I recently attended Under the Radar 2012 as GoGrid was a sponsor of this event. As there were several tracks, Michael Sheehan and I split the tracks and I covered Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data. Michael covered Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS in Part 1.  Overall, the presenting companies have some compelling ideas and it gives an indicator as to the new thinking happening in Silicon Valley. The trends that I noticed were: a continued interest in private clouds, the increase in adoption of Openstack and the prevalence integrating Big Data.

If you never attended Under the Radar, the format is to have four startups that already have a real product present for 6 minutes and are then judged by a panel of experienced executives at more established companies. The presenters had to be companies that are actual startups with a unique value proposition and a real product that they are able to monetize. Alumni or companies that are already more established can also present as a “Grad Circle” member but they are not included in the awards presented at the end of the show. And like American Idol, the audience also has a vote on their favorites for each category.  I included the Judge’s choice and Audience choice for each category but also added my own choice which reflects my own opinion and not that of GoGrid.

Infrastructure

This category focused on companies that are delivering infrastructure or infrastructure management products. So this would include services that could offer up infrastructure components (like compute, network, and storage) or even tools for managing configurations and deployments. Not surprisingly, nearly all of them focus on the cloud as the operating model of choice.

Cloudscaling – This company focuses on delivering an amazon-like cloud using Openstack. Their solution is comprised of Open Cloud OS, which is a product grade version of Openstack, Cloudblocks, a comprehensive architecture for cloud services and Hardware Blueprints, which are templates for physical hardware. Customers can leverage this solution to deploy a public or private cloud in their own DC.

Nodejitsu – Sticking with the Japanese-theme of cloud automation companies (a la Heroku), this company makes it easy for customers using Node.js to deploy and automate services on the cloud. While Heroku’s strength is Ruby, Nodejitsu focuses on Javascript which they believe to be faster and to have greater staying power than other higher level languages.

Piston Cloud Computing – Its core product, Piston Enterprise OS is a massively scalable private cloud operating system build on Openstack and is designed for any company tackling Big Data and for 1/4 the cost of VMWare.

Zadara Storage – Focused on providing low cost, block storage as a service inside the cloud. Zadara provides an easy to use and flexible storage solution on multiple leading public clouds. The product operates as a virtual private storage array.

Puppet Labs (Grad Circle) -  A former best in show company, Puppet Labs manages the open source Puppet configuration management tool, one of the leading products used  at companies like Zynga and Citrix.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

Providing competition for VMWare is compelling, especially if can be done leveraging open source technologies, so Piston Cloud is also my choice in this category. Enterprises have great interest in private clouds but providing one that is based on an open technology gives more flexibility for hybrid clouds and a path to the eventual migration to the public cloud.

Database Scalability

This category focused on companies that are building out products that are designed to handle large scale datasets. This would include enhancements to open source products to better handle scale or new designs for handling larger datasets that need to be delivered faster and more efficiently. I felt that there is some overlap in this category with the Big Data category since they are interrelated. For example MongoLab can be used to solve for Big Data problems and the Big Data presenters can argue that they can also offer some form of database scalability.

Drawn to Scale – Builds a database called Spire that leverages Hadoop, Hbase and their own software to provide real-time Analysis for Big Data. This helps to solve for use cases where users already use Hadoop but need the ability to do real-time SQL queries from the data.

MemSQL – A Y combinator startup that offers an OLTP database that lives in memory. In combination with MySQL, this gives users a way to have high through-put transactions while also having persistence of data on disk.

MongoLab – Provides MongoDB as a service that is designed to better work with object-oriented development. It removes the operational and administration layer from developers and provides monitoring and backups for MongoDB.

ScaleArc – Sits in between the database and the app servers and helps with optimization and performance of MySQL-related databases. It operates like a load balancer for databases.

NuoDB (Grad Circle and formerly known as NimbusDB) – A new SQL and ACID compliant relational database that is designed to run on a distributed architecture like the cloud.

In this category, I would pick MongoLab. With MongoDB’s adoption growing in the marketplace, it’s an important alternative to have services that enhance the database, especially if it can be delivered via a public cloud.

Big Data

This category offered companies that are solving problems around Big Data. This could involve technologies that are used to better handle Big Data or services that ease the collection, transformation or analysis of Big Data.  It seemed that most presenters generated or provided large amounts of 3rd party data in addition to providing products and services for Big Data.

Chart.io – Makes charting and analytics easy for non-technical users. Able to connect to MySQL, Postgres, Google Analytics and Oracle (in the near future). Chart.io provides an alternative to heavyweight on-premise business intelligence products.

Datasift – Helps customers extract, analyze and gain value from social networks. Although it can pull from over 30 data source, it is one of two exclusive re-syndicators of Twitter data. Datasift operates in a SaaS model so companies can be up and running in minutes.

Infochimps –  Provides a full Big Data platform for processing and analyzing data from their own data marketplace or anywhere in the web. This makes it easy to source data leveraging Hadoop and providing services on top of that platform.

Metamarkets – Provides data science as a service, providing for data exploration, decision support and operational awareness. Using their own technology, the product is able to process large volumes of data at speed and scale.

Judge’s Winner:	Audience Winner:	My Choice:

Having the ability to pull 3rd party data or any data from the web and analyze it without investing in your own infrastructure is a valuable product. Hadoop is difficult to wrangle although it is currently one of the leading technologies for running Map Reduce jobs. Providing the data and services on top of Hadoop makes Infochimps a key solution in my mind.

Top Winners

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the top winners for the day:

Venture Beat People’s Choice Winner:	Best in Show – Judge’s Winner:	Best in Show – Audience Winner:

Overall, all the companies that presented were very interesting, showing the kind of innovation and creativity that we have come to expect from early stage startups. While cloud is still a strong theme here, I think that the future is moving towards Big Data. I think we will see the two themes start to converge as users start to see the power of using Big Data solutions in the cloud for performance and cost-effective deployments. The enthusiasm and effort given by these startups bode well for the technology industry and are a harbinger of the great things to come.

When you purchase a car, you obviously think a lot about its performance before you buy. How much horsepower does it have? Is the car safe? How does it handle? Is the gas mileage going to break the bank or will you be saving the environment? Is the vehicle flexible enough to meet all your needs or just suitable for one activity like off-roading?

When you think about cloud computing, specifically cloud infrastructure, performance matters as well. And there are many factors to consider when shopping for a cloud provider or partner. How’s their VM performance? Does their network provide multiple high-bandwidth pipes to support your network-hungry application or service? Are there any I/O bottlenecks? If your website comes under heavy load, can you burst to support it and then scale back when demand subsides?

These are important considerations. Would you want a car that has no acceleration when getting on a highway? Probably not. That’s the same reason you wouldn’t want a cloud that is over-subscribed or doesn’t have the architecture to support your business needs.

Speaking of “performance,” this is our third year sponsoring the Under the Radar (UTR) conference and marks the second year that our CMO, Jeffrey Samuels, being a judge there. This year, Jeff will be on the panel for the Performance Monitoring session. Here are the companies presenting in this session:

• Fabric Engine – lets developers write high-performance application using dynamic languages
• Iron.io – provides elastic products for cloud messaging and background processing
• Sumo Logic – gives real-time Big Data and IT insights of log intelligence and analytics
• Tracelytics – provides insights into the performance of web applications

Tuning your application or infrastructure for the best performance possible is a critical check-box when moving into production. And monitoring how everything performs once it’s released is another. One quick and easy way to get a jump-start on these two items is to choose a cloud provider with a reputation as a solid performer. As the Technology Evangelist of GoGrid, I’m particularly proud of our performance over the past years. We’ve been independently benchmarked as providing market-leading I/O performance and also lead the pack in uptime from an SLA standpoint. Our network availability and performance remain unparalleled. And we craft unique infrastructure solutions to ensure performance is there when you need it, whether it’s with a completely public cloud solution, a hybrid infrastructure (mixture of cloud and physical servers), or a private cloud instance. And our recently announced Big Data solution couples performance with the scalability that developers, analytics firms, advertisers, and social media companies are demanding.

I look forward to seeing the innovations companies are presenting at UTR this year, and can’t wait to meet many of you personally. Best of luck to all the presenters. May you truly “perform!”

From February 13-16, 2012, in Santa Clara, CA, GoGrid sponsored Cloud Connect 2012, an expo devoted to educating professional seeking to learn more about the benefits of Cloud Computing. We have been a long time sponsor of this show and each year it seems to get better, not only from the caliber of content being presented, but also in terms of the level of expertise on cloud computing that attendees profess.

As I attend many of these conferences as a sponsor, exhibitor and interested party, I have seen a great evolution not only of knowledge and education but also in the cloud services being presented by various companies at the show. A few years ago, it was all about “what is cloud” and how do we define it. The past years have allowed us to really fine-tune the definition and really move beyond this to rolling up the sleeves and implementing cloud solutions. I’m definitely encouraged by the progress of companies with their cloud innovations and the individuals looking to capitalize on this influx of knowledge.

Talking with customers and prospects looking for or implementing cloud infrastructure solutions gives and insight into what is working in the cloud and what people are really looking for. For example, a few years ago, we introduced the concept of Hybrid Hosting – the ability to mix and match virtual and physical servers within the same architecture, all managed through a single pane of glass, so to speak. In fact, many of our recent Case Studies show that hybrid environments are really the reason why these companies turned to GoGrid for their cloud solution.

GoGrid Customer Presentation – Microgroove

At the show, one GoGrid customer, Microgroove, presented their decision-making process and implementation strategies on moving their music platform to our cloud. It was an interesting journey for them as they did have to do some tests on other clouds only provided completely virtualized environment that simply did not meet their requirements. In the coming days, we will post a video of their presentation but if you are interested in reading about their case study, you can download it here.

We have compiled a list of new GoGrid customer success stories that you may find interesting. These stories can be downloaded here.

The full PowerPoint presentation can be viewed below:

A Hybrid Hosting Primer

David Michael, a Solutions Architect here at GoGrid, also gave a presentation on the benefits and use cases of our hybrid hosting model in the Demo Theater of the Cloud Connect show. To a captive and interested audience, David walked through things to consider and the advantages that companies can benefit from by using a hybrid hosting scenario.

The full presentation is shown below.

Listening to You

While presenting success stories and best practices is always helpful, it’s also important to listen to and answer questions about GoGrid and the services that we provide. That is where I personally find it important to be an active exhibitor, staffing our booth. A while back, we developed this concept of the “Cloud Fingerprint” – essentially that your business and infrastructure needs are unique and the cloud partner your choose should be adaptable and flexible enough to meet those needs. We believe that it is important for not just the sales and marketing teams to be at these shows, but also representatives from all departments at GoGrid. On-site, we had executives from Engineering, Support and even Human Resources as well (yes, we are hiring) gathering their own perspectives of the show and what people are looking for in a cloud provider.

“Cloudy with a Chance of Cocktails”

Lastly, GoGrid also sponsored a party at Cloud Connect 2012. With everyone’s mind swirling with cloudy thoughts, it was important to relax, be social and have a gathering place to literally blow off some steam. Below are a few pictures from the Party (also be sure to view the Cloud Connect Flickr set that has more pictures from the party – towards the end of the set).

If you did attend Cloud Connect 2012, we hope that you found it educational and rewarding and allowed you to build up your set of cloud resources and tools. If you didn’t, we hope that you can attend next year.

GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, recently spent some time overseas visiting the new GoGrid European Headquarters and data center in Amsterdam. I caught up with John upon his return in order to find out his thoughts and visions of a global GoGrid cloud, how Equinix has enabled GoGrid’s expansion and why it is important to the GoGrid customer.

Michael Sheehan: Why is opening a new overseas data center important?
John Keagy: It’s part of our global expansion plan. Europe is a logical next step.

MS: Why Amsterdam and not somewhere else?
JK: My favorite reason on why we selected Amsterdam as the first part of our overseas expansion is AMS-IX. AMS-IX is an Internet exchange that has resulted in Amsterdam being the place for Internet transit. Bandwidth is affordable and comparable to Silicon Valley. It means that customers are in the spot where most Internet traffic originates and terminates. If you are going to locate a web server in one location in Europe, Amsterdam is the most connected city. It’s the best place to locate your Internet infrastructure. It’s got the most connections and because it has the most connections, it is the most affordable – the highest performance at the lowest cost.

MS: Why was having a European presence critical?
JK: We have a strong European customer base that has been demanding a localized presence and when we examined that marketplace, we determined that it was critical to enable those European customers to have a cloud infrastructure deployable in their backyard.

MS: What are your impressions of the data center facility having visited it?
JK: The data center facility is incredible. It’s a combination of GoGrid doing a nice job with its installation – the racking and stacking, cabling and design of the installation. But it is also Equinix’s implementation of its cold aisle technology. It’s like walking into a refrigerator. It’s sealed. It doesn’t have a cage door, it has a glass door. They pump cold air into the interior of the cage and it’s vented through the equipment. Where there is no equipment, the slots are filled with baffles so that the cold air is forced through the equipment. It’s sort of like a refrigerator within a cage. It’s not just us doing a good job, it’s Equinix pursing a better utility efficiency score through sophisticated cold aisle containment technology.

MS: What’s your longer term strategy for global operations?
JK: Europe was just a first step in our global expansion plan. The next step will be Asia, although we have always enjoyed a large percentage of our customers coming from South America, so our next step after that will be South America.

MS: Personally, how is this exciting for you – 10 years in the making, we now have an overseas footprint?
JK: GoGrid has always had a customer base that served an international audience. Over 90% of our customers historically were outside of the state of California – considering the value we bring to Silicon Valley-based companies, that is quite remarkable. And we are on the order of 40% international. For me personally, it’s a milestone that I have been looking forward to for a long time and I’m excited that we finally have automation technology that is really facilitating what we are doing.

MS: Why is the Equinix partnership important?
JK: I’m very excited about the partnership with Equinix. They have an ecosystem for cloud services that is more compelling than their ecosystem for telecom services. The difference here is that businesses (consumers of cloud services) are learning that by connecting to Equinix, they can procure cloud infrastructure and other services securely and reliable in a high performance fashion that avoids the public Internet.

MS: How does that work with GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud?
JK: It’s about avoiding the two largest fears regarding the adoption of Cloud Computing: the public Internet and sharing. Customers are worried about consuming cloud services over the public Internet. There are over 3 million buildings connected to Equinix facilities in one way or another – this allows them to remove the public Internet from how they consume cloud services. GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud is a non-shared environment – it’s dedicated and private – which eliminates the 2nd big fear which is sharing – it provides security and performance benefits.

MS: For GoGrid customer, having a global footprint like this is important because…
JK: GoGrid is the only company that has a single pane of glass that lets you manage infrastructure across the globe in a truly on-demand fashion – through one pane of glass and one API.

Do you have any questions for John? If so, please leave a comment!

GoGrid is one of the Platinum Sponsors of this week’s Cloud Connect 2012 conference and Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The event promises to be a memorable one for cloud newcomers as well as those of us trying to keep up with the blazing pace of cloud innovation.

This year, we’re particularly excited to be focusing on GoGrid’s hybrid infrastructure solution, which we think combines the best of both the physical and virtual worlds. We believe that your company is unique, and your infrastructure should be, too. Stop by our booth 709 to find out what your unique “cloud fingerprint” looks like. Chances are it’s a flavor of our hybrid solution.

Presentations

Maybe you’re wondering whether to keep your dedicated servers or move to the cloud. What if you could have it all? Join one of our solutions architects as he walks through real-life examples of how hybrid hosting can improve your business’s infrastructure: Tuesday, Feb. 14, 3:35 – 3:55pm in the Cloud Solutions Theater on the Expo Floor. Here’s the presentation description: “Different businesses have different infrastructure needs. And the choices of clouds, colocation, or dedicated services can be daunting if not confusing. So why choose just one when GoGrid’s hybrid architecture (a union of the best of virtual and physical) provides options for both flexibility and growth? Physical hardware provides guaranteed, dedicated, high performance coupled with an assurance of strict data control and security, while cloud architecture scales when your business demands it. Learn the secrets of hybrid hosting and how it can improve your business’s infrastructure in this 20-minute walk-through.”

Then on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 1:15 – 2:15pm (Grand Ballroom H), learn how Microgroove is creating a high-performance, cost-effective cloud environment for the music industry with GoGrid. The title says it all: “Performance Matters, Especially in the Music Industry – Global Hybrid Infrastructure Makes Artists Sing.” Here’s an overview: Learn first hand how Microgroove leveraged physical and virtual infrastructure components in creating a high-performance, cost-effective cloud environment for the music industry. One that easily supported their need for cloud scalability coupled with the permanence and single-tenancy of dedicated servers — a hybrid solution not found in commodity clouds. Microgroove’s technology platform running on GoGrid is powering hundreds of popular artists’ sites from Snoop Dogg to Yani as well as an eCommerce site of 1.5 million+ SKUs.

We’ll also be holding several short presentations at the GoGrid booth. Topics include:

• Cloud 101 in less than 10 minutes
• Hybrid Hosting in less than 10 minutes
• Hosted Private Cloud in less than 10 minutes

Be sure to drop by for these quick primers on cloud computing.

GoGrid-Sponsored Reception

And don’t forget to drop by “Cloudy with a Chance of Cocktails,” the GoGrid party on Wednesday from 6 – 8pm in the Hyatt Mezzanine. Register now and beat the rush! This party is open to all Cloud Connect attendees but, space is limited, so act now.

Everybody Loves Free Stuff!

Lastly, Cloud Connect attendees can participate in the GoGrid Cloud Scavenger Hunt, where one lucky person will win an iPad 2. Stop by the GoGrid booth (709) for details. We’ll also be giving away various GoGrid goodies, including a Mystic Pyramid to help predict your future –- a perfect complement to our Cloud Pyramid!

Register for the Expo

To make sure you don’t miss out, we’d like you to be our guest at the Expo; just complete the online registration form and mark your calendar. Hope to see you there!