GoGrid continues to build out our Executive Team with the announcement that Mark Worsey has joined GoGrid as Chief Information Officer.

The following Press Release was distributed today:

GoGrid Names Mark Worsey Chief Information Officer
Infrastructure and Internet Veteran Joins Cloud Hosting leader

San Francisco, CA – July 21, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has appointed Mark Worsey as Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology. Worsey brings to the GoGrid team expansive industry expertise ranging from technology platform development to world-wide network operations. Worsey will be responsible for all technological and architectural advancements as well as managing the operating strategies for GoGrid’s products and services.

We’re proud to have Mark’s leadership driving GoGrid’s innovative engineering, technology and operations departments,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “We will look to Mark’s technological vision and expertise to enable GoGrid to continue to surpass the expectations of our thousands of customers every day.”

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GoGrid was a sponsor and exhibitor at the recent Structure 2010, a Cloud Computing industry event that took place on June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

The event topics covered a wide range of Cloud subjects, with many industry leaders discussing their views on the subject matter at hand. Topic titles included:

• Dealing with the Data Tsunami: The Big Data Panel
• Cloudonomics: The Value of the Cloud
• Guru Panel: Web Infrastructure for Real Time and Critical
• Hitting Reset: Reinventing Core Internet Technologies
• Analytics and Management Layers
• What Comes After the Blade? Architectures for the Cloud
• Fatter and Faster: Reducing Latency and Increasing Capacity on Broadband

There were several panel sessions as well.

GoGrid’s CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy, was interviewed by GigaOM Pro’s Derrick Harris. John answered the following questions:

• “GoGrid is a cloud provider, can you explain the GoGrid service?”
• “Cloud computing is a hot topic right now, how is GoGrid’s business?”
• “One of the keys to GoGrid’s success is your strong Partner program. Can you talk a a little bit about your Partner program and why it is important for Cloud providers to have one?”
• “Do you find that a lot of your Partners bring a lot of business to GoGrid?”
• “Another unique thing about GoGrid is your background in managed hosting and dedicated servers. Can you talk about how that enables GoGrid to offer a hybrid cloud option?”

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If you are already a GoGrid user, most likely your inbox has a copy of the June 2010 GoGrid Newsletter. But for those of you who are not customers or are simply interested in receiving the latest and greatest information straight from us, below you can find the content of the newsletter. It was definitely an action-packed month for us at GoGrid as you will indubitably see from reading.

Below is the full content of the newsletter:

Hello,

It’s been a busy start to the first half of the year for us at GoGrid. We’re excited to fill you in on all of our important news and how we’ve been working to make your GoGrid cloud even better. From opening a new East Coast data center to our release of GoGrid version 3.0, you’ll find this newsletter full of information on how you can enhance and expand your GoGrid cloud.

Specific topics include: (more…)

We at GoGrid are excited to introduce you to the latest version of GoGrid! (Perhaps you already saw the “Sneak Peak” article I posted earlier.) After several months of planning, developing, implementing, testing, deploying and wiping the sweat off of our collective brows, we present to you, GoGrid 3.0.

This post will not be about the nitty-gritty details of the release as there will be several other posts that touch on all of the activities going on at GoGrid. To provide some guidance though, here’s what I’m going to briefly cover:

• New GoGrid Product Site
• Webinar for New GoGrid Customers
• High-level Overview of GoGrid 3.0 Features
• Copy of Press Release on GoGrid 3.0

There are many ways to get more information about this release and what it can do for you as someone shopping for Cloud Infrastructure or already using the GoGrid Cloud. One of the best ways is to talk to a GoGrid Sales Representative as they have great ways to choose the right GoGrid infrastructure solution for you. You can call them at: 1.877.946.4743 (US & Canada) or 1.415.869.7444 (Worldwide). Or we typically have 24×5 Live Sales Chat & Contact forms available here.

New GoGrid Site

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There have recently been a number of Cloud benchmark studies coming out and we wanted to highlight one in particular, that of CloudHarmony. At the beginning of June, CloudHarmony published their “Disk I/O Benchmarking in the Cloud” study and GoGrid‘s performance was right at the top of the list of 19 other Cloud Providers. This is one study in a series that CloudHarmony is producing.

We sent out the following Press Release today announcing the results of this independent, third-party study:

New Cloud Benchmarking Report Shows GoGrid at the Forefront

CloudHarmony’s Benchmarking report grades performance of cloud providers

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GoGrid pushes ahead with new Intel-based technology, specifically, the new Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series, code named “Westmere”.

The following Press Release was distributed today:

GoGrid Announces Cloud Services Powered by New Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 series
The 32-nm processor provides an incredible 50% savings in power consumption

San Francisco, CA – June 15, 2010 – Today GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure hosting provider, announced they will be deploying cloud services based on the powerful new Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 series, formerly codenamed “Westmere”.

GoGrid cloud services have always provided superior CPU performance, which means faster response times and improved productivity for our customers,” said John Keagy, GoGrid CEO. “With the latest Intel Xeon processor technology, we will be able to deliver an even better experience to our customers at a lower cost.”

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GoGrid is pleased to announce a new Cloud Management option using enStratus as a management service for GoGrid. The following Press Release describing the new offering was issued by GoGrid Partner, enStratus. enStratus is a cloud infrastructure management platform that allows for the deployment, operation and management of enterprise-class application in public and private clouds. Its multi-cloud architecture is focused on the security and high-availability of mission-critical web applications.

enStratus enables enterprises to run applications that operate with sensitive data all within a cloud infrastructure environment.

Webinar – June 23rd

enStratus is hosting a webinar on June 23rd titled: Cloud Security Best Practices from 11:30PM to 12:15 PM Central Time where you can learn how enStratus and GoGrid work together to ensure your security policies and procedures are met for your cloud computing infrastructure. Topics include:

• How can I best manage my keys for the cloud?
• Can I encrypt my data?
• If lawyers subpoena my cloud provider, can they get access to my data?
• Can I have users with varying levels of access to my infrastructure?
• Is LDAP or SAML 2.0 supported?
• What auditing is available?

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Want to see a quick list of the top 10 Cloud Computing players in the space? (And yes, GoGrid is obviously one of those otherwise I wouldn’t be mentioning this article.) Yesterday, Jeff Vance published an article titled “Ten Cloud Computing Leaders” on Datamation where he briefly describes his thoughts on the leaders in the Cloud Computing space.

As Vance writes about each Cloud provider, he breaks down his analysis into answering a few key questions:

1. Why they are a leader today
2. Why the could be on top in years to come
3. Who the Key Executives are
4. Who their Customers are

I have always found that doing comparisons of Cloud-related companies to be quite a difficult task since products and services can vary so dramatically. And, obviously, there are other factors and metrics that simply cannot be listed in these types of “summary” articles, things like hosting experience, feature-to-feature comparisons, breadth & depth of product and services offerings, etc. However, if you are looking for an organized snapshot of the current leaders, you might want to give Vance’s article a good read.

Companies listed in this top ten are: (more…)

GoGrid is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeffrey Samuels as GoGrid’s new Chief Marketing Officer.

The following press release was distributed today:

GoGrid Names Jeffrey Samuels Chief Marketing Officer
Internet Infrastructure Executive to Drive Cloud Hosting Market Adoption

San Francisco, CA – May 20, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has named Jeffrey Samuels as Chief Marketing Officer. Samuels brings a proven executive track record in marketing, sales and product management to GoGrid’s leadership team. In this role, Samuels will be responsible for managing and expanding GoGrid’s cloud hosting businesses and driving market adoption at a global level.

Jeff’s impressive energy, vision, and track record make him a great addition to GoGrid,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “His experience is uniquely anchored in scaling cloud-based business-to-business product lines. As GoGrid continues to innovate and increase market share in the cloud infrastructure market, Jeff’s leadership will be vital.”

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Network World this week published a comprehensive review of 3 GoGrid Partners titled “First-ever test of public cloud management wares” and how their services can be used to monitor and manage Public Cloud resources including GoGrid. In the article, Thomas Henderson and Brendan Allen put RightScale, Tap In Systems and Cloudkick through some fairly rigorous testing to show the strengths (and weaknesses) of each Cloud Management vendor.

Source: NetworkWorld.com

The point of the article is pretty clear to me. We (and Cloud Infrastructure providers Rackspace and Amazon) have been providing Cloud Infrastructure for several years now with 100,000′s combined customers actively using our respective clouds. Obviously, depending on the provider, this process can be quick and easy or a bit more involved. But once you have your infrastructure deployed in the Cloud, how do you monitor and manage it effectively? The authors take this challenge of deploying, managing and taking down jobs hosted in the cloud and discuss their findings within the article.

Summing it all up in a quote:

Our findings in this test are that RightScale impressed us most with its overall control and deep understanding of specific cloud vendors like Amazon. Tap In Systems has more breadth in terms of different clouds that can be used, it’s just not as easy to use. And we liked Cloudkick for its simplicity and ease of use.

My opinion of these three Cloud Management vendors is that each have various specialties and are better at one function than another. Also, each vendor handles integration and control of specific Public Clouds in different ways. Be sure that you conduct some due diligence when choosing one as well as when selecting a cloud for them to manage. Regardless, I do recommend that you give the article a read as it provides some pretty good insight into these three vendors and how their products works with the 3 leading cloud infrastructure providers out there. (more…)