At GoGrid, we pride ourselves on being the world’s largest pure-play Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. We work tirelessly to innovate the top cloud infrastructure technology available, provide the best support solutions and offer the most comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) in the industry. And when an independent research group recognizes our hard work, it’s extremely validating and a little hard not to share.

This past July, Info-Tech Research Group released an extensive report entitled “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)”. This report is designed to help companies understand the offerings of cloud infrastructure providers so they can select a partner with solutions that best meet their needs. Each cloud IaaS vendor was scored based on their product offering and company strengths. GoGrid was one of 3 companies placed in the highest quadrant, “Champion”, and had the highest “Value Index” of every company profiled.

GoGrid topped the charts because our services had the highest value and, as Info-Tech put it, was the biggest “bang for the buck” (e.g. features, usability, stability, etc.).

The research and findings of the Info-Tech Research Group are available for download. The report highlights the purpose and methodology behind Info-Tech’s research, complete industry results and detailed analysis of GoGrid as a cloud infrastructure provider.

Learn why GoGrid was positioned as “Champion.” Please Download the Info-Tech Cloud IaaS Research Report

Today, June 8th, is World IPv6 Day. What does that mean exactly? Well, the internet is running out of IPv4 addresses and today, some companies around the world are testing out their sites using IPv6, a networking protocol that aims to replace IPv4 in the coming years. So, today is the day to raise awareness of IPv6. It’s NOT a transition day – the transition will take years to accomplish – it IS a time to evaluate your IPv6-readiness on your sites, applications, hardware, software or anything that uses IP addressing protocols.

IPv4 Networking Protocol

IPv4 is a networking address space that most of us should be familiar with. It is a numeric, 32-bit only, and takes the form of XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (so like 192.168.100.000). There is a physical limitation to the number of IPv4 addresses you can have, 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 to be exact, and we are running out pretty quickly. Every website has an IP address bound to it. We, as consumers, are used to typing in domain names (like www.GoGrid.com). But what happens is that the domain name is translated into an IPv4 address (like 216.93.160.144). Think of IP addresses like an “internet phone number”. Nowadays, we click on a name (e.g., a domain name) to call someone. In the past, we dialed a phone number (e.g., an IP address).

Remember, not all of those combinations can be used as some are reserved:

(table source: Wikipedia)

When you think about it, Cloud Computing is burning through IP addresses pretty quickly. For example, every GoGrid customer is allocated a block of IPv4 addresses to use with their infrastructure. That’s a lot of IP addresses that we are giving away. And, as more and more sites or infrastructures are created, more IPv4 addresses are being consumed. Since there is a finite amount of these addresses, companies need to start thinking about transitioning over to the new IPv6 protocol.

Also, cell phones & other public internet-enabled devices are consuming these limited IPv4 addresses (even if using DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol – where IP addresses are applied for a specific time duration and then released back to a pool). So, as society becomes even more internet-enabled, this pool of IPv4 availability dries up even more quickly.

Do you get the point? When you think about it, running out of IPv4 addresses is really the sign of growth and the internet is expanding. This is a good thing.

IPv6 Networking Protocol

IPv6 builds for tomorrow’s growth and beyond.  Instead of being limited to numeric addresses only, IPv6 is 128-bit and is alpha-numeric. IPv6 takes the form of:

(image source: Wikipedia)

Using “simple” math, that means that theoretically you can have 2^128 addresses or 340 undecillion (3.4 x 10^38) addresses. Let’s take a look at that number:

• 2^128
• 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
• 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456
• 340 billion billion billion billion
• 340 trillion trillion trillion

Uh…that’s a LOT of numbers!

Let’s put it another way:

• a 70 kg body, has approximately 7×10^27 atoms in it (7 and 27 zeros)
• there are 6.79 billion people in the world (2009 estimate)
• that means there are 4.753*10^37 atoms in all of the people of the world
• which means that there are 7.16 IPv6 addresses available for every atom of living people in the world

I don’t think that we will be running out of IPv6 addresses in our lifetimes!

GoGrid and IPv6

GoGrid helped with World IPv6 day. We enabled IPv6 networking within Compuware’s IPv6 Website Performance Testing Page, a GoGrid customer, where you can determine how IPv4 and IPv6-enabled websites compare in terms of site performance. GoGrid is currently executing a comprehensive IPv6 roadmap, and the Compuware development project represents a technology preview that demonstrates a complete rollout of IPv6 within GoGrid’s infrastructure.

Engineering teams from both GoGrid and Compuware collaborated to design and implement a custom solution within GoGrid’s infrastructure to allow Compuware to enable the first ever Gomez IPv6 Website performance test.

Today we issued a Press Release about our work with Gomez & Compuware related to World IPv6 Day.

Be sure that if you have an IPv6-enabled site that you run the Compuware/Gomez Performance test to see how your sites perform.

What You Can Do Now

Again, the goal of World IPv6 Day is to raise the awareness of the depletion of IPv4 addresses and to nudge companies along in their efforts to begin utilizing the new IPv6 protocols. It’s essentially a “test flight” for major web companies and other industry players to come together by enabling IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. If you remember the days of Y2K, this can be likened to a similar effort. No, the Internet won’t crash or stop working if you aren’t IPv6 ready today, but in order to save costs and effort in the future, companies should definitely start their long term plans and preparations of this inevitability. GoGrid, for example, expects to have IPv6 compatibility by the end of 2011.

So, take a deep breath, stop worrying about all of those IPv6 digits and what they mean, and start driving ahead in your planning for enabling IPv6 within your software, devices and infrastructure.

Some pretty big things are happening at GoGrid. Today we announced the release of our Image Rights Management (IRM) service for GoGrid Partners, a very powerful technology that assists with the software and licensing management in the cloud, specifically within the GoGrid Exchange. As many of you may know, GoGrid Exchange is a catalogue of software server images and solutions from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are available on-demand for those who use GoGrid cloud infrastructure. IRM adds several benefits for ISVs and, in turn, customers.

To better explain IRM technology and why it is so important, I sat down with Raja Srinivasan, VP of Cloud Computing at Zeus Technologies, and our very own Paul Lancaster, Manager of Cloud Ecosystems at GoGrid. They discuss how IRM is the solution to licensing software in the cloud and what the GoGrid Exchange means for partners and customers.

Raja and Paul highlight many of the benefits of the GoGrid Exchange as well as focus on our new IRM technology. They break them down into two main areas.

Benefits for Partners:

• License Management – IRM technology automatically verifies if the software is correctly licensed to run within the GoGrid cloud, and will automatically take pre-defined actions should the licensing be invalid.
• Software Management – Simply update your software on the GoGrid Exchange and it is automatically made available to your customers.
• Easier to Deliver Support – When a customer has a support need, the ISV can quickly understand exactly what kind of infrastructure the software is running on so they can identify the support issue faster.
• Easy Payments – GoGrid handles the invoicing of customers for both Partner Image licensing and infrastructure usage, and then pays the Partner for the Partner Service Image usage.

Benefits for GoGrid Customers:

• Single-Button Install – Customers can find the software solution they want on exchange.gogrid.com and instantly install it with little to no configuration.
• Software Management – Users are automatically kept up to date with the latest versions of the software they installed from the Exchange.
• Unified Invoicing – GoGrid handles the billing for Exchange Partner server images as well as infrastructure costs within a single invoice. Customers can manage their software and infrastructure payments from a single portal on a single bill.
• Flexibility & Scalability – the GoGrid Exchange allows customers to get the software they want when they want it. Also, customers aren’t locked into any multi-year licensing deals. The Exchange makes software solutions in the cloud highly efficient and ready to scale with your company.

We’re very excited about the release of IRM what this means for our customers and the cloud computing industry.

For more information, please read our Press Release titled “GoGrid Enhances Partner Exchange Platform with New Image Rights Management Technology” which is available in the Press Release section of the GoGrid site.

For more information, please visit http://exchange.gogrid.com

This blog post is long overdue but the recent events that affected customers using Amazon Web Services sparked an increased priority in my mind. I have long been an advocate of Amazon’s amazing efforts driving cloud computing to fruition. And the current unfortunate events have not changed my attitude towards them. Amazon is amazing!

Really amazing! And GoGrid is really thankful.

Thank goodness Werner Vogels keeps getting up on stage with incredible success stories. Werner’s slides featuring Amazon’s growth statistics are so awesome that I bet they make Al Gore jealous. And that isn’t a tongue-in-cheek quip because Al Gore gave birth to the Internet. This isn’t a tongue-in-cheek blog-post. This is a hearty high-five to Amazon from GoGrid. The convenient truth for GoGrid is that when Werner takes the stage, it feels like he’ll need a ladder to show us how incredible the adoption is of AWS.

Can you imagine a world without Amazon? The whole “cloud” revolution probably wouldn’t be happening. SalesForce had been doing their thing for about a decade but it wasn’t until Amazon Web Services geared up that the whole “cloud” thing started cranking.

• No great brand-name company was going to bring cloud computing to market because they’ve been watching a bookstore eat their lunch now for years and they still haven’t done anything relevant. I’m talking about computing giants like IBM, HP, Dell, and Cisco or telecom service providers like AT&T and Verizon. Sun was gonna do something relevant about 2 years ago but Larry pulled the plug on that. Amazon has declared an entirely new style of computing that will define the future, and the big-names just seem to be watching. Wake up! What is going through your dino-minds? There is a new Sheriff in town. Do you still think that Amazon is just an attempt to sell excess bookstore infrastructure that they didn’t need at Christmas? Amazon-dot-com faced an incredible IT challenge and so they invented an entirely new style of massively multi-tenant, incredibly scalable, programmable, on-demand infrastructure. Smell the Java ©!
• Countless technology start-ups would never have started. Amazon established an entirely new paradigm that has changed the game for entrepreneurs in several great ways. First of all, Amazon enables bunches of new businesses that simply couldn’t have existed even if they had the capital. The best examples of these are the companies that simply grew too fast to get their needs met without programmable and massively scalable on-demand infrastructure.
• Amazon has done wonders for the psyche of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs feel empowered. There is a new consensus that a company can be started for almost nothing whereas it used to feel like a start-up needed $10,000,000. Entrepreneurs are liberated because they know that they can scale their cost of goods sold with their revenues and that they don’t need any CapEx. Amazon is a bigger friend to tech start-ups than venture capital and has become a comparable engine for growth in our economy.
• OpenStack wouldn’t exist. OpenStack was invented to compete with Amazon. RackSpace never would have purchased SliceHost and jumped into the cloud game. RackSpace wouldn’t have needed a “cloud” strategy ‘cause their core business was doing great.
• And last but not least, people wouldn’t care so much about GoGrid. We’re proud to have pioneered cloud computing alongside Amazon, but if we had done it alone it might be comparable to a tree falling in the forest. We had load balanced cloud servers years before Amazon, and load balancing is core to elasticity which is a defining attribute of cloud computing, but not as many people would have noticed. We also were way ahead of Amazon with on-demand Windows servers, real VLANs, dedicated servers, Hosted Private Cloud and bunches of other things but you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog-post if it weren’t for Amazon. We take great pride in having a feature-set that our customers and industry analysts alike consider to be the most comparable to Amazon’s. We’re headquartered in San Francisco and quite good at R&D ourselves and we also are pushing the industry forward. GoGrid got into the game trying to solve a different problem than Amazon, we were trying to automate managed hosting, but we’ve both ended up in nearly the same wonderful place…the cloud!

So thank you Amazon! You’ve done the World a great service!

Love,

John Keagy

CEO
GoGrid

Last week GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, was a guest on “This Week in Cloud Computing” hosted by Amanda Coolong & David Linthicum. The video podcast covered a variety of interesting topics including Fujitsu’s new cloud offering in Asia-Pac, Microsoft’s war of words with Google over Cloud Connect and Intel’s rumored client-aware cloud offerings. John Keagy weighs in with some very interesting thoughts on each of these topics. We’ve embedded the full episode for your viewing pleasure, but we’ve also included highlights and the discussion about GoGrid’s past, present and future!

Note: each of the clips below the main one will jump directly to the relevant content.

Full Episode

Highlights

Australia is the first country outside of Japan to roll out Fujitsu’s standardized cloud offering. Do you think the expansion of cloud computing in Asia-Pac will add a boom to business development?

Google and Microsoft are sparring over Cloud Connect and Microsoft Office. Microsoft claims that Cloud Connect is Google’s ploy to get their hands on more of our data. Should Microsoft be worried and is Google going to succeed with enterprise?

Intel is planning a Cloud Vision event and are expected to reveal client-aware cloud. Will this mean cloud providers will write for devices directly and move further away from the browser and closer to apps?

Amazon launches AWS Cloud Formation to make easier for enterprises to mack stacks of apps and recourses. With this ability to combine resources, will this provide a strategic advantage for Amazon?

Amanda Coolong, David Linthicum and CEO John Keagy discuss GoGrid’s past, present and future.

Do you have an opinion on what’s happening in cloud computing? Share in the comments section below!