With so many different types of cloud infrastructure available – public, private, internal – and with so many conflicting opinions in the industry, finding the right cloud for your business can be a confusing and frustrating process.

In order to bring clarity and understanding, we recorded a new educational webinar, hosted by GoGrid, where guest speaker James Staten, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., and Mario Olivarez, VP of Product Management of GoGrid share new research and discuss the status and direction of the Cloud infrastructure landscape.

These cloud experts discuss:

• The 4 characteristics of cloud computing
• Why are companies using the Cloud?
• What is the difference between Public and Private Cloud?
• Why is 2011 the Year of the Hosted Private Cloud?
• What is the ROI of the Cloud?

The recorded webinar also includes all the answers to the questions submitted by the live audience.

So if you are interested in learning more about the cloud industry or want to have a greater understanding of how cloud computing technology can help your business The Future of the Cloud will be well worth viewing. Starting today, this webinar is now available as a free download (.wmv and .mov versions available).

Please download the webinar by clicking the download link and leave your thoughts in comment section on this blog post.

Download “The Future of the Cloud – Why 2011 is the Year of Hosted Private Cloud”

In order to provide a more “rounded” voice on the GoGrid blog, we are going to start having some new authors. To kick off this initiative, I wanted to introduce Paul Lappas, GoGrid’s VP of Engineering and Co-Founder. Paul manages GoGrid’s engineering efforts, technical operations, IT and the technology vision for GoGrid.

Recently, he and some other team members attending a MeetUp in San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters to discuss and present  JClouds and Pallet and how those tools are being used at GoGrid. Here is Paul’s synopsis of Jclouds and the presentation:

“GoGrid is doing some really cool stuff using an automated provisioning technology called “Pallet”.  Pallet is similar to existing automating configuration technologies like Puppet and Chef but with a key difference that it was built specifically to solve the problem of quickly spinning up and configuring groups of servers in the cloud. It support “Jclouds” out of the box and is implemented as a set of libraries for “Clojure” which is a LISP-based programming language that is quickly building steam.  Jclouds is an open source framework developed by Adrian Cole that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java development skills, with an API that allows you the freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features.

GoGrid is working with the author of Pallet (Hugo Duncan) and a key contributor Toni Batchelli to enable the fast deployment of fully functional GoGrid environments for use by development teams for test & dev. It’s a tough problem for most companies, but especially challenging for us considering how complex (and capital intensive) it is to stage an end-to-end GoGrid environment due to the sheer breadth of technologies that span almost all 7 layers of the OSI stack. With Pallet, we are able to treat our “infrastructure as code” and manage the configuration of systems, networks and applications just like we do our source code so that they can be quickly applied to spin-up new environments. But perhaps the coolest aspect is that we are using GoGrid internally to virtualize the individual components! It’s kind of like Inception where there is a grid-within-a-grid. Our teams are still getting their heads around logging into a GoGrid account and seeing virtual representation of physical GoGrid components represented as VM icons in the GUI! Very cool stuff.

The following presentation provides more details of the implementation and was presented at the recent Jclouds meetup at Twitter’s headquarter in San Francisco. Check out future jclouds meetups here:
http://www.meetup.com/jclouds/”

Below is the presentation that was presented at the Jclouds meetup:

Stay tuned for more posts from some of the thought-leaders driving GoGrid.

A few weeks ago GoGrid launched its revolutionary Hosted Private Cloud offering, receiving quite a bit of publicity in the process. But Private Clouds and even Cloud Computing is still confusing to many organizations, even to this day. As part of our on-going educational webinar series, where our goal is to get knowledge of cloud computing into the hands of our users and other interested parties, we will be doing a webinar specifically on GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud offering.

This is your chance to learn the advantages of cloud computing over traditional (physical) implementations of infrastructure, and then dive deeper into how Private (and Public) Clouds can optimize productivity within your business.

Webinar Details

WHO should attend? – IT professionals, System Administrators, C-Level executives, Infrastructure Managers.

WHAT is the Webinar about? – “Hosted Private Cloud” – presentation on ways in which your business can implement a private cloud environment, quickly and easily, with no capital expenditure.

WHERE is it being held? – In the cloud, of course!

WHY should you attend? – If you have ever had questions about the implementation and usage of cloud computing, specifically cloud infrastructure within your workplace, and specifically would like to learn more about the total cost of ownership of implementing a Hosted Private Cloud versus an On-premise Private Cloud, then this webinar is for you!

WHEN is the webinar? – Thursday, February 3rd from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)

HOW do I register? – Simply fill out the registration form on the webinar sign-up page and you will be registered.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Distinguishing between a Public vs. Hosted Private Cloud – What’s right for your business?
• Use cases – how enterprises are leveraging the private cloud
• Resources – getting started with a Hosted Private Cloud
• Questions & Answers

We believe that this webinar will help any organization understand not only cloud computing but also the choices available within public and private Cloud Infrastructure.

As part of GoGrid‘s on-going educational webinar series, we have another important and informative webinar titled “Accelerate Your Website & Deliver Your Content with Lightning-Fast Speed” running tomorrow (Thursday, December 2nd, 2010) at 11:00-12:00 PM (Pacific Time). As many of you may already know, GoGrid has a CDN offering (see our CDN page for more details) that can help you instantly scale your web presence around the globe.

Here are the details of webinar:

Description: Do you depend on your web presence as a critical component of your business? Have you experienced occasional slow load times or video buffering of your content from certain geographic locations? Will increased website speed help you sell your services, products, or advertising on your website?

Topics:

• What is a content delivery network and how it can benefit your business
• Example of businesses and content that should be using CDNs
• Introduction to the GoGrid CDN

Presenters:

• Kevin Lewis, Director of Global Alliances EdgeCast Networks
• Rob Larson, GoGrid Product Manager

Date: December 2, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (PDT)

Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101202

Be sure to bring your questions to the webinar as there will be time during the presentation to ask the experts. Just to get your ideas flowing, here’s some more information about the GoGrid CDN:

Features:

• Website Acceleration—faster page load times for your website
• Large Object Download Service—for software, videos, games, music, podcasts and movies—the best way to provide delivery of downloads
• On-Demand Video Streaming—Flash and Windows
• Live Video Streaming—Flash and Windows
• Security*—all of the important security features needed for online business including SSL delivery and Token-based Authentication
• Cname Support—disguise the GoGrid CDN URL with a customized URL
• Reporting—the most comprehensive reporting and analytics suite in the industry—view bandwidth consumption, breakdowns of downloads by media type, geography, file type and popularity
• Advanced Reporting*—over 60 reports to help improve and optimize website performance

The GoGrid CDN currently has 18 Points of Presence (PoPs) around the globe including 9 in North America, 5 in Europe, 3 in Asia and 1 in Australia.

We hope to see you at the webinar.

Have you ever wondered what this “new” term “NOSQL” means? Is it something that you need to seriously look at when you are crafting your cloud environment? Is it a viable alternative to MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostreSQL or other database applications? Do you even know how to get started with it?

If any of the questions above left you scratching your head AND you are in the Silicon Valley on October 26th, you might want to head over to the following meetup “A NOSQL Evening in Palo Alto“.

Many industry experts are saying that NOSQL will be or is the database of choice for Cloud Computing because of its scalability and ability to handle data-intensive applications better. Many popular websites that are high-traffic or deliver lots of rich media are adopting and re-architecting their infrastructures to take advantage of NOSQL.

From the Event Page:

Tim Anglade (founder, A NOSQL Summer), hosts a 2-hour discussion and Q&A with representatives from some of the most prominent NOSQL vendors and projects. The topics will look back on the origins of the movement and its growing pains, discuss the current technological & business states, as well as look ahead to the opportunities for improvement and expansion.

So if you ever wanted to hear the lessons learned by an emerging tech industry, or wanted to have an inside look into the non-relational revolution, come join us for a unique evening at beautiful Dinah’s Garden Hotel, in Palo Alto, California.

Confirmed Panel Participants, by alphabetical order

• 10gen: Roger Bodamer — SVP, Products and Engineering
• Basho: Andy Gross — Vice President of Engineering
• CouchOne (formerly CouchIO): Mikeal Rogers — Employee Number One
• Cloudant: Mike Miller — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist
• Cloudera
• GoGrid: Paul Lancaster — Business Development Manager
• InfiniteGraph: Warren Davidson — Director, Business Development and Strategic Alliances
• NorthScale: James Phillips — Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Products
• Riptano: Jonathan Ellis — Founder
• Scality: Randy Parker — Sr. Director, North America

We’re running out of space on the panel but many other NOSQL project leaders and executives will be in the audience, including the CEOs of Neo4J and InfoGrid. Each company with also have several additional team members in attendance at the evening.

Space is limited, please RSVP in advance.
Date: Tuesday, October 26
Time: 6PM-10:30 PM (Pacific)
Location:
Dinah’s Garden Hotel
4261 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, CA

Registration: http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-NoSQL/calendar/14727419/

Schedule

• 6:00pm: Doors open. Mingle over drinks and appetizers.
• 7:00-9:30pm: Discussion and Q&A with the panel with a break in the middle (coffee, fruit and cookies will be available at the break).
• 9:30-?: Trader Vic’s is literally feet away from the conference room. We’ll be hosting a dinner there for the panelists and special guests, but you’re welcome to join us in the restaurant (just let us know in advance, so we can reserve more tables for you).

This might be a really great meetup to attend if you are looking at Cloud Computing and databases therein.