In this blog post, I’m going to discuss disaster recovery. After superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, there were people without power weeks after the storm. Data centers were affected by the storm as well. And although GoGrid’s East Coast data center didn’t experience an outage, some providers did. So it is timely to consider geographically redundant solutions rather than wait for the next superstorm.
Geographic Redundancy
There are three basic strategies you can implement today on GoGrid to make your application better able to recover from a data center outage: cold standby, warm standby, and full geographic-redundancy with multiple active data centers. Let’s start off with a definition:
Redundancy: (noun) the ability of an application or system to resist the failure of one or more constituent parts, or recover quickly from such failure.
Systems administration and IT management boils down to that proverbial 3:00am phone call. Your application is down. How do you respond? Having the proper plan and appropriate recovery assets in place is the key to surviving this all-too-real scenario. How current are your backups? Do you have standby servers already in place? If not, how quickly can you bring new ones online?
It’s pretty standard to have offsite backups. If the offsite backups are in a secondary data center, they can be used to springboard reconstituting your application. GoGrid offers two products that make this process easy to implement: (more…) «You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics»
This week, InformationWeek published an extremely handy IaaS Buyer’s Guide designed to help companies navigate the complex airspace of cloud computing, specifically the Infrastructure-as-a-Service marketplace. The Guide covers 9 IaaS providers, including GoGrid, that each submitted responses to a questionnaire about their service offerings. InformationWeek then compiled and categorized those responses in this easy-to-understand Guide. You can find the full Guide (behind a registration wall) here.
Topics covered in the Guide include:
CPU & Memory
Storage
Operating Systems
Database Software Needs
Redundancy/Data Center Needs
Additional VM Features
Cost
Security & Compliance
Support & SLA
Additional Services
A few things have changed since GoGrid was originally interviewed, and we wanted to provide updated information for some of these categories.
If you’re familiar with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), you probably understand the substantial benefits that come along with deploying infrastructure in the public cloud: things like “utility billing and on-demand availability,” “elastic benefits that let you scale resources up and down based on demand,” and “the ability to rapidly move and redeploy workloads as needed.” This flexibility is why we originally brought GoGrid’s hourly pay-as-you-go Cloud Servers to market. They’re perfect for specific cases like these:
Periodic workloads that only run for a few hours, days, or weeks during a given billing cycle
Short-term, project-based workloads where term commitments aren’t desirable
Short-term spikes in workload where demand is erratic and being able to scale resources up and down quickly are desirable
Development and test workloads that require rapid iteration and redeployment of resources
Proof of concept workloads where instant access to resources and the ability to quickly change technology are key
Customers with steady-state and long-term workloads don’t always need this hourly flexibility, however. And that’s why GoGrid has developed prepaid monthly, semiannual, and annual Cloud Server products. Prepaid Cloud Servers are less flexible, but they do offer significant cost savings in exchange for the term commitment. The shortest prepaid term GoGrid offers is a monthly prepaid Cloud Server and the longest term is an annual prepaid Cloud Server.
If you run a constant workload during a given month, a prepaid term server is probably a better solution than an hourly server. Again, the tradeoff here is flexibility. Prepaid servers are ideal for:
Steady-state workloads where demand is constant
Workloads that tend to grow rather than contract
Production applications where you can plan for demand in advance
For example, imagine you run an eCommerce website. You know you always need three servers to run your operations throughout the year. During the holiday season, however, you know demand is likely to spike. Your deployment of annual servers going into the holiday would look something like this:
Our GoGrid cloud services engineers are always working away making visible and behind-the-scenes improvements to the customer experience on GoGrid. Today, we rolled out some enhancements to the customer management console that we wanted to highlight. Although several of these changes won’t be immediately apparent to all customers, we’ve done a lot of work to the underpinnings and architecture powering the management console.
So that GoGrid customers are aware of these changes and updates, I’ve summarized the most notable ones within this article.
Pre-Populated IP List Dropdown
In the previous version of the management console, when you were creating a new cloud server, you needed to start typing the IP address you wanted assigned to your server for the list to begin populating.
Now, when you create a new cloud server, all the available IP addresses in your account will be pre-populated into a dropdown. Remember: GoGrid provides a free, contiguous block of static IP addresses for your server.
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