevelopment. Digital Realty Trust’s portfolio is located in 28 markets throughout Europe, North America and Singapore. For additional information, please visit Digital Realty Trust’s website at http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com.

About GoGrid

Thousands of leading IT experts choose and rely on GoGrid’s Cloud infrastructure services. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control cloud environments and complex virtual and physical server networks with full administrative control. GoGrid’s industry standard specifications and robust service offerings are powering thousands of businesses globally to achieve previously unrealized efficiencies. Deploying a GoGrid infrastructure solution using a Standard or Partner Server Image, free hardware F5 load balancing, Cloud Storage, private VLANs and much more takes minutes via a web interface, API, or iPhone application. GoGrid provides users the control and advanced capabilities of a data center environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. www.GoGrid.com

As always, please be sure to check our announcements page for other details coming from GoGrid.

The word “cloud” has become a bit of a buzzword in the IT industry. Well, let me rephrase that, it has become a HUGE and overused buzzword not just within various tech sectors, it has also infiltrated the lives of us all. A year or two ago, if you mentioned “cloud” or even “cloud computing” to the average passerby, they might have looked back at you with a cloudy look on their face (sorry). Terms like “public cloud,” “private cloud,” “hybrid cloud” and “false cloud” are currently thrown around and peppered throughout conversations. And now, especially exemplified by Microsoft’s recent ad campaign, the phrase “To the cloud!” seems to have brought clouds to everyone, including the general public.

We are being bombarded from every angle. So what do they mean?

Some seem to be useful in our everyday lives:

Others seem to be a bit ominous (as is seen in this tweet from Marc Benioff – Chairman & CEO of SalesForce.com):

But even with everyone talking about “clouds” now, they are still confusing.

The truth is, clouds can take on many different forms, shapes, sizes and characteristics.

“Cloud” is one of the most confusing terms currently in the computing world, but we aim to clear up this nebulous term. Today we release a new white paper titled “Skydiving Through the Clouds” which explains what clouds are, how they work, who uses them and why they are becoming of growing importance within the IT industry.

Download “Skydiving Through the Clouds”

In order to provide a more “rounded” voice on the GoGrid blog, we are going to start having some new authors. To kick off this initiative, I wanted to introduce Paul Lappas, GoGrid’s VP of Engineering and Co-Founder. Paul manages GoGrid’s engineering efforts, technical operations, IT and the technology vision for GoGrid.

Recently, he and some other team members attending a MeetUp in San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters to discuss and present  JClouds and Pallet and how those tools are being used at GoGrid. Here is Paul’s synopsis of Jclouds and the presentation:

“GoGrid is doing some really cool stuff using an automated provisioning technology called “Pallet”.  Pallet is similar to existing automating configuration technologies like Puppet and Chef but with a key difference that it was built specifically to solve the problem of quickly spinning up and configuring groups of servers in the cloud. It support “Jclouds” out of the box and is implemented as a set of libraries for “Clojure” which is a LISP-based programming language that is quickly building steam.  Jclouds is an open source framework developed by Adrian Cole that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java development skills, with an API that allows you the freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features.

GoGrid is working with the author of Pallet (Hugo Duncan) and a key contributor Toni Batchelli to enable the fast deployment of fully functional GoGrid environments for use by development teams for test & dev. It’s a tough problem for most companies, but especially challenging for us considering how complex (and capital intensive) it is to stage an end-to-end GoGrid environment due to the sheer breadth of technologies that span almost all 7 layers of the OSI stack. With Pallet, we are able to treat our “infrastructure as code” and manage the configuration of systems, networks and applications just like we do our source code so that they can be quickly applied to spin-up new environments. But perhaps the coolest aspect is that we are using GoGrid internally to virtualize the individual components! It’s kind of like Inception where there is a grid-within-a-grid. Our teams are still getting their heads around logging into a GoGrid account and seeing virtual representation of physical GoGrid components represented as VM icons in the GUI! Very cool stuff.

The following presentation provides more details of the implementation and was presented at the recent Jclouds meetup at Twitter’s headquarter in San Francisco. Check out future jclouds meetups here:
http://www.meetup.com/jclouds/”

Below is the presentation that was presented at the Jclouds meetup:

Stay tuned for more posts from some of the thought-leaders driving GoGrid.

GoGrid continues to push forward with our plan to expand world-wide. This week, we announced plans to open a data center within Europe, thus providing our Cloud Infrastructure services closer to corporations and enterprises who require a presence in Europe.

The Press Release is available online as well as below:

GoGrid Continues Global Expansion With New European Data Center

Leading Cloud Provider to Deliver Integrated Cloud Infrastructure Services Globally

San Francisco, Calif., February 3, 2011 – GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure provider, today announced plans to open a new data center facility in Europe in the summer of 2011. The expansion represents a significant step in the company’s global expansion strategy to accommodate growing demand for cloud computing outside of the U.S.  GoGrid’s regional presence will provide IT professionals, developers and organizations with fully integrated, on-demand infrastructure services available across the globe.

GoGrid has uniquely architected its cloud technology for seamless deployment around the globe with unlimited scalability.  GoGrid leverages a common architecture footprint that ensures functionality and performance consistency in any region or data center. When launched in Europe, GoGrid will deliver a feature-complete solution via a single management portal. Customers can create, manage and deploy robust cloud solutions in any of GoGrid’s various data centers all within GoGrid’s web-based portal or programmatically via an Application Programming Interface (API).

“As we continue aggressively pursuing our global expansion efforts as a result of our tremendous growth in 2010, we remain committed to providing the easiest and most robust cloud infrastructure services to our customers around the world,” said John Keagy, founder and chief executive officer of GoGrid. “GoGrid’s cloud operating stack was designed and built from the ground up for this expansion.  Unlike some other leading cloud providers that require multiple log-ins for each location, we deliver a seamless experience for managing global infrastructure through a single ‘pane of glass’”.

In a recent global study conducted by Gartner Research*, key findings indicate that “adoption of cloud computing is underway in all European regions surveyed and will accelerate during the next 18 months.” By establishing a presence in Europe, GoGrid will provide regional customers with one of the industry’s most reliable cloud infrastructure services backed by the most comprehensive 100% guaranteed service level agreement of cloud infrastructure providers. In addition to its upcoming European location, GoGrid also maintains existing data centers in San Francisco, Calif., and Ashburn, VA and also plans to expand to Asia in Q4 of 2011.

*Gartner, December 15, 2010: “Survey Analysis: European Adoption of Cloud Computing, Patterns and Preferences”

About GoGrid
Thousands of leading IT experts choose and rely on GoGrid’s Cloud infrastructure services. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control cloud environments and complex virtual and physical server networks with full administrative control. GoGrid’s industry standard specifications and robust service offerings are powering thousands of businesses globally to achieve previously unrealized efficiencies. Deploying a GoGrid infrastructure solution using a Standard or Partner Server Image, free hardware F5 load balancing, Cloud Storage, private VLANs and much more takes minutes via a web interface, API, or iPhone application. GoGrid provides users the control and advanced capabilities of a data center environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. www.GoGrid.com

Please look for more announcements regarding our global expansion in the coming months.