Features of the calculator include:

• The ability to add numerous configurations of Cloud Servers (RAM/Hours Deployed/# of servers with that configuration)
• Add Load Balancing
• Add Cloud Storage
• Configure Inbound and Outbound monthly transfer
• Plan recommendations based on your configuration
• Estimated total monthly cost

So, for example, below is the following configuration:

• 2 – 2GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• 2 – 4GB servers running for 30 days (720 hours)
• Load balancer –> it’s FREE
• 24 GB of Cloud Storage –> first 10 GBs are free so the charge is for 14 GB/Month @ $0.15/GB/mo
• 20 GB/mo Outbound Data Transfer ($0.29/GB/mo)
• Inbound data transfer –> it’s FREE

Note how a different Memory Plan is suggested based on my configuration:

If you add more Outbound Data Transfer to your account, the calculator will suggest a plan there as well. For example, changed the amount of Outbound data transfer to 6600 GB/mo, the calculator suggests the “Transfer 3.6 TB” pre-paid plan as a better alternative:

It’s pretty easy to play with different scenarios to help you project your GoGrid Infrastructure costs. Again, the GoGrid Pricing Calculator is located here: http://www.gogrid.com/cloud-hosting/cloud-hosting-pricing-calculator.php

What do you think? Is it helpful? Let us know any comments or suggestions on how to improve on it.

This webinar was recorded on June 28, 2010, the day of the official release of GoGrid 3.0. Presenters were Mario Olivarez & Justin Kitagawa of GoGrid and Ryan Holland of TrendMicro. The topics included:

• Overview: Complex Infrastructure Made Easy – GoGrid’s unique value proposition
• GoGrid 3.0: The latest version of the GoGrid platform – East Coast demo
• GoGrid Security: New services from Cisco, Fortinet, TrendMicro & Sentrigo
• PCI Compliance: PCI compliance in the GoGrid Cloud – Demo with TrendMicro
• Questions & Answers

I realize that not all GoGrid customers were able to attend this webinar, so I have provided the full recording below (it is also available on our Vimeo channel):

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar: Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release & New Datacenter from GoGrid on Vimeo.

Also, for those interested in seeing just the presentation slide deck, that too is available for viewing below (as well as online in our SlideShare channel):

If you have any questions about the content that was covered within this webinar, please leave a comment on this post and I will be sure that it is answered. Also be sure to check the “Webinar” category on the GoGrid blog for past webinars that have been delivered.

Are there any topics you would like covered in future webinars? Please let me know.

Well, I wanted to give everyone a small update on this upcoming release, especially those GoGrid users who have logged in and seen some slightly changed interfaces.

Note: below the “Highlights of Changes” section is information on two upcoming WEBINARS for future and current GoGrid users. I encourage you to register for one of those.

First, if you want to read a bit more about some of the features included in GoGrid v3.0, take a look at the GoGrid Software Update page. Most importantly, this update lays the groundwork for the opening of our new East Coast datacenter (US-East-1) in Ashburn, VA. To accommodate this expansion, we’ve made some now-visible changes to the following:

• Billing Widget – easier to read & gives you Memory Usage at a glance
• List View Panel – the network widget has been removed and is now enhanced within the List View, making it much easier to view your public and private IP address across datacenters
• Workflow Changes – see below for details on this change

Highlights of Changes

We’ve added a new “datacenter aware” selector prior to choosing the GoGrid object you wish to deploy. If you’ve logged into the GoGrid Portal since the update last night, you will see some differences when you go to ADD an object:

Unless you are part of the Alpha testing group, objects within the US-East-1 datacenter are grayed-out. If you select the US-East-1 datacenter, you should expect to see the following (until the launch of the new datacenter which is scheduled for June 28, 2010):

Another notable change is the Network Widget which use to appear in the left sidebar has now been removed. In its place is a link that will take you to the new Network section of the List View.

When you click on the link “Your Network Settings“, you’ll immediately be taken to the List View and the Network section therein. Within the Network section, you can view Public and Private IP addresses assigned to your GoGrid account, their Status (Assigned/Unassigned) and the datacenter they are associated with.

Note: All GoGrid users can currently use the Network section as of this update.

Also, we have simplified the Billing Summary widget to give you a snapshot of your Memory and Transfer allotment and usage (including a direct link to view your current invoices):

Learn More About GoGrid v3.0 at Upcoming Webinars

Whenever there is an update, current and future customers always have questions. So, we have put together a series of webinars to help explain these and other significant improvements coming to the GoGrid cloud.

If you are a CURRENT GoGrid customer, you can catch up on the latest and greatest improvements to your GoGrid cloud by attending the “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy: Learn About the GoGrid 3.0 Release and Our New East Coast Data Center“:

• Date: Monday, June 28, 2010
• Time: 11:00 am PDT
• Summary:
  • Learn about our new features and system enhancements included in GoGrid 3.0 and how they can help your business.
  • Understand how to expand the complexity of your cloud with GoGrid’s new east coast data center (US-East-1).
  • See a demonstration of how easy it is to deploy a cloud (virtual) server in GoGrid’s US-East-1 data center.
  • Discover how other companies are using GoGrid to build complex and unique architectures in the GoGrid cloud.
• Details & Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/customer_28_june_2010

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

If you have any questions prior to the webinars or that you would like answered in the webinars, please leave a comment on this post! We hope you fully take advantage of the new features and services coming to GoGrid in the next few weeks.

But understanding the nitty-gritty details of how the F5′s work within GoGrid is not something that most people understand. For the most part, customers are concerned that it simply works and works well, which it does. Yesterday, Lori MacVittie, the Technical Marketing Manager at F5, posted a technical article that does a great job explaining how the magic behind the scenes works with the F5 load balancers and GoGrid.

The article is available on F5′s DevCentral as well as below:

Cloud Load Balancing Fu for Developers Helps Avoid Scaling Gotchas

If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results

One of the benefits of cloud computing, and in particular IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is that the infrastructure is, well, a service. It’s abstracted, and that means you don’t need to know a lot about the nitty-gritty details of how it works. Right?

Well, mostly right.

While there’s no reason you should need to know how to specifically configure, say, an F5 BIG-IP load balancing solution when deploying an application with GoGrid, you probably should understand the implications of using the provider’s API to scale using that load balancing solution. If you don’t you may run into a “gotcha” that either leaves you scratching your head or reaching for your credit card. And don’t think you can sit back and be worry free, oh Amazon Web Services customer, because these “gotchas” aren’t peculiar to GoGrid. Turns out AWS ELB comes with its own set of oddities and, ultimately, may lead many to come to the same conclusion cloud proponents have come to: cloud is really meant to scale stateless applications.

Many of the “problems” developers are running into could be avoided by a combination of more control over the load balancing environment and a basic foundation in load balancing. Not just how load balancing works, most understand that already, but how load balancers work. The problems that are beginning to show themselves aren’t because of how traffic is distributed across application instances or even understanding of persistence (you call it affinity or sticky sessions) but in the way that load balancers are configured and interact with the nodes (servers) that make up the pools of resources (application instances) it is managing.

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LOAD BALANCING FU – LESSON #1

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Our first lesson revolves around nodes and the way in which load balancers interact with them. This one impacts the way in which you orchestrate processes, automate tasks, and interact with cloud framework APIs that in turn interact with load balancing solutions. It also has the potential to influence your choice of provider or core application design decisions, such as how state is handled and persisted.

In general, a load balancing virtual server interacts with a pool (farm) of nodes (applications). Because of the way in which networks are architected today, i.e. they’re IP-based for interoperability, a node is identified by an IP address. When the virtual server receives a request it chooses the appropriate pool comprising one or more nodes based on the associated algorithm. Cloud computing providers today appear to be offering primarily one of two industry standard algorithms: round robin and least connections. There are many more algorithms, standard and not, but these two seem to be the most popular.

When a load balancing solution detects a problem with a node (it’s monitoring the node by sending ICMP pings or opening a TCP connection or doing an HTTP GET, depending on the provider and implementation) it marks it as “down”. Nodes can also be marked as “down” purposefully, in the event you want to perform some maintenance or find a problem with the application running and need to address it.

The gotcha comes in here, because when you’re scaling down or purposefully taking down a “node”, there may be users that have been directed to that node and are still actively interacting with it; there’s still connections to the node. While load balancers will stop directing new requests to a “down” node, how they handle existing (open) connections is configurable. When a node is marked as “down” the Load balancer has some options how to interact with existing connections ranging from allowing existing connections (users) to complete their interactions with the application to outright rejection of all incoming requests. The decision on this configuration option by the provider impacts the way in which you should architect your application if you’re really going to be taking advantage of elastic scalability, because while the options do not impact scaling up they do impact scaling down.

For example, after Amazon introduced its ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) service, users began to see what they considered odd and unacceptable behavior that was merely the result of the way in which load balancing works.

”Funky” AWS ELB behavior confusing customers

We have a production site that is now sending traffic to someone else’s site. We terminated a couple of instances earlier today and this may have started this phenomenon, but this is very, very disconcerting. Repetitive refreshes brings up this site just as regularly as our servers. Can someone from amazon please help us out here? This is totally unacceptable behavior.

and a little while later in the thread:

I’m pretty surprised that terminating an instance doesn’t remove it from a load balancer.

The behavior (which Amazon indicates in the same thread has been resolved) is based on the understanding that taking a node “down” is not the same as “deleting” it. By terminating an instance in a load balanced environment the load balancer sees that it is “down” and marks it as such. Taking down the instance does not automatically delete it because there are many reasons you might want to take a node “down” and bring it back “up” later, such as upgrades, patches, etc… If you don’t bring it back up, however, the load balancer needs to be explicitly directed to delete the node lest you end up with odd behavior as described above (which shouldn’t happen in a truly isolated network environment, which says something about the way in which Amazon was internally designed from a network layer perspective). The ability of a load balancer to detect nodes as “down” and later as “up” is by design; it is in part what makes them dynamic and allows transparent (non-disruptive) scalability. Nodes can be added, deleted, taken down, and brought up without impacting the clients and their interaction with the application. The steps to scale down, then, require that first you take down the node (deregister in Amazon speak) and when all connections have been terminated (through normal means) then you delete it from the load balancer. This takes some coordination.

GoGrid’s load balancing implementation will not cause the scenario experienced by Amazon customers for two reasons: first, it makes extensive use of VLANs to isolate customers and thus no load balancing service for customer #1 will be able to communicate with a server used by customer #2 and second, GoGrid has orchestrated scalability services in such a way that load balancers are added and deleted en masse. Individual nodes are never added or removed but rather the entire load balancer object is modified. This effectively means the deletion of a node (by reconfiguring the load balancing object) is immediate and all existing connections are terminated. This is similar to the load balancer being configured to “reselect” a node when the original node is “down”.  This is something of which you need to be aware when deploying applications as it will eventually impact either the way your application behaves (from a user perspective) or your ability to scale elastically.

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SCALING SERVICES IMPACT DEVELOPER DECISIONS

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If you’re going to be using the scalability services of a cloud provider you, as a developer, need to know how the load balancing service is going to act when scaling down. You need to know specifically whether it bleeds (quiesces) connections when a node is taken “down” or whether a node being “down” results in rejects or reselection. This impacts (or should impact) the way in which you design your applications or the choice of provider. Also important to the decision is what you consider the proper behavior for your application. It may be the case that it’s acceptable for users to “lose” their session. It may not be. The core logical behavior and user expectations should in part drive your architectural decisions when designing a scalable application, even if that scalability is provided by a third-party as is the case with public cloud computing.

There are (at a minimum) two questions you should ask a provider regarding its scalability services to help determine the apropos course of action.

Possible reactions to the answers to these questions:

• Rewrite the application to share state (shared-session database architecture)
• Rewrite the application to be stateless
• Do nothing and accept rejection/user loss of session as an acceptable risk
• Choose a provider whose load balancing behavior aligns with your expectations
• Implement a virtual private cloud instead, taking advantage of existing infrastructure to load balance applications “in the cloud” by extending your data center to include cloud-based resources.

In all cases, when you’re scaling down you don’t really want to just terminate the instance; you want to mark the node as down and allow the connections to bleed off before terminating it and deleting it from the load balancing solution. That’s the way it should work. By simply terminating the instance the node is marked as down and may continue to incur charges because health checks are using bandwidth to determine the status of the node. In the optimal case the load balancing service would offer a “conditional” delete function in its API that marked the node as “down” and, when all connections were completed, would automatically remove the node from the load balancing service. This is not the case today, for many reasons, but is where we hope to see such services go in the future.

If you have questions beyond what Lori has written about above, we do offer free 24×7 support at GoGrid as well as on the GoGrid Wiki (specific to the F5 Load Balancer).

The panel was moderated by Shlomo Swidler (Founder, Orchestratus) and the members included:

• Shashi Mysore, Product Specialist, Eucalyptus Systems
• Adrian Cole, Founder, jClouds
• George Reese, CTO, enStratus
• Michael Mayo, Rackspace
• Mitch Garnaat, President, CloudRight
• Justin Kitagawa, Lead Senior Software Engineer, GoGrid
• Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy, Sonoa Systems

Each panel member was allowed a few minutes to discuss how their service can be controlled programmatically via an API or other method. This is an important discussion point because many companies and developers are looking to build applications that span clouds. However prior to doing this, these developers must fully understand how a cloud is architected and can be utilized. Obviously, when building a cloud as a vendor, there are challenges and hurdles that must be overcome in the process. Each of the panelists discussed their design decisions and then answered questions presented to them by the moderator as well as by audience members.

As an attendee of this panel, I thought it important to present GoGrid’s thoughts on our own API and how we came to make the decisions behind its development. Below is a video of Justin’s presentation which covers:

• Who and What is GoGrid?
• The GoGrid Portal
• The GoGrid API
• The Anatomy of a GoGrid API Call
• A Sample API Request
• Sample Code
• GoGrid API Objects & Actions
• Challenges in Developing
• Who is the API for?

The full presentation is also available below:

If you are interested in how the GoGrid API works, I encourage you to look at the GoGrid Wiki where you can find the “Getting Started Guide” as well as the following items:

• Anatomy of GoGrid API Call
• Common API Call Patterns
• API Frequently Asked Questions
• API Libraries and Tools
• Download a GoGrid API Quick Reference Guide
• API Version Log

Also, I’m personally curious to find out if and how you are using the GoGrid API. Have you created a program to hook into our API to control scaling or deployment of servers? What about creating your own interface to our service? Please leave a comment and let me know!

GoGrid is a sponsor of this premier Cloud Computing event and will have a booth there. We hope that you will come and visit us to discuss your Cloud Computing plans. Our staff there will be available for infrastructure consultations, demos and general discussion about the Cloud.

Also, Justin Kitagawa, Senior Technical Lead at GoGrid, will be part of a panel called: “Writing Code for Many Clouds” which is on Tuesday, March 16 (1:30-2:30PM). The panel details are as follows:

Writing Code for Many Clouds

Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM

You may be developing an application that runs on a single cloud today, but you’ll want to keep your options open in case things change. Switching clouds isn’t always easy: cloud providers have differing resource models, constraints, and gotchas. All of these pose potential risks of lock-in, presenting challenges for developers who need to consider how their code can work with more than just one cloud provider.
This panel brings together developers who’ve dealt with some of these challenges and built to specific cloud APIs with the people who built those APIs. It’s a rare glimpse into the design decisions behind some of today’s most prominent cloud computing platforms — and perhaps even a glimpse into the future API feature plans of various cloud providers.

• Moderator – Shlomo Swidler, Founder, Orchestratus
• Speaker – Shashi Mysore, Product Specialist, Eucalyptus Systems
• Speaker – Adrian Cole, Founder, jClouds
• Speaker – George Reese, CTO, enStratus
• Speaker – Michael Mayo, Rackspace
• Speaker – Mitch Garnaat, President, CloudRight
• Speaker – Justin Kitagawa, GoGrid
• Speaker – Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy, Sonoa Systems

Special Offer

You can now register for a FREE EXPO PASS or save 40% on the price of Conference Passes by using the priority code: CNJPCC01 . Simply go to the Registration Page and enter in the priority code at checkout.

More about the Cloud Connect Event

The event is from Monday, March 15 through Thursday, March 18th at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, CA.

Topics for the Conference include:

Cloud Futures and Roadmaps
The Impact of Clouds on Society – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
What IT Couldn’t Do Before – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Ubicomp is Here: Pervasive Connections, Cloud Computing, and Universal Interfaces – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

Cloud Risks, Challenges, and Governance
What to Worry About: Risks, Regulations, and Unknowns – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Cloud Providers: Leveraging Risk and Compliance in Today’s Cloud Environments as a Competitive Advantage – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Cloud Users: Compliance and Mitigating Risks to Hedge Against Uncertainty – Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

Dealing with Big Data
Introduction to Big Data and Storage at Scale – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
Processing Big Data – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Learning from Big Data with Scaleable Analytics – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

Developing for the Cloud
Writing Code for Many Clouds – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Design Patterns for Cloud Computing Applications – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Deploying to the Cloud: The Care and Feeding of a Cloud Application – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM
Orchestration: The Next Frontier for Cloud Applications – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM

Migration Strategies
Moving to Clouds: It’s Not All or Nothing – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Practical Migration to On-Demand Clouds – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Building Infrastructure as a Service – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

New Infrastructure
Private and Hybrid Clouds – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–5:00 PM
The New Role of Networks – Thursday, March 18 8:15 AM–9:15 AM
Infrastructure Interoperability in a Cloudy World – Thursday, March 18 9:30 AM–10:30 AM
Standardizing Infrastructure Interoperability: An Introduction to IF-MAP – Thursday, March 18 10:45 AM–11:45 AM

ROI, Cost and Economics
Cloudonomics: The Surprising Economics of the Cloud – Tuesday, March 16 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Tools and Rules: How to Calculate ROI from the Cloud – Tuesday, March 16 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
New Pricing Models: How Will They Impact ROI? – Tuesday, March 16 4:00 PM–5:00 PM
Public, Private, or Hybrid: Where’s the Value Today and Where’s It Going? – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM

Standards, Governments and Industry
Where We Are Today: State of the Standards – Wednesday, March 17 8:30 AM–9:30 AM
The Standards Real Users Need Now – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Standardization from a Provider Perspective – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Where Are Standards Going? – Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

Case Studies and Lessons Learned
Startups Built on Clouds – Wednesday, March 17 1:30 PM–2:30 PM
Enterprise Cloud Adoption – Wednesday, March 17 2:45 PM–3:45 PM
Government and Open Clouds - Wednesday, March 17 4:00 PM–5:00 PM

We hope to see you at this event!

• What is our view of Cloud Computing
• What is GoGrid
• New feature: GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• What is Hybrid Infrastructure
• A GoGrid Portal Demo
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• The new GoGrid List View
• Walk-through of other Interface Enhancements & Links
• Question & Answer Session

The entire Webinar is below and is broken into two parts:

• Part One – Overview presentation, discussion of Cloud & GoGrid, demonstration of the GoGrid Portal & GoGrid Dedicated Server Deployments (30 minutes in length)
• Part Two – Question & Answer session from the audience and Additional Information (19 minutes in length)

Also included later on in this post is the stand-alone presentation (without audio, demo walk-through or question and answers).

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 1

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 1) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 1 of a two part webinar***

GoGrid Feature Webinar – Part 2

GoGrid Webinar – February 2010 Product Update (PART 2) from GoGrid on Vimeo.

This is a webinar produced by GoGrid which walks through recent updates to GoGrid. The release was in February 2010 and the webinar covers:
- What is cloud computing
- What is GoGrid Hybrid Infrastructure Hosting
- New GoGrid Dedicated Servers
- New GoGrid List View
- Other changes
***This is Part 2 of a two part webinar***

Stand-Alone Presentation from Webinar

The following is the presentation that was used in the Webinar above.

If you have further questions about the GoGrid February 2010 Feature Update or about GoGrid in general, I recommend that you contact a GoGrid Sales Representative who can help you get started with GoGrid.

The description of the Webinar is as follows:

With the increasing importance of information technology for the continuation of business critical functions, combined with a transition to an around-the-clock economy, the importance of protecting an organization’s data and IT infrastructure in the event of a disruptive situation has become an increasing and more visible business priority in recent years. It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning.  Recent technological advancements, primarily with cloud computing, allow more companies to afford and be better prepared for the day disaster strikes.  This webinar demonstrates new approaches for implementing a powerful yet cost effective disaster recovery program in the cloud.

Webinar details:

DATE: Friday, February 26, 2010
TIME: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST)
HOST: ANX eBusiness
REGISTRATION: To register, please visit this page

More Information about ANX eBusiness

ANX eBusiness currently has 2 Partner GoGrid Server Images (Partner GSI) available within the GoGrid Exchange, specifically their ANX PositivePro VPN Cloud Connector.

ANX’s PositivePro is a cloud-based VPN solutions that allows secured user-to-cloud, site-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud connections. ANX’s PositivePro is a software-based managed service that includes dual-factor authentication using phones and backed by 24/7 live support. It is deployed as an on-demand service and billed monthly per site and users, and has the ability for GoGrid customers to turn on and off additional sites and user instances as well as scale up and down as usage demands it.

Some use cases are:

• Setup a secured ad-hoc Datacenter in the cloud and directly connect sites and users.
• Expand Corporate Applications into the Cloud to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Scale the corporate servers in the Cloud when the traffic load exceeds the corporate on-premise capacity.
• Disaster Recovery: Periodically back-up mission critical data from the corporate datacenter to the cloud

Pricing details:

• GoGrid VPC Powered by ANX Positive Pro: ($75/server) Appropriate for GoGrid customers who want to expand their datacenter to the cloud or build a virtual datacenter in the cloud and connect it to their corporate network. Includes 1 tunnel and 3 VPN remote users
• Each additional user: ($20 – Additions are handled by ANX through customer portal)
• Each additional user with Dual Factor phone authentication: ($26 – Additions are handled by ANX through customer portal)
• Each additional site: ($75 – Additions are handled by ANX through customer portal)

For more details, we encourage you to read more about ANX eBusiness on the GoGrid Exchange as well as on the ANX PositivePro product page.

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• List View of GoGrid Objects
• Edit F5 Load Balancers via the API
• New Login Page
• Self Service Support Links

More details about these features can be found on the following GoGrid blog post. For a quick overview of the new features in the form of a screencast, please watch the video below. I quickly cover many of the items listed above including:

• Walking through the new login page
• Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
• Overview of the new GoGrid List View
• Dedicated Servers showing in the Jobs Tab
• Showing of Self-Service Links in the portal
• Editing Load Balancers using the GoGrid API

If you have more questions about these new GoGrid features, I recommend that you attend our webinar (on February 24, 2010) where you can get more information about this important release. Be sure to register for the webinar and come prepared with questions!

• DATE: Wednesday, February 24, 2010
• TIME: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST
• REGISTRATION: Please visit – https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/725449257
• HOSTS: Rob Larson (Product Marketing Manager – GoGrid) & Michael Sheehan (Technology Evangelist – GoGrid)

Be sure to bring any and all questions you may have to this webinar and we will do our best to answer them. If you have questions ahead of time, feel free to leave a comment on this article.

The topics to be covered are:

General

• Updated login screen on my.gogrid.com
• New GoGrid Customer Portal Links
• Login page (links to getting started guide, wiki and forums)
• Support > Cases (links to wiki and forums)
• Support > Add a case (links to FAQ, wiki and forums)
• Network Widget
• Unblock email (SMTP)
• GoGrid CDN (link to CDN Portal)
• New List View Tab (allows copy and pasting of IPs)
• GoGrid Dedicated Servers
• Edit Load Balancer  (Explanation of benefits)
• End of Life of Linux Images
  • 64-bit RedHat 5.1 w/Apache 2.2
  • 64-bit CentOS 5.1 w/Apache 2.2

Terminology

• “GoGrid Dedicated Servers” – Refers to the three server options available in the GoGrid Portal.
• “CloudConnect” – Refers only to ServePath Servers that are cross-connected to a GoGrid VLAN.  GoGrid Dedicated Servers do not use CloudConnect.
• “Hybrid Infrastructure” – Refers to the ability to use a combination of physical and virtual servers to create a hosted server network

GoGrid Dedicated Servers

• Manage GoGrid Dedicated Servers through GG Customer Portal (Available in the new “List” view)
• Order & Cancel
• Power Cycling
• View Invoices
• Manage Support Cases
• Password Management
• 3 Options:

• Benefits:
  • Access to on-demand Cloud Servers
  • Hardware F5 load balancing included
  • Access to elastic Cloud Storage
  • Free inbound data transfer
  • Unlimited data transfer on your Private VLAN
  • No long-term commitments
    • Prepaid Monthly (1-month minimum)
    • Prepaid Annual  (2months free)
    • Same terms apply to Operating Systems
  • No setup fees
  • Deployment time  -  2 business days
• FYI
  • API Support for GoGrid Dedicated Servers will be coming at a later date
  • Currently you cannot install a MyGSI onto a GoGrid Dedicated Server
  • GoGrid Dedicated Servers do have many other Base Operating System Images including: Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora as well as Windows, RHEL and CentOS

Please be sure to register early for this informative webinar on GoGrid’s exciting new features! We hope to see you there.