Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category
Monday, September 24th, 2012 by Michael Sheehan 
September 24th, 2012 2:04 pmMichael Sheehan
This week, GoGrid partner, Jaspersoft kicks off JasperWorld 2012 in San Francisco, CA. If you are in the area and are interested in Business Intelligence (BI), learning how to manage and digest large quantities of customer and business data, and how to leverage JasperSoft as your data analytics platform in the cloud, you definitely should consider attending JasperWorld.
Jaspersoft provides the most flexible and widely deployed open source BI platform in the world, enabling better decision-making through web-based reporting and analysis.
Speaker & Panel Info
GoGrid CEO and founder, John Keagy is a panelist at one of the sessions at JasperWorld. Information on the panel is below (as well as on Jaspersoft.com)
Title: BI Building in the Cloud
Track: Panel Session – Cyrill Magnin I, II, III (Level 4) – Parc 55 Wyndham
Date: 9/25/12
Time: 11:30am – 12:10pm (Pacific)
Moderator: Edd Dumbill
Speakers: Jan Aleman, John Keagy, Roger Sippl, Issac Roth
Abstract: SaaS applications have grown significantly, fueled by the efficiencies of a Cloud-based deployment. The next generation of applications are not only being deployed in the Cloud, they’re being built in the Cloud. Jaspersoft is bringing together respected industry leaders to discuss how BI is being built into applications for the Cloud and in the Cloud. Join us to hear how these development environments are enabling a new breed of data-driven applications in the Cloud.
(more…) «Business Intelligence in the Cloud – GoGrid CEO John Keagy Speaks at JasperWorld 2012»
Tags: BI, Business Intelligence, cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure, event, expo, GoGrid, JasperReports, JasperSoft, JasperWorld, John Keagy, Panel, reporting, Speaker, Tradeshow
Posted in Big Data, CEO, Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Events, General, GoGrid, GoGrid Exchange, Images, Industry, Open Source, Partners, Presentation, Public Cloud | No Comments »
Thursday, July 19th, 2012 by Michael Sheehan July 19th, 2012 8:33 amMichael Sheehan
Let me preface this post by saying, I am NOT a Linux guru. In fact, I consider myself to be a newbie when it comes to the intricacies of Linux. I probably know enough to be dangerous, at least dangerous to the server. So, I’m writing this post with the following disclaimer: Don’t ask me for any details on the “why” or how to do what I’m outlining below differently. But since I figured that lots of you are like me, I wanted to share.
Since I’m a Linux newbie, you’ll probably understand why I wanted to write this post though. I’m not a command line junkie—GUIs are much more my thing. But when it comes to running a server that is speedy and high performance with low overhead (e.g., doing away with GUIs), you’re probably looking at various Linux distros. What I wanted to do was set up a basic Linux system running a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack that also had a web-interface and some added security controls.
The great thing about doing this type of experimentation in the cloud is that I can create essentially a Dev & Test environment where I can spin up a server in minutes, install software, configure it, and test everything out. Then if it doesn’t work the way I want it to, I can tear it down and start again from scratch. The cloud lets you do this quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
In this tutorial, you can basically have the entire configuration up and running in the GoGrid cloud in less than an hour and only spend about $0.25 to test this out (assumes a 2 GB server running for 1 hour at $0.12/GB RAM/hr.)
Here’s what we’re using:
- CentOS 6.0 (64-bit) – with 2 GB RAM
- Webmin – web-based interface for sysadmins for UNIX that lets users set up user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, and a whole lot more
- ConfigServer Firewall & Security (CFS) – a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, login/intrusion detection, and security application for Linux servers
(more…) «How to Install LAMP, Webmin & ConfigServer Security & Firewall on a CentOS 6.0 GoGrid Cloud Server»
Tags: Apache, CentOS, ConfigServer, CSF, firewall, GoGrid, GUI, harden server, How To, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, secure server, Security, Server Management, Webmin
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, General, GoGrid, How To, Linux, Open Source, Public Cloud, Security | 5 Comments »
Monday, July 9th, 2012 by Rupert Tagnipes July 9th, 2012 9:27 amRupert Tagnipes
Basho is a GoGrid partner and responsible for the open-source Riak project. If you are not familiar with Riak, it is a well regarded open-source distributed database. It was built off of the Dynamo concept so it is often compared to Cassandra and Amazon Dynamo DB.
Riak is used as a fast, fault-tolerant distributed database. Companies like Mozilla use it for storing and analyzing beta testing results. Mozilla needed a solution to help improve the user experience and that would allow them to store large amounts of data very quickly. Another example of a company using Riak is Bump which uses Riak to scale and manage massive amounts of data sent between it’s millions of users. Riak is used to store elements of past user conversations so that communication history is readily accessible to users.
Basho Riak version 1.1.4 is now available as a GoGrid Community Server Image (CGSI). You can find it when you launch a virtual machine and search for “Riak”. This image is available in all our data centers. This CGSI contains the open source version so support is only available via the community site and will not have all the features present in the Enterprise version. However, you can use this image to either run a proof of concept (POC) of Riak to see if it will meet your needs or to run a small cluster. These will run on GoGrid’s high performance VMs which have been shown to have significant performance advantages over other cloud implementations.
Why is GoGrid faster?
(more…) «Create a Basho Riak Cluster on GoGrid»
Tags: analytics, basho, Big Data, cGSI, GoGrid Server Image, GSI, NOSQL, partner, riak, Storage
Posted in Big Data, Cloud Computing, GoGrid, How To, Images, Open Source, Partners, Public Cloud, Storage | No Comments »
Thursday, February 9th, 2012 by Zack Gilman February 9th, 2012 8:00 amZack Gilman
Recently, GoGrid was examining performance enhancements on several internal processes; among these enhancements was switching from standard gzip to “pigz”. Since I had never heard of this “pigz”, I was intrigued by this supposed “parallel” implementation of gzip; meaning it uses all available CPU’s/cores unlike gzip. This prompted me to ask, “I wonder if there is a parallel implementation of bzip2 as well”, and there began my endeavor.
pigz and pbzip2 are multi-threaded (SMP) implementations of their respective idol file compressors. They are both actively maintained and are fully compatible with all current bzip2 and gzip archives.
If you’re like me, you might’ve stayed away from using gzip or bzip2 due to the single-threaded aspect. If I try to compress a, let’s say, 2GB file, the system becomes rather sluggish; the reason being is that the “compression tool of choice” uses almost all of 1 core of today’s multi-core, multi-CPU systems and creates an uneven load between the cores, causing the CPU to operate very inefficiently.
In this example I have a .tar file with several databases in it, which totals 1.3GB. The system in question is a GoGrid dedicated server with 8 cores. The server’s load is around 1 and is a production database server.
Using bzip2, the file took approximately 6 minutes and 30 seconds to compress. Yikes!
(more…) «How To Optimize Your Database Backups and Text File Compression with pbzip2 and pigz»
Tags: backups, cloud, Cloud Computing, compression, Data, Database, file, GoGrid, gzip, How To, IaaS, pbzip2, pigz, solution, technical tip, zip
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server, FAQs, General, GoGrid, How To, Open Source, Public Cloud | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 by Zane Williamson June 14th, 2011 11:38 amZane Williamson
This is the 3rd and final post in my setup and use of the GoGrid Community GSI server for Cacti Monitoring. In my first post, “Set Up A Cacti Monitoring Server in Minutes with this GoGrid Community Server Image,,” I covered how to deploy Cacti in your GoGrid environment using a Community GSI. My second post, “How to Monitor Your Ubuntu Server on GoGrid in 6 Steps Using Cacti 0.8.7g,” I discussed how to initiate monitoring of your GoGrid Ubuntu server. Now to round things off, I want to show you how to link up your Cacti monitoring server to a Windows Server 2008 server on your GoGrid network. The base install of Cacti 0.8.7g will allow you to monitor the server’s bandwidth utilization, Ethernet errors, number of logged in users, and total number of processes. There are other templates available to monitor other components and services on your Windows server, but they require using an additional SNMP service beyond the Microsoft SNMP service. My blog post won’t get into the latter, but I will cover the former.
Objectives:
- Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server
- Configure and start Microsoft SNMP service on your Windows 2008 Server
- Add new Cacti device
- Create graphs to log Local Connection and Local Connection 2 bandwidth and errors, Logged in Users, and server processes
Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server
Below we see that we have a server (“Web2”) deployed on GoGrid with a public IP. Let’s log into this server and configure the private network with a private IP from the same subnet of the Cacti Monitor server. As I described in my previous post – I am using the prescribed private IP subnet from my GoGrid portal, contained under the List tab and then under Network – Private Network.
(more…) «How to Monitor Your Windows 2008 Server on GoGrid with Cacti 0.8.7g»
Tags: Cacti, cGSI, cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure, Community Server Image, How To, Server Image, tips
Posted in Cloud Computing, Cloud Server, FAQs, General, GoGrid, How To, Images, Open Source, Public Cloud, Windows | No Comments »
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