We absolutely LOVE hearing how GoGrid customers are using our cloud solutions to create unique “cloud fingerprints” and environments using the features and data centers of GoGrid. Paul Trippett just published a very interesting write-up of an infrastructure environment that addresses many of the common concerns facing any company looking to provide a highly-redundant infrastructure while also ensuring a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) for their customers.

You can find Paul’s original write-up titled “Utilizing GoGrid’s Multiple Data Centers for Routing and Failover” on his site. With his permission, we have reposted the article so that others can learn, mimic and build upon his unique scenario.

At the beginning of the year one of our customers asked us if we can provide an SLA for StormRETS and with it, the sound gritting teeth suddenly echoed around the room. As you can imagine, this caused more questions than which we actually had answers for:

What kind of SLA did we want to provide and what could we realistically provide?

Our hosting provider, at the time, had an SLA which entailed “We don’t give any guarantee that your servers will be available, but if for any reason they are unavailable we will get the back up and running as soon as we can.”, erm, how on earth can we build a SLA based on that. It was decided at this time we would migrate our servers to another hosting provider, one at least with a SLA we can build on and a company we can actually contact directly should a problem arise.

Any migrations we did needed to address the following issues:

• System Monitoring — Constant monitoring for potential problems.
• Network Downtime — If its a localized network issue, secondary DR fail-over site.
• Server Downtime — Multiple Servers or Secondary DR fail-over site.
• Software foul ups — Unit Testing and run the system on multiple servers.
• Server Software Updates — Multiple Servers.
• Maintenance Schedules — Multiple Servers.
• High Traffic Spikes –  Multiple Servers.
• Botched Deploys — DR fail-over.
• Drunk SysAdmins

We decided it would be a good idea to setup a second data center in the case of a failure of the primary, but, what’s the point in having all this extra duplicated capacity we’re not using, it makes sense to put it to good use by directing traffic to our nearest data center and failing all traffic over in case of a major outage.

DNS Failover and Load Balancing
The problem with this is that DNS fail-over or geo-aware DNS was extremely expensive. We just couldn’t justify a spend of more than $200 a month for something we could setup ourselves on a few VPS boxes scattered around the globe for $50 a month. Anycast DNS is severely overrated, it makes sense yes but not at the prices being asked. Sometimes answers comes from strange places, while doing some whois searches on start-up companies, which we knew would be looking at this same problem, we found Zerigo who have recently started offering geo-aware DNS at prices starting at $20 per month. After running some tests there response times aren’t to shabby either!

Cloud Hosting
There are more than enough blog posts about choosing a cloud provider. We looked at the more common providers including Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid, in the end we decided on GoGrid. GoGrid offer a really good SLA, they have telephone support and multiple data centers ready for you to use.

GoGrid offer a really good SLA, they have telephone support and multiple data centers ready for you to use.

With every GoGrid account comes two /28 blocks of routable IP addresses, one in each data center. This is an awesome feature, usually when you create a new VPS you are assigned a random IP address from a huge pool, deleting a VPS would mean you lost that IP address, with GoGrid you can delete a VPS and re-assign its IP address to another VPS meaning all your IP addresses are always contiguous and easy to remember. Due to GoGrid’s network setup you cant use all the IP addresses as some are reserved for the default gateway, network broadcast, and a further 3 IP address reserved in the middle of the pool for the active and standby load balancers.

GoGrid provides free fault tolerant F5 load balancers with their service, allowing you to setup up to 3 load balanced IP addresses per data center. In our old setup we had setup Load balancers ourselves running on CentOS and NGINX but using GoGrid for this saves us time and money, and gives us one less thing we have to worry about and manage ourselves.

Network Setup
Our network setup is nothing new, but the data we have, needs to be retrieved and processed quickly via our API. Our average API response time is currently 0.07 seconds against approx 1,000,000 property records and we don’t want any redundancy we put in place to affect that time. Additional locations should be as autonomous as possible with little or no inter-site communication caused by an API request and be able to handle another data center going down.

Above you can see the basic network diagram of what we have setup and running:

• Zerigo DNS to load balance between the two data centers and fail-over requests to another data-center in case of a failure.
• GoGrid f5 load balancers in each location to load balance requests across the web servers in each location.
• OpenVPN Servers to bridge the two networks for passing replication data between the data centers.
• MySQL circular replication between the two sites.
• CouchDB multi master replication between the two sites.

A lot of the fail-over is left up to the platform to decide. Every minute the monitoring system calls into the system via a URL, this script checks a few key things, such as MySQL and CouchDB availability, if any of these tests fail the script returns a failure status and the DNS automatically switches. We use 3 minute TTL’s on the majority of our DNS records, so in theory fail-over should take no longer than 3-5 minutes to complete.

With our new setup we can now redirect traffic to our second data center while performing maintenance on the other, and we are in a much better position to provide an SLA to our customers, but even after these major first steps we are still not in a position to provide an SLA quite yet. Over the coming weeks we will be running various performance tests and fail-over testing to verify that both data centers will be able to work independently of the other, based on these performance tests we will be able to devise how much capacity we have and at which points we need to start considering upgrades and adding capacity.

Do you have an environment running on GoGrid that you think is unique, helpful for others to see and learn from or are particularly proud of? If so, drop me an email: michael [at] GoGrid.com.

As 2010 draws to a close, I thought that I would take a look back at some predictions about Cloud Computing that I made at the beginning of the year, but with a bit of an added spin. This reflection could be pretty lengthy so I will focus mainly on how GoGrid matched up to the predictions. While that can be perceived as a bit one sided, I believe that it is important for the Cloud Computing community to contemplate on what they did for the Cloud from a “personal” perspective and how they are driving this evolutionary movement forward.

Here were my predictions from January 2010:

1. Cloud Outages – There will be several Cloud Outages that get high visibility this year. As complexity and associated infrastructure grows and more users turn toward the cloud, any hiccups therein will receive quick and broad media coverage, with naysayers quickly stating “I told you so”. Unfortunately, any type of outage may be perceived as a “cloud failure”, resulting in the masses becoming increasingly doubtful in the reliability of the cloud. This “F.U.D. Factor” will be a steep hurdle that cloud providers and partners will have to overcome. Those companies with sound IT strategies and best practices in place will be able to weather any outages well, assuming they employ Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions and have them implemented.
   
   End of Year Update: Yes, there were outages in the cloud but the term “cloud” expanded to include a variety of items that were indirectly related to the Cloud Pyramid. No hosting service or data center is fully immune to outages or disruptions. Several SaaS providers had disruptions of service that were pretty high profile (most recently Tumblr, a micro-blogging platform, affected countless customers across the globe). ReadWriteWeb has a good listing of significant disruptions that occurred including Wikipedia, WordPress, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and yes, even WikiLeaks.
   GoGrid Update: I’m happy to say (knock on wood), that GoGrid has maintained a 99.99% uptime throughout the year which means that customers who have implemented their infrastructure solutions within our cloud offerings have made an important choice. With our rollouts of new service offerings as well as an East Coast data center, our customers now have a choice on the type of infrastructure to provision and where they want it to reside.
2. The Rise of Hybrid Hosting Solutions – While relatively new in 2009, more providers will consider implementing the ability to have the “best of all worlds” hosting solutions. Whether this be the combination of physical and cloud environments or, cloud bursting, or private and public clouds working congruently, there will definitely be a blurring of lines between what hosting is.
   
   End of Year Update: There was definitely some significant movement in this arena, with a couple providers announcing “Cloud Connect” or “Hybrid Connect” features that cross-connect physical and virtual environments. This is an important item for corporations looking to have flexible network topologies.
   GoGrid Update: We first launched Cloud Connect back in November of 2008 as we understood this need by businesses to have hybrid environments. Coincidentally, it was released using the “Cloud Connect” name which other providers seem to have attempted to capitalize on. However, back in February 2010, we released our GoGrid Dedicated Servers offering that effectively integrates physical and virtual infrastructure within the GoGrid Cloud. More recently (December 2010), we announced that GoGrid Dedicated Servers and our Hybrid Hosting environment was available within our East Coast data center as well, thus providing these hybrid solutions in multiple locations. The important take-away here is that 2 years ago we realized that this would be an important service that enterprises, businesses and corporations would desire, so our products and engineering teams ensured that the physical and virtual components that comprise our offering were tightly integrated and easy to use, all within the same web portal and private network.
3. Security Concerns, Vulnerabilities and Malware – this is an only logical prediction. As the number of cloud or virtualized environments increase due to their ease of use and lower cost, the possibility of environments being created and left unattended also increases. Also because of the ease of use, with “average” users deploying environments that are not hardened or at least audited from a security standpoint, there are more possibilities for hackers or users to unintentionally open their systems up to malware, botnets or other malicious code.
   
   End of Year Update: With the exception of DDoS attacks which any hosting provider is susceptible to (and which are typically targeted at a specific site, not a provider), and with the obvious exception of the WikiLeaks attacks, cloud “hacks” or vulnerabilities seemed to remain fairly low. There is still obviously the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but since cloud computing has really seemed to have hit mainstream IT, companies are doing their due diligence when selecting a cloud hosting provider, obviously looking toward robustness and security as core requirements for IT implementations.
   GoGrid Update: We have strengthened our DDoS mitigation services, engaged with new technology partners and service providers, and continue to provide robust support should malicious activities occur. GoGrid has been conducting regular educational webinars (including some with our partners) to help our customers reduce risks associated with technology as well as develop redundant, N-level architectures designed for fault tolerance and resiliency.
4. A “Cloud” for Everyone – Towards the end of last year, we started to see a blurring of the definition of “cloud” and “cloud computing”. The mainstream media is to blame for much of this confusion. To that end, people seem to be ubiquitously interchanging the word “cloud” and “cloud computing” where they are actually quite different. Most people are simply using the word “cloud” to describe anything where the data is stored somewhere else, whether it be truly using a “cloud computing” environment or simply a cluster of servers somewhere. I predict that this confusion will get worse long before it gets better. People will continue to interchangeably use “cloud” and “cloud computing” thus forcing those of us in the industry to (re)define what “cloud computing” truly is. However, as the word “cloud” becomes incredibly mainstream, it will grow to mean anything that is delivered via the web, regardless of if it is applications, services, infrastructure, data or what have you. (In fact, I used “cloud” interchangeably throughout this post…for me, I’m talking about “cloud computing.”)
   
   End of Year Update: Unfortunately to those of us in the Cloud Computing industry, the term “cloud” continues to morph into an encompassing of anything related to “stored on the Internet somewhere”. Recent advertising campaigns now throw the term “cloud” around extremely loosely, polluting the true definition. We believe that Gartner’s definition of Cloud Computing is one of the best in the space currently: “A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to customers using Internet Technologies.”
   GoGrid Update: At GoGrid, we make it our mission to adhere to the important qualities of cloud computing: self-service, scalable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go and as a service. While we may use the term “cloud” loosely, our core competency is “cloud computing”, being the largest “pure play” provider in the space. What I mean by pure play is that our business is devoted to providing infrastructure services entirely, not diluted by other add-on services or products or physical items. This year we developed our Unique Value Proposition (UVP) – “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™” which we live and breath by. So while the term “cloud” continues to become fractured, representing many things that it wasn’t initially supposed to, we fully believe in ensuring that our “cloud” represents industry definitions and standards.
5. Analysts will Shorten their “Coming of Age” Stories – Many of the big name players predicted that cloud computing wouldn’t really be adopted by the mainstream for another few years. I believe that they will retract or refine their statements to show how much closer to mainstream cloud computing really is. While Fortune100 companies may still be slow to adopt, the “rest of us” will get on the cloud a lot faster than analysts originally predicted.
   
   End of Year Update: Cloud Computing continues to “infiltrate” corporations and enterprises as these companies look to alternatives to traditional IT requisitioning. While corporate entities as a whole might not fully throw themselves at replacing their existing infrastructure with cloud infrastructure, business units and other departments therein are seeing the advantages and embracing them. I still believe that the adoption curve is moving a lot faster than what analysts are predicting.
   GoGrid Update: Our increase in corporate and enterprise customers clearly indicates that there is a significant uptake in interest as well as implementation of cloud and hybrid scenarios and solutions. Also, our ever-growing numbers of SMB and Web 2.0 customers reflect an even healthier adoption of cloud computing as outsourcing of IT services remains a critical component of financial savings, human resource optimization and other unrealized IT rearchitecture.

So there you have it. A quick look back at my predictions for 2010 and how the market and GoGrid faired. What are your thoughts on the past year and how Cloud Computing did therein? What about 2011? Would love to get your read! And Happy Holidays from all of us at GoGrid.

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:

• New East Coast Data Center
• GoGrid 3.0
• GoGrid’s Leadership Team
• CloudHarmony Benchmarks
• New GoGrid Website
• Partner News
• Events and Other News

NEW EAST COAST DATA CENTER

We’re thrilled to announce our new East Coast (US-East-1) data center in Ashburn, VA. Our expansion to the East Coast has been in development for several months and is available now. All of our GoGrid data center locations are SAS70 Type II certified and Cisco Powered Networks.

Data Center Locations:

• West Coast (US-West-1): San Francisco, CA
• East Coast (US-East-1): Ashburn, VA

Virtual servers with GoGrid base images are available for immediate deployment at the US-East-1 data center; additional features will be launched in subsequent releases. You can use the GoGrid portal or API to provision virtual servers in real time, and in either of our locations; US-West-1 or US-East-1.

GOGRID 3.0

You’ll notice that throughout the newsletter we’ll be talking about making complex infrastructure easy and that’s really the goal of GoGrid version 3.0. In addition to continually enhancing our product offering, we’ve also been listening to you – our customers – and developing features that make creating a complex IT infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud easy.

Some of the new features and system enhancements you’ll recognize from previous newsletters, however, the culmination of all the hardware architecture and feature development make up GoGrid version 3.0. While each of our releases contain many features and improvements, the timeline below represents those that can help you make an immediate impact on how you leverage your GoGrid cloud.

GoGrid 3.0 Timeline: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy

• June 2010 New East Coast Data Center – GoGrid partners with Equinix, Inc (Nasdaq: EQIX) in the expansion to a new data center in Ashburn, VA. The initial rollout enables you to provision cloud servers in real-time and in either location Us-East-1 or US-West-1.
• May 2010 GoGrid Node Hardware and increased CPU allocations – All GoGrid data centers are updated and outfitted with the latest Intel Nehalem chipset architecture which allows for 25-50% more CPU for virtual servers. Cloud Servers also now have greater CPU allocations. See the blog posting.
• April 2010 Hardware Firewalls – Firewall services are introduced allowing you to manage security for your GoGrid VLAN from a single device.
• February 2010 Virtual & Physical Servers – The ability to create a hybrid IT infrastructure with virtual and physical servers within the same environment becomes available.
• November 2009 GoGrid Exchange – GoGrid introduces the GoGrid Exchange with new Partner Server Images (PGSIs). PGSIs provide a variety of software solutions deployed as software server images for common business challenges including: Software & Applications, Development & Testing, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, and Security, Monitoring & Reporting.
• November 2009 Content Delivery Network – GoGrid CDN is rolled out, allowing you to accelerate the delivery of all your web content using our global infrastructure.

GOGRID’S LEADERSHIP TEAM

Not only have we been enhancing our product offering, but, we’ve also been expanding our GoGrid leadership team. With a keen eye to selecting industry pioneers with proven track records, we’d like to introduce you to the newest members of our leadership team and formally introduce you to all of our GoGrid executives.

New Members of the Executive Team

• Jeff Samuels, CMO
• Mark Worsey, CIO and EVP of Technology

Executive Team

• John Keagy, Founder and CEO
• Brett Newsom, CFO
• Jeff Samuels, CMO
• Mark Worsey, CIO and EVP of Technology
• Jack Duffy, EVP of Sales and Business Development
• Paul Lappas, VP of Engineering
• Mario Olivarez, VP of Product Management
• Bobby Brown, VP of Operations and Support

Learn more about each of our executives on the GoGrid website.

CLOUDHARMONY BENCHMARKS

CloudHarmony just announced the results of the first industry wide test of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. In the recently published Input/Output (I/O) Cloud Performance report, GoGrid Cloud Servers dramatically outperform most other cloud vendors in the marketplace.

GoGrid Benchmark Results:

• GoGrid’s 4 GB RAM cloud server benchmark performed best with input/output performance (IOP) of 161.14. This was over 50% faster than Amazon’s equivalent cloud server which had an IOP of 104.36
• Our 4 GB RAM cloud server was almost twice as fast as RackSpace’s equivalent cloud server which had an IOP of 86.75

Read the GoGrid blog for more details on the methodology and results.

NEW GOGRID WEBSITE

Our GoGrid website has been completely overhauled. Easily navigate to find product information, pricing plans and case studies to help enhance your GoGrid cloud. Explore the new site www.gogrid.com.

PARTNER NEWS

Did you know that a partner image (PGSI) can be provisioned in minutes, drastically reducing the time it takes to get new applications up and running in the cloud? As a GoGrid user, you have full access to any public PGSI within the GoGrid catalog of images. Detailed partner information, as well as descriptions of the available PGSIs can be found on the GoGrid Exchange.

The following images are NEW to the GoGrid Exchange.

• SNORT IDS/IPS – Snort® is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system (IDS/IPS) developed by Sourcefire. There is an additional charge of $29/month per instance of this deployed. It gets the user access to updated rules via Sourcefire.
• MediaWiki – MediaWiki is a wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis. MediaWiki was designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.
• JasperServer – JasperServer Community Edition, the open source report server, built by the developers of JasperReports, the leading open source reporting library. It provides a web and web services based environment for reporting and dashboards.
• Spree – The most powerful and flexible E-Commerce platform for the Ruby Enterprise. Spree.
• Coppermine – Coppermine is a multi-purpose, full-featured web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.
• Rubystack – Ruby on Rails is a full-stack MVC framework for database-backed web applications that is optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.
• LAPPstack – Includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP and phpPgAdmin and required dependencies. LAPPstack
• Librato Silverline – Silverline allows you to process your workload on a smaller number of servers without any impact on the Quality of Service provided by your primary applications.
• Sentrigo Hedgehog – Hedgehog Cloud-Based Database Compliance and Security Suite.

OTHER NEWS AND EVENTS

• Structure 2010 hosted by GigaOm – GoGrid was a sponsor at the annual Structure conference hosted by GigaOm on June 23 and 24.GigaOm/Structure
• GoGrid Named One of The “Hottest Companies in San Francisco” by Lead411Read more on our blog
• GoGrid named “Best Cloud Computing Provider” for May and June 2010 by HostReview.com Read more.
• ASCII Awards GoGrid “Best Channel Incentives.” Find our more on our blog.

As always you can find more information about GoGrid at:

• 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 contact me directly at Maria[at]gogrid.com.

Thank you,
Maria Gallegos

I told you we were busy! Please don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a fan of us on Facebook. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. We hope you enjoy all of the great news coming from our San Francisco headquarters.

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

Before I dive into the items that make up this important feature and service release, I also want to point out that we have completely updated the GoGrid Product site.

We have revamped the look and feel and drastically updated the content and organization. The primary sections of the site are:

• Cloud Hosting – http://www.gogrid.com/cloud-hosting/
• Support – http://www.gogrid.com/support/
• Partners – http://www.gogrid.com/partners/
• About Us – http://www.gogrid.com/about/
• Sign Up - http://www.gogrid.com/signUp/

You will notice that many of the top navigation menus now have content within them.

For example, within the Cloud Hosting section, you will find the following subsections:

• What is GoGrid?
• NEW Case Studies
• Infrastructure Components
• Pricing
• Included Features
• Add-on Features

The Support Section contains Support and other Online Resources to make your GoGrid experience and education thereof even better.

The Partner section discusses the various Partner Programs available as well as shows the numerous GoGrid Exchange solutions that you can use to make your infrastructure within the GoGrid cloud even more robust.

The About section actually pulls in the latest GoGrid Blog posts as well as gives more details about the Company as a whole, upcoming Events/Webinars, Press Coverage and Press Releases and Careers at GoGrid (YES, we are HIRING!).

Lastly, you can Sign Up for GoGrid quickly and easily. All that you need is a Credit Card.

Be sure to take a quick look around the new product site. We are definitely pleased with how it turned out!

Upcoming GoGrid Webinar

Whether you are new to Cloud Computing, the GoGrid Cloud or an existing GoGrid user, we understand that with every release, you have questions. Well we have answers for you! To that end, we have set up a webinar for new GoGrid users.

If you are NEW to GoGrid, I recommend that you register and attend the “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy: Learn How You Can Leverage the GoGrid Cloud“:

• Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2010
• Time: 11:00 am PDT
• Summary:
  • Learn about the enhanced offerings included in the GoGrid 3.0 release and how they can help your business.
  • Understand how GoGrid’s robust partner ecosystem can help you leverage the GoGrid cloud.
  • Discover how GoGrid customers are expanding their cloud environment with our partners and the GoGrid Exchange.
• Details & Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/event_29_june_2010

We definitely hope that you can attend the webinar. If you miss it, don’t worry as we will be posted it and others later. And we do plan on having more webinars in the future.

High-Level Overview of GoGrid 3.0 Features

As I mentioned in my “Sneak Peak” post there are several important items that make up this release, specifically:

• New East Coast Datacenter
• New GoGrid Node hardware
• New CPU and Hard Drive allocations
• Cloud-like Physical Server deployments
• GoGrid Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• More Actionable & Usable List view of GoGrid virtual & physical appliances and networks
• New Pre-Paid and volume-licensing pricing plans
• Robust Partner Ecosystem with the GoGrid Exchange & Partner Server Images (PGSIs)
• Physical & Virtual Hardware Firewalls
• Updated GoGrid API
• Edit Load Balancer API support
• Custom Server Images (MyGSIs)
• Dynamically Scalable Cloud Storage

Critical components of the GoGrid 3.0 launch include:

• New East Coast Datacenter – GoGrid has partnered with Equinix, Inc (Nasdaq: EQIX) in the expansion to a new datacenter in Ashburn, VA which allows for GoGrid to have multiple points of presence in the continental United States. The initial rollout will allow for the provisioning of cloud servers within the new datacenter and with new appliances being rolled out shortly thereafter.

• New GoGrid Node hardware – the new GoGrid East Coast datacenter has been outfitted with the latest Intel Nehalem chipset architecture which allows for 25-50% more CPU for select virtual servers. Cloud Servers now have equal CPU-to-RAM ratios which means better performance across the board.

• Virtual & Physical Server deployments – GoGrid sets the standard for “hybrid hosting” by allowing customers to deploy Cloud Servers and Dedicated Servers within the same infrastructure. The ability to mix and match virtual and physical appliances within the same environment enables never before seen flexibility that maintain cloud characteristics.

• Growing Partner Ecosystem – GoGrid continues to expand its rich and robust Partner ecosystem called the GoGrid Exchange with new and updated Partner Server Images (PGSIs). PGSIs provide a variety of software solutions deployed as software server images for common business challenges including: Software & Applications, Development & Testing, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, and Security, Monitoring & Reporting.

Press Release on GoGrid 3.0

Lastly, below is the GoGrid Press Release that came out today:

GoGrid Unveils Next Generation of Cloud Infrastructure Hosting Service

Market and Customer Demand Drives GoGrid 3.0

San Francisco, CA – June 29, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced the release of GoGrid Version 3.0. GoGrid 3.0 is designed to extend the company’s leadership position as the most flexible, secure, easy-to-use, and feature-rich Cloud Infrastructure Hosting Solution available. The release includes a number of security and management features designed to enable GoGrid customers to create innovative and compelling infrastructure solutions for their business needs.

GoGrid has been on the leading edge of the cloud market helping company’s like Gomez utilize the  power of cloud computing to transform our infrastructure,” said Colin Mason, Reality Load Product Manager of Gomez, the Web Performance Division of Compuware (NASDAQ: CPWR). “GoGrid delivers outstanding performance and flexibility as Cloud Infrastructure provider. With GoGrid 3.0′s features and new datacenter, we can further integrate the cloud into our business processes.”

GoGrid’s suite of features and services provide the Cloud Computing marketplace with a unique blend of compelling infrastructure solutions. The launch of 3.0 is an important step in realizing GoGrid’s vision of making complex infrastructures easier.

There are many features of GoGrid version 3.0 that will put more flexibility, control, and customizable computing power in the hands of customers. Some of these include:
•    a new East Coast datacenter
•    new CPU and hard drive allocations
•    industry-leading  pre-paid and volume licensing pricing plans and,
•    physical and virtual hardware firewalls for enhanced security.

For a full list of new features please visit http://www.gogrid.com/software-update

GoGrid has continually brought to market pioneering services that help businesses of all sizes seize the tremendous opportunity of cloud hosting.” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “Our latest release is a significant step forward in our efforts to make complex infrastructure extremely easy in the GoGrid Cloud. From the new East Coast Datacenter to our unique hybrid hosting solution, GoGrid 3.0 epitomizes GoGrid’s mission to handle the infrastructure for clients, so they can focus on their business.”

GoGrid will be hosting a webinar for new comers to Cloud Computing and the GoGrid Cloud on June 29th at 11:00am PDT. To sign up for the webinar, please visit: http://go.gogrid.com/event_29_june_2010.

About GoGrid
GoGrid makes complex infrastructure easy. GoGrid’s Cloud and Hybrid infrastructure hosting enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control free f5 load balanced cloud infrastructures and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access/administrative server control. GoGrid physical and virtual server instances maintain industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn proprietary standards. Deploying GoGrid infrastructure using a Standard or Partner Server Image takes minutes via a web control panel or GoGrid’s API. GoGrid gives users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud.

For more information:
Product site: http://www.GoGrid.com

Pretty exciting stuff! If you have any questions about this new GoGrid release, please be sure to leave a comment on this post or contact one of our Sales Representatives.

And lastly, we want to introduce you to our new Unique Value Proposition: “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™”.

An interesting article was posted to the Outsourcing Journal that is relevant to anyone considering using the Cloud as a viable infrastructure strategy. There are plenty of important topics & points in this article, especially as many companies begin moving full infrastructure to the Cloud. Using cloud infrastructure hosting provided by GoGrid and the CloudIQ platform by GoGrid partner, Appistry, companies can move their applications into the cloud for free^[1].

The Appistry CloudIQ platform consists of 3 offerings:

1. CloudIQ Manager helps enterprises manage their applications within a cloud environment.
2. CloudIQ Engine helps companies cloud-enable their applications, providing scalability and reliability.
3. CloudIQ Storage allows organizations to harness inexpensive commodity storage

The Appistry CloudIQ platform is currently available on GoGrid as two Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers which have been recently updated as well:

GoGrid and Appistry customer, Presidio Health, a small start-up which provides a Healthcare SaaS offering is one such company used the free Appistry CloudIQ offer to move its infrastructure over to the GoGrid cloud. Prior to migration, Presidio Health business requirements were high and their infrastructure was not made to meet the success they were having. They wanted to concentrate on growing their business as opposed to managing their IT infrastructure.

“We wanted to focus on the software we were developing for hospitals,” Gregory explains. “We didn’t want to support a full IT staff around the clock to manage the hardware. By using an external provider, we didn’t need to worry about downtime or redundancy. Outsourcing fit our business needs.”

Other items of interest in the article:

• Presidio Health needed HIPAA compliance which was achieved with the GoGrid/Appistry solution
• Hybrid Hosting model helped in the success
• The GoGrid/Appistry solution increased computing power by 70 percent but didn’t increase the IT spend
• The Cloud Computing solution will allow Presidio Health “to grow quicker”

I recommend that readers interested in this case study as well as the Appistry/GoGrid solution read this article for complete details.

1. standard GoGrid hosting costs still apply – For the next 90 days, GoGrid is offering a US$100 credit to Outsourcing Journal readers who reference this promotional code: GGAPPO [↩]