With the March 2010 GoGrid newsletter, we welcome and introduce a new name to our communications, that of Maria Gallegos who has joined us as a Product Marketing Coordinator for GoGrid. Maria comes from a marketing background (from financial services to non-profits) and will be producing the GoGrid newsletter as well as managing other customer experience programs. One of her first tasks has been the March 2010 Customer Update Newsletter.
For those who are not current GoGrid users, we provide the full newsletter on our blog, just so that you can see what you are missing out on! If any of the items that are mentioned here interest you, or if you want to get started on GoGrid right away (remember, we provide a full range of hosted infrastructure solutions ranging from Cloud Servers to Dedicated Servers to Cloud Storage, all within a Load Balanced network), I encourage you to speak with a GoGrid Sales Representative. They can provide you with answers to many of your infrastructure hosting questions. Just tell them that I sent you!
Here is the full March 2010 GoGrid Customer Update newsletter:
Hello,
As 2010 continues to progress, so does GoGrid. From system enhancements to new partners, you’ll find this edition of the newsletter full of information to better help you manage your cloud hosting infrastructure. Specific topics include: (more…)
Today art of defence and GoGrid announced the availability of the Industry’s first Distributed Web Application Firewall running within the GoGrid cloud. This is a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) solution called hyperguard™ and can be easily and quickly deployed using a GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI). By using a GoGrid Server Image running art of defence’s hyperguard SaaS, customers can be assured that they are receiving robust application-level protection beyond simply the network layer within their cloud environment.
By deploying the hyperguard-enabled GoGrid Server Image, GoGrid users simply have to configure their applications and their respective protection levels through hyperguard’s web-base GUI which allows for comprehensive attack detection and protection at the Web Application layer. hyperguard SaaS basic (which is currently available on GoGrid for $39/mo/server plus associated GoGrid RAM/Bandwidth costs) offers web application security monitoring, detection-only and protection modes.
Hyperguard SaaS Standard dWAF provides the following key capabilities:
Security monitoring at the application layer of attacks like SQL-injection, cross site scripting and OWASP Top10 for all applications delivered on the hyperguard web server GSI
Comprehensive baseline protection against known attacks at the application layer – only if rule sets are run in protection mode
Automated updates of baseline protection rule sets by art of defence – with testing capability for these new rule sets via detect-only mode
The GoGrid Server Image is available now through GoGrid:
On Friday, February 26, one of our GoGrid Partners, ANX eBusiness will be hosting a webinar titled “Disaster Recovery in the Cloud“.
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
As you probably know by now, GoGrid released a series of new enhancements to our Cloud Computing Infrastructure Hosting service. You can read more about what was included in this latest release in this blog post. Some of the highlighted new features and improvements include:
GoGrid Dedicated Servers
List View of GoGrid Objects
Edit f5 Load Balancers
New Login Page
Self-Service Support Links
We also sent out a newsletter highlighting some of the changes in the January/February 2010 timeframe.
As with previous releases, I wanted to spend some time with our VP of Products, Mario Olivarez, and discuss some of these items and what they mean to GoGrid customers. (YouTube direct link.)
As always, if you have any questions about any of the items you heard in this video or about GoGrid in general, please leave a comment on this post or ask us on Twitter (@GoGrid). Stay tuned for more updates and videos.
Gear6, the leading provider of commercial Memcached solutions, and GoGrid today announced the availability of Gear6 Cloud Cache, an on-demand service offering designed to speed up, scale out and ensure uptime of web services and applications built within servers deployed within the GoGrid cloud. Memcached is a popular, open source distributed memory system used to scale dynamic content for busy web sites. As dynamic content gets pushed to cloud applications, Memcached provides an ideal mechanism for accelerating performance.
By choosing the Gear6 GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI), GoGrid users will receive a 100% Memcached compatible server that delivers dramatically better memory efficiency. GoGrid users who deploy a Gear6 optimized server within GoGrid benefit from:
Using Gear6’s Memcached server images on GoGrid means that those servers will have optimized memory management which translates to a much higher speed of cached data and up to a 50% increase in DRAM efficiency without any noticeable performance degradation. There are currently a couple of Gear6 images available within GoGrid, including: (more…)
Today, MuleSoft, who specializes in enterprise-class software, and GoGrid announced the availability of the industry’s first commercially-supported cloud-based Apache Tomcat offering known as Cloudcat as a GoGrid Partner Server Image (GSI). The Partner GSI by MuleSoft contains their product Cloudcat which allows developers and QA personnel to build and test web applications easily in the cloud using a pre-installed & configured Apache Tomcat application server. Having Cloudcat contained within a Partner GSI is important to GoGrid users because it eliminates the need of having to do a manual Tomcat download, installation or configuration. Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used application server, with over 1 million downloads per month and over 70% penetration in the enterprise datacenter.
More information about MuleSoft and Cloudcat can be found within the GoGrid Exchange on the MuleSoft Partner Page. There are currently two MuleSoft/Cloudcat images available on GoGrid:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (32-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (64-bit)
These images have a monthly (recurring) cost of $29/server (in addition to standard GoGrid RAM and Bandwidth charges).
Today we sent out the January 2010 GoGrid Customer Update to all GoGrid customers. We wanted to ensure that all people who are interested in GoGrid have access to the latest and greatest information coming from our headquarters so the full newsletter is posted below. If you want to get regular updates similar to this newsletter, I recommend that you subscribe to the GoGrid blog RSS feed, subscribe to blog post via email, follow us on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a GoGrid Facebook Fanpage.
Below is the entire GoGrid Newsletter (January 2010):
Hello Michael,
On behalf of everyone here at GoGrid, I want to wish you a very successful 2010! We are starting the year off with a bang that includes some exciting new developments that I want to share with you in this edition of the GoGrid Newsletter. Here are the specific topics:
New Features and System Enhancements
GoGrid CDN: New Singapore and Paris Points of Presence (POPs)
New Partner GSIs
Preventative Power Maintenance
End-of-Life: CentOS 5.1 w/Apache & RHEL 5.1 w/Apache operating systems
New CentOS 5.3 & RHEL 5.4 base operating systems
Two New 3rd Party Services to Monitor your GoGrid Servers
Yesterday, CloudKickannounced that they have officially come out of beta and is rolling out a freemium model for their server management and monitoring service. With the announcement, CloudKick also officially launched support of the GoGrid Cloud in its management, alerting, graphing and monitoring suite.
CloudKick offers a variety of robust services to help you quickly and easily gain insight into your infrastructure hosted on GoGrid. Some services and features include:
Monitor critical metrics
Simple management tools
Flexible alerting to multiple addresses including SMS
Visualize performance data
Multiple users
Changelog tool
CloudKick agent
Depending on the plan that you are on (they range from free to $599+ a month), you get a variety of services mentioned above. The difference in plans depend on the number of servers, users, data retention, alerts and the type of support you desire.
There are plenty of services out there that let you monitor your infrastructure and servers performance and uptime. In fact, you would be foolish not to have at least a couple monitoring your site’s URL so that you can be notified when issues do occur. However, there are fewer services that actually let you monitor AND troubleshoot at a much more granular level. Over the past few weeks, I have been testing out once such service called Server Density.
Whether you have 1 server or multiple, Server Density has your monitoring covered with both free and paid for pricing plans (details here). The folks over at Boxed Ice, the makers of Server Density set me up with the premium version of their service so that I could test it out on my personal blog which is running on GoGrid. Before I go into my analysis of the service, here are some of the highlights (pretty much all of which I have tested):
Today, New Relic announced that their RPM product supports GoGrid Cloud Hosting Infrastructure and is available for a limited time with preferential pricing. RPM is an on-demand tool that companies can use to optimize, monitor and troubleshoot their Java, Ruby and JRuby applications within a variety of environments, which now includes the GoGrid cloud.
With New Relic’s RPM running on GoGrid, users can monitor many aspects of a Ruby, Java or JRuby application, detect performance problems and eventually drill down to uncover root causes of any performance issues. RPM also cleanly integrates with other development tools.
