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 [↩]

This past Wednesday night, GoGrid was the host of another StartUp SF (along with co-host Microsoft BizSpark of which we are a Hosting Partner). The guest speaker was David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, a client of GoGrid & ServePath. StartUp SF is a regular meetup in San Francisco designed to help young businesses become more successful. Each meetup has a format designed to stimulate, engage and network in a social learning environment. Each event has a guest speaker who talks about expert subject matter and how it relates to helping startups. Also, successful companies showcase their products and services in an interactive manner with product demos occurring throughout the event.

Full details from the 12/02/09 event are on the StartUp SF page.

Below is the video of David’s talk titled “Give Your Ideas Ex-Lax“:

David Weekly (PBWorks) Speaks at StartUp SF v2.2 from HighTechDad on Vimeo.

His presentation is also available on SlideShare and is below:

GoGrid regularly hosts StartUp SF and we look to bring you many more in 2010!

If you are currently a GoGrid customer, I want to talk to you! As you know, the Cloud is all the hype with lots of vendors, analysts and industry experts expounding the virtues and benefits. (I’m one of those who keeps the grease in the marketing buzz machine rolling.) But I’m also an advocate, not only of Cloud Computing, but especially of those using GoGrid successfully.

So, here is what I’m looking for…

• Windows Developers – people using the “Windows-side” of GoGrid. That is to say, ASP.NET, Windows Server 2008 or 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, IIS
• Linux Developers – those implementing either Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or CentOS
• OpenSource Users – if anyone is developing rich applications using PHP, mySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache
• Mixed Environments – of particular interest to me is those using combinations of the items above
• Failover Scenarios – are you using GoGrid as a failover site? For redundancy?
• Cloud Connect – have you created a hybrid hosting solution that you are particularly proud of, using a combination of Cloud and Dedicate hosting?
• Twitter Development – since Twitter is all the rage, are you creating the next killer app to manage the Twittersphere?
• Statistical Analysis – are you spinning up a series of high end GoGrid servers for a few hours to do number or other data crunching?
• Web 2.0/3.0 Products – how are you AJAX-ing your applications using GoGrid for hosting? What great new mashup application have you created?
• API Activity – are you using the GoGrid API in any particularly exciting way? How ARE you using the API?
• Cloud Storage – how have you mixed in GoGrid’s Cloud Storage into your infrastructure? As a backup solution? To server data?
• Digital Media Manipulation – are you using GoGrid to process large sets of digital media?
• Database intensive products – have you implemented an architecture that utilizes a high-end DB either in the GoGrid Cloud or cloud-connected to a dedicated server?

So, what do you get out of it? I can definitely promise a few things:

• Free PR and Marketing – tell us all about the product or service that you are proud of and we will write about it,  include in our newsletters and pass around various social networking sites
• Web links – we will include your site in links on our sites and blogs
• Potential presence at trade shows – if you are chosen as a showcase customer, we welcome you at our upcoming tradeshows
• Potential participation in our Referral programs – please contact me for details
• Other forms of “Thank you’s” – (wink)

To submit your information, please complete the form below:

cforms contact form by delicious:days

I look forward to hearing about and trying your sites that run on GoGrid. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting up some write-ups of your submissions.