Last week, the 4th annual GigaOM Structure conference was held in Northern California and GoGrid was part of the show in many ways not only as a sponsor but also active in a variety of panels. This was our 4th Structure conference that we attended and 3rd that we have sponsored…so I guess you can say that we have been there from the start and support the efforts of the GigaOM team. Structure is GigaOM’s “flagship conference on Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure” and we have seen the conference grow from a single day to this year’s two day sold-out conference.

What struck me and my colleagues most about this show is the professional and technical level of the attendees. This was not a show of cloud or IaaS “tire kickers”, these were people and businesses who knew their stuff about cloud computing and who were bringing value to the cloud (not diluting the term “cloud” like we are seeing in the mainstream media, in TV commercials and elsewhere). This was a partnership-making event. You could just feel the deals being drafted out in the hallways between sessions.

(image source: GigaOM)

But Structure 2011 was also an educational event, with carefully chosen speakers and panels providing thought-leadership ideas and commentary to a captive audience. I’m not going to discuss each and every session in this article, simply because GigaOM already has that covered. However, because GoGrid was an active in the event, I did want to provide a brief recap of two sessions that we were part of:

• “Dedicated, In More Ways Than One: The IaaS Panel”
• “The What, How and Why of Secure SaaS Delivery – GoGrid and Orange Business Services Discuss the Hosted Private Cloud as the Enabler”

The IaaS Panel was hosted by Paul Miller, Founder of Cloud of Data. On the panel with Paul was our very on John Keagy, Executive Chair and Founder of GoGrid; Chris Pinkham, Co-Founder and CEO of Nimbula; and Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. You can watch the full panel discussion in the video below.

More businesses are demanding dedicated infrastructure (not sharing hardware with other tenants) on the grounds that it is more secure and offers better performance. The panel discusses the merits of this reasoning and highlight the fact that you aren’t getting the true benefits of cloud computing using solely dedicated hardware. While public clouds, as multi-tenant environments, may make more sense financially, it’s still met with trepidation from “hardware huggers”. The speakers all believe that dedicated infrastructure will grow over the next 5 years, but will ultimately serve as a gateway to public and private cloud infrastructures.

The panel also talks about the mentality towards applications. For so long, developers were adamant about which hardware and operating systems they built their applications on. Now the types of cloud and OS aren’t as important as they used to be. The experts claim that cloud computing users should focus on the application and need to find solutions that best meet the needs of that application.

Finally, the video highlights and discusses the current trend away from virtualization – John Keagy even declares that, “The party is over for virtualization,” essentially, that cloud computing is not virtualization alone. As John states, the type of virtualization software that is used by a cloud provider usually doesn’t matter (unless it is costly to the vendor and that mark-up is passed on to the end-user – my side note) when the customer is shopping for a cloud and it will matter even less in the future. (For those interested, GoGrid uses opensource Xen and a proprietary management layer.)

The GoGrid and Orange Business Services Workshop was a question and answer panel moderated by Paul Miller. Panelists were: Lee Cardona – Director, Orange Business Services, Michael Mascia – Director, Technology Partners, Platform Engineering and Development, Orange Business Services, Mario Olivarez – VP of Products, GoGrid and Jeffrey Samuels – CMO, GoGrid. GoGrid and Orange recently implemented a private cloud using GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud service. Soon, GoGrid will be releasing the Orange Case Study which goes into more details of the reasoning behind Orange choosing GoGrid as their solution provider.

Did you attend or watch the livestream or recorded videos of Structure 2011? I would love to know what you thought of the event, the content, the speakers, the sessions and what you gained from it.

We’re working on a new series on the GoGrid blog focused on the employee side of working at GoGrid. While this series is geared towards prospective employees, it also gives you, our customers or other interested readers, a better idea of who our employees are that work hard to keep GoGrid services up and running, and the type of exciting and bleeding edge technologies they get to work with. Think of it as the ultimate inside scoop to the driving force behind GoGrid’s success.

GoGrid’s corporate office is located in the SOMA district in the beautiful city of San Francisco, home of the World Series champs, the San Francisco Giants. In fact, our offices are about 5 minutes from the ballpark where we recently held a company event in one of the luxurious club suites- because that’s how we roll and because our Executive Chairman and Founder, John Keagy, is a die-hard fan. Did I mention that our offices overlook the Bay Bridge? Imagine coming to work every day seeing this:

That’s an amazing view if you ask me.

“What’s it like to work at GoGrid?” I can’t tell you how many times candidates have asked this same question over the course of the 4.5 years I’ve been here. When responding to candidates, the first thing I mention is the people they would work with. The people that call GoGrid their “home” during the day inspire me want to come to work every day.

I wanted to get our employees’ perspective so I asked them the same question:

“I love coming into to work every day. Living in the city and biking to work (rain or shine) is like living a dream. When at GoGrid I am around some of the brightest, most tech savvy people I have ever met. This energizes me to strive for new levels of knowledge and experience.” -Zane, Technical Support

“Working at GoGrid gives you the ability to learn the latest technology that is driving the web all while making friends with the best team in the world. It’s a truly unique opportunity and I have to pinch myself sometimes to remember that I am actually at work. It’s that fun!” -Paul, Marketing (who has worked here for 10 years!)

“For me it’s been a refreshing change from other companies that I have worked for in the past. There is energy, excitement and innovation rampant in the halls. And being on the cutting edge of a new technology movement helps fuel the fire to succeed. We have a start-up feel but with the structure and processes of an established organization.” -Michael, Marketing

Being a high-tech company in the Cloud Computing space is extremely exciting. Our engineers get to build some amazing technology that’s reshaping the (technology) world, as we know it. I remember walking through our data center for the first time and thinking, “Wow! I get to work for a company that works with this?” I was like a kid in the candy store, thinking this was way “kewl”, as Executive Chairman John Keagy likes to put it.

So what else can I tell you about what it’s like to work at GoGrid? Being the HR professional that I am, I wouldn’t be doing my job by not communicating our competitive benefits and perks. We want to keep our employees healthy and happy by offering them the following:

• Kaiser, Anthem Blue Cross, MetLife Dental, and VSP (100% employer paid for employee coverage);
• Commuter benefits;
• Traditional and Roth 401(k) plans with a 25% company match;
• $10 Crunch memberships- did I mention there’s a Crunch in our courtyard?
• Employee discount program;
• Friday free lunch, fruit, espresso/cappuccino machine, and drinks fridge;
• Game room (so you can rock out to Guitar Hero);
• Employee referral program, known as the Cloud Talent Project;
• Incentive and employee referral programs; and
• Professional Training & Development

Granted, this isn’t the full scope of what we offer our employees, but you have to admit that you find yourself saying you want to work here, right? The truth being said, we are looking for the right talent to build out the GoGrid family so be sure to check out our latest Job Openings and see if you are a fit!

Last time in the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report series, I wrote on cloud use cases and reasons for migrating to the cloud. This week, I wanted to focus on everybody’s favorite topic: security and compliance in the cloud.

If you’re brand new to this series, let me catch you up to speed. At the beginning of the year, GoGrid gathered feedback from over 500 CTOs, developers and IT professionals relating to cloud computing and best practices. This week, we’re highlighting the results from the question “What type of security/compliance do you require in the cloud?”

You may have noticed, whenever there is a conversation about Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the security debate is sure to follow. We wanted to see what types of security the IT industry uses and which were the most important to maintaining compliance.

What Type of Security/Compliance Do You Require in the Cloud?

As seen in the chart above, private VLANs, network layer firewalls and DDoS mitigation are the most required form of security according to our respondents, followed closely by Virtual Private Networks.

Obviously, security is only as good as the amount of effort that you put into implementing it. At GoGrid, we believe that providing raw infrastructure that you can control and manage is paramount. And, we provide the tools to help make your environment more secure. Private VLANs enable traffic to flow between your server instances that is not public in any way to other users of the public cloud. We launched with this service and believe that is should be core to any cloud. DDoS protection is something that most web infrastructure providers and hosters have built into their service offering. No site is 100% immune to Distributed Denial of Service attacks, however, attacks can be thwarted and mitigated. Also, GoGrid provides firewall services either via a hardware appliance or via a Partner GoGrid Server Image (PGSI) – like CloudPassage, Gazzang, Cranium Solutions, Sentrigo, Trend Micro, Art of Defence or CohesiveFT (for VPN solutions), among others, where GoGrid users can choose best-of-class server image solutions to further harden and monitor their GoGrid environments.

PCI compliance is very business-specific. While GoGrid does not offer full PCI-compliance, we can provide the tools to “get you down the path” of achieving PCI-compliance. One example is via our hybrid hosting offering. By mixing and matching physical and virtual environments, you can work to achieve compliance of certain aspects of your hosted environment. Also, some of the partner images in the GoGrid Exchange offer means to achieve compliance for particular components of the PCI-compliance checklist – for example IDS/IPS, logging and web application firewalls. Our account teams have assisted many GoGrid customers in achieving PCI or HIPAA compliance.

Security/Compliance Requirements (Grouped)

This graph took the same data from above and really highlights what the IT industry views as important for IaaS security requirements. One of the reasons HIPAA and PCI are low are because is is very specific to a business vertical. Since many of the respondents may not have a need for PCI compliance, they will mark it as a lower of a priority than more commonplace items like firewalls, Private VLANs and VPNs which most companies should use as part of their Security Best Practices implementations.

Now that you know the security requirements from over 500 professionals from the IT industry, how do you stack up? Is your infrastructure more or less secure than our respondents? Stay tuned to the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report series because next time we’ll be diving into the private cloud!

For more information on our survey methodology or to see all of our results, please download the Cloud Survey Report.

This is the 3^rd and final post in my setup and use of the GoGrid Community GSI server for Cacti Monitoring. In my first post, “Set Up A Cacti Monitoring Server in Minutes with this GoGrid Community Server Image,,” I covered how to deploy Cacti in your GoGrid environment using a Community GSI. My second post, “How to Monitor Your Ubuntu Server on GoGrid in 6 Steps Using Cacti 0.8.7g,” I discussed how to initiate monitoring of your GoGrid Ubuntu server. Now to round things off, I want to show you how to link up your Cacti monitoring server to a Windows Server 2008 server on your GoGrid network. The base install of Cacti 0.8.7g will allow you to monitor the server’s bandwidth utilization, Ethernet errors, number of logged in users, and total number of processes. There are other templates available to monitor other components and services on your Windows server, but they require using an additional SNMP service beyond the Microsoft SNMP service. My blog post won’t get into the latter, but I will cover the former.

Objectives:

1. Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server
2. Configure and start Microsoft SNMP service on your Windows 2008 Server
3. Add new Cacti device
4. Create graphs to log Local Connection and Local Connection 2 bandwidth and errors, Logged in Users, and server processes

Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server

Below we see that we have a server (“Web2”) deployed on GoGrid with a public IP. Let’s log into this server and configure the private network with a private IP from the same subnet of the Cacti Monitor server. As I described in my previous post – I am using the prescribed private IP subnet from my GoGrid portal, contained under the List tab and then under Network – Private Network.

Once logged into the Windows 2008 server (“Web2”), I go to the Network and Sharing Center which is found by first going to the Start button. From here I need to open up Local Area Connection 2. This is the private network interface that plugs into your own private VLAN on GoGrid. I enter the “Properties” button and then open up “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)”. By default GoGrid will enable DHCP for this private network interface. If you have a DHCP server, your server can receive private IP addresses upon initial boot up. Perhaps I will cover this in a different post. For now, we need to configure the interface with a static IP available from our example private subnet 10.129.151.0/24. The subnet will be randomly generated for each customer account. I show you how to find this in my previous post, “How to Monitor Your Ubuntu Server on GoGrid in 6 Steps Using Cacti 0.8.7g.” Following the nomenclature – keeping the last octet of the 32bit address space the same as the public to make IP address association easier – I give this system the private IP address 10.129.151.110. The .110 matches up with the last 3 digits of the public IP address 173.204.58.110. This isn’t necessary, but helps you identify systems and know their private IP address based upon their public address and vice versa. See the image below of me assigning the private IP address.

Now, open up a command prompt >Go to Start, then Run – type in cmd and hit “enter”. I now test connectivity to the 10.129.151.0/24 network by pinging the gateway IP – 10.129.151.1. I get a response, so I can move on. If you don’t get a response, double check the private IP address you used and make sure the Subnet mask is correct. You can also test connectivity by pinging the private IP address of your Cacti Monitoring server. Remember, your 10.x.x.x/24 network will be different than my example subnet. Please check your portal for what you should be using.

Configure and start Microsoft SNMP service on your Windows 2008 Server

Check to see if you have the SNMP Service running already on your Windows system. By default, this server role in Windows Server 2008 on GoGrid isn’t installed and running. Go to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services. SNMP Trap may be there, but we also need SNMP Service. To install SNMP Service go to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Server Manager -> Select Features -> Add Features. From here find and check SNMP Services (which covers SNMP Service and SNMP WMI Provider). See image below.

Click Next and this will begin the install process of this feature on Windows.

Once the SNMP Service is installed, we can go to the Services page to find and configure the SNMP Service with the appropriate community and host IP address to accept SNMP calls from.

First go to the Services page – Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services or from Run type services.msc

Find the local service – SNMP Service and right click it and go to properties. From here you need to give the service the community string that you will set on the Cacti server and the private IP address of your Cacti Monitor server. This is under Accepted Community Names and Accept SNMP packets from these hosts. See image below:

Add new Cacti device

This step is same “create a device” step that I outlined in my previous post – except the details of the host will be different.

The IP, hostname and template used in the screen shot below represent my example Windows 2008 server named “Web2.” I chose the Host Template Windows 2000/XP Host –> selected SNMP v2 -> put in the community string I chose, and clicked “create.”

You should see the SNMP information for the host quickly appears near the upper left portion of the screen. If you see an error here, you will need to check your private network connectivity between the two servers and check the SNMP Service configuration on the Windows 2008 server.

With the new device in place on Cacti, we can now create the graphs.

Create graphs to log Local Connection and Local Connection 2 bandwidth and errors, Logged in Users, and server processes

From the device we just created, go to Create Graphs for this Host.

From this page we want to add a check to the following graph templates seen below in the image:

1. Logged in Users
2. Processes
3. Local Connection
4. Local Connection 2

Once you have done this, click Create at the bottom of the page.

We will do this again for the In/Out Errors/Discarded Packets option next.

1. Change the “Select a graph type:” near the bottom of the Create Graph page to In/Out Errors/Discarded Packets
2. Next check box the “Local Area Connection” and “Local Area Connection 2”
3. Finally click the Create button at the bottom.

After about 5 minutes, the graph icons will be available and your data will then begin to accumulate for your viewing.

I hope this blog series was helpful for you. The GoGrid Cacti Monitor – Community GSI is a great server-based application that can easily be deployed to a GoGrid virtual server, and configured to communicate via SNMP with your servers on the GoGrid network. The information gathered will give you real-time and historical interface bandwidth, server performance, and other important system level information.

Be sure to check out other Community or Partner Server Images available on GoGrid. The GoGrid Exchange has many pre-configured software solutions that can be deployed to your GoGrid architecture in a matter of minutes.

Managing your own infrastructure isn’t an easy thing. You have to spend hours, days or weeks planning your specific needs, deploying the right hardware for your use cases (which you also have to pay for), and hiring a team to manage the hardware and operations. Making those types of projections or even “predictions” is kind of like gazing into a crystal ball at times. But what if your infrastructure needs change? Your business is hopefully growing and your infrastructure needs to match your success. Well, as you grow, you have to run through that whole process all over again. You have to plan, deploy and manage; and each of these tasks has a significant cost, not only from a monetary standpoint, but also in terms of project management, human capital and your sanity as a whole.

The main principle behind Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is to develop a simpler process to address your IT needs and ensure that it takes less time to plan, manage and deploy – saving you time and money in the end. The question isn’t, “Can cloud computing save you time or money?” because we all know the answer to that. Yes. Of course it can! The real question is, “How much time and money can you save with cloud computing?”

In order to find that answer, you need to have a clear understanding of the benefits of cloud computing and where the real savings come into play. I go over this in great detail in my white paper, Skydiving Through The Clouds. Below are some of the ways companies benefit from transitioning to cloud based infrastructure.

• Economies of Scale – underutilization and misappropriated hardware become a thing of the past. The cloud enables compute, storage and RAM resources to be more efficiently managed, provisioned and scaled, all within a shared environment.
• Cost Control – knowing exactly what you are using and how much that usage will cost you allows for a much stricter control over expenditures.
• “Disposable IT” – companies have the ability to create, use and destroy infrastructure based on their business needs.
• Burstable Workloads– scaling based on demand allows organizations to efficiently use infrastructure in a timely basis.
• Avoiding Capital Expenditure – with cloud computing, infrastructure becomes an operating expense with no need to amortize hardware costs over time.

John Keagy, GoGrid’s Executive Chair and Founder, also jumped in on the conversation a couple weeks ago where he shared what is fact and what is fiction regarding the economics of IaaS in an article entitled The Actual Truth About The Economics of Cloud Computing.

Some cloud providers, like GoGrid, also make very easy to determine what your total operating expenditure will be with cloud hosting calculators. Our tool gives estimated monthly costs based on your infrastructure needs and usage. Remember, GoGrid is “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™” so we can definitely help you plan out your cloud computing strategy and rollout in a way that is understandable and doable.

Now, I’d like to hear from you. If you are already using cloud infrastructure, how much time and money have you saved since the switch? How are you using the cloud to make your IT-rollouts more cost effective? If you’re still managing your own infrastructure, how much do you estimate you could save by switching to a cloud hosted solution?

Share your answers in the comment section below.

Look forward to seeing your answers!