Having a secure Cloud Computing environment is paramount to GoGrid cloud customers. In fact, many critics of cloud computing in general point to “security” as one of the primary barriers to entry for their company or clients jumping into the cloud as a critical component of a company’s core IT strategy. We whole-heartedly agree that Security in the Cloud should be on any checklist when evaluating cloud providers. To that end, we have enhanced our Hardware Firewall service to ensure that your servers and critical data remain secure from malicious threats that ANY server or website is vulnerable to, cloud or not.

Set up, managed and maintained by experienced GoGrid System Administrators, the new GoGrid Fortinet is designed to insulate your infrastructure on GoGrid from a variety of new and sophisticated threats. Also, if you are working down the path of achieving PCI compliance for your environment running on GoGrid, this hardware firewall solution provides another “check in the box” towards compliance. While host-based firewall solutions do work in many cases, to achieve true protection against attacks, a hardware-based firewall is definitely the direction to go.

Key Features and Pricing

Briefly, the new GoGrid Fortinet Firewall’s key features are:

• 1 Gbps throughput
• 100,000 concurrent sessions
• Unlimited IP addresses in a trusted interface
• Choice of one VPN from the following
  • SSL
  • Site-to-Site
  • IPSec

The new Fortinet Hardware Firewall service is available for $200/month or $2000/year if prepaid annually. There is no Setup Fee for this service. The service includes one VPN, but should you desire to add additional Virtual Private Networks (like SSL, Site-to-Site or IPSec) those can be added for $50/month with no setup fee.

To order a GoGrid Hardware Firewall, you need to contact the GoGrid Sales Department (if you are a new customer) or your Service Team Account Manager (if you are a current GoGrid customer).

More Information about GoGrid’s Fortinet Firewall Service

We have compiled the following set of Frequently Asked Questions in anticipation of them being asked.

Question: Where are the Hardware Firewalls available?

Answer: The Fortinet Hardware Firewalls are currently only available in our US-West-1 data center.

Q: Can I control my firewall via the GoGrid API?

A: At this time, the Hardware Firewalls cannot be controlled via the API

Q: Can I use my GoGrid F5 Hardware Load Balancers with the Fortinet solution?

A: Yes, the F5 load balancing services can be used in conjunction with the Fortinet Hardware Firewall.

Q: How am I billed for the GoGrid Hardware Firewalls?

A: Fortinet hardware firewall billing is done based on your GoGrid signup month & day on a monthly basis. The bill can always be viewed in the GoGrid Customer Portal.

Q: I have a GoGrid Hybrid Hosting environment (combination of GoGrid Cloud Servers & GoGrid Dedicated Servers), is the Fortinet Firewall compatible with that type of environment?

A: Absolutely! The Fortinet Firewall can be configured to protect your entire GoGrid environment (virtual and physical servers).

Q: Sign me up! How do I order or add to my Firewall?

A: To order a GoGrid Firewall, you must contact a GoGrid Sales Representative (new customers) or your Service Team Account Manager (existing customers). Ordering via the GoGrid Web Portal is not currently available.

Q: Can I see my Hardware Firewalls within the GoGrid portal?

A: At this time, the Firewall is not displayed in the GoGrid portal.

Q: What are your SLA deployment times for the Firewall?

A: Your hardware firewall will be deployed within 2 business days.

Q: Can you show a couple of high-level network diagrams of the Firewall solution?

A: See below.

Above: The Fortinet Firewall provides enterprise-level security on the network layer.

Above: IPSec Remote Access allows “dial-up” connectivity from many operating systems and requires the use of FortiClient software. The SSL VPN allows for unlimited users in non-tunneled mode or 5 concurrent logins in tunneled mode. The Point-to-Point VPN Tunnel is an “always up” end-to-end encrypted tunnel solution which requires a VPN endpoint at a remote location.

GoGrid is one of the only “pure-play” Infrastructure providers who offers a state-of-the-art Fortinet Hardware Firewall solutions to further enhance the security of your infrastructure running on our services.

I think that we may have broken a record in having one of the most news-filled newsletters in GoGrid history. And, I don’t think we were able to put everything in there. One feature of particular note is that of RAM Scaling. Now, within GoGrid, you can scale your cloud servers up or down as you need. This month’s newsletter has information about this important feature and a whole lot more, so for those of you who are not currently receiving the GoGrid newsletter, the full content is below.

Below is a copy of the October 2010 Customer Update newsletter that went out to all GoGrid customers:

Hello,

All of us at GoGrid have been working on providing more and more value to you not only in our feature and system enhancements, but also with educational webinars and trainings. In this issue of the GoGrid newsletter, you’ll discover ways in which we can form a partnership to help you leverage more from your GoGrid cloud.

This edition includes:

New Features and System Enhancements

• RAM Scaling Now Live
• API Enhancements
• GoGrid Firewall Enhancement
• Performance Boost with Intel’s Westmere Chipset
• New Terms of Service

Partner News

• New Partner Images for the GoGrid Exchange
• Updated Partner Images

Webinars

• Live GoGrid Training Session
• Cloud Hosting 101
• Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud
• Capture Your Share of the Cloud Market: Learn How With GoGrid’s Channel Program
• BuycPanel (title pending)
• Deploying NOSQL in the Cloud
• Scale Your Applications in the Cloud Without Downtime or the Headache

Events and Other News

• FailCon
• SYS-CON Cloud Expo

New Features and System Enhancements

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RAM Scaling

The ability to scale your RAM up or down is now available! Our RAM scaling feature allows you to upgrade to the maximum amount of RAM available for your operating system on your Cloud servers. RAM scaling only applies to RAM, so your core and disk allocations remain untouched. Also, all your settings and configurations (except RAM of course) remain the same when you scale your RAM.

Changing the RAM of any cloud server is easy. Use the API to programmatically change your RAM allocation or simply log in to the portal my.gogrid.com and follow these four steps:

1. Select the cloud server you wish to scale up or down
2. Click the Upgrade button.
3. Choose your desired RAM allocation.
4. Click Submit.
Note: the minimum amount of RAM available for downgrade is equal to the amount allocated when you originally provisioned that particular cloud server.
Read more on our blog.

FREE Live Training! Sign-up for our live training session on October 26 at 11:00 a.m. PDT, where a GoGrid Technical Account Manager will walk you through our new features and provide some use cases and best practices.

Register now: go.gogrid.com/webinar/20101026

API Enhancements

You now have even more control over your cloud servers via the API. Check out the new enhancements:

• Edit Server Description via API – using a simple API call, you can now fully edit the description of your GoGrid Cloud Server. See the API documentation on how to do this.

• Change Cloud Server Classification via API – you can now change the server classification via the GoGrid API. Options are: Web/App Server or Database Server. This will affect where your Cloud Server appears in both the Grid and List views. See the API documentation on how to do this.

The GoGrid Customer Portal and API now also present the number of Cores and Disk Space allocated to your servers. Read more about RAM Scaling and API enhancements on our blog.

GoGrid Firewall Enhancement

We are now accepting pre-sale sign-ups for our enhanced Fortinet Hardware Firewall. This new configuration now supports your existing public IP addresses, our free F5 load balancers and will be available directly in GoGrid’s networking infrastructure. Confidently secure your GoGrid cloud or hybrid infrastructure behind Fortinet’s enterprise-grade hardware firewall. Contact your Account Manager to add this essential security component to your infrastructure.
The Fortinet hardware firewall is $200/month, which includes one type of VPN.

Performance Boost with Intel’s Westmere Chipset

To continue improving GoGrid performance, as well as build an internal foundation for growth while upgrading our infrastructure with cutting edge technology, we’ve changed a few things:

1. We’ve upgraded our hardware, including outfitting our host machines with Intel’s Westmere chipset and fast SAS drives. As a result, you should see even greater I/O performance and in some cases greater CPU performance, an improvement upon our existing hardware, which is already rated the best in the industry. It will take us 4-6 months to completely build out enough Westmere capacity to handle 100% of new server adds. As a result, it is possible for new servers to be provisioned on non-Westmere nodes.
2. In order to achieve this performance boost, there will be a change to the cloud server disk allotment. As of September 15, all cloud servers will receive 50 GB of local storage for every 1 GB of RAM, a reduction of 17% compared with the 60:1 ratio we offered on the older hardware. As always, please note that the amount of usable storage presented by your cloud server’s OS may be slightly less than 50 GB.

Terms of Service

Please note that section 10 (g) of our terms of service has changed. Essentially, we have made improvements to the way we communication terms of service with you. We will now be notifying you via the GoGrid website and a written notice.

Please see www.gogrid.com/legal/terms-service for more information.

Partner News

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The GoGrid Exchange continues to grow with new and exciting partners.  Check out the new and updated Partner GoGrid Server Images (PGSIs) available in the GoGrid catalog.

NEW to the GoGrid Exchange:

• Genero: a platform-independent application development and deployment environment, optimized for data-intensive business applications suitable for businesses of all sizes. Genero applications work well in enterprise environments, interoperate with other languages and platforms, scale well, and lend themselves to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

• Genero DB: a high-performance, fully transactional, ACID and SQL Compliant RDBMS optimized for modern computer architectures, designed for high throughput in high-content many-user, high-workload environments. Available both as part of the Genero GSI and on a stand-alone basis for use with other programming languages, Genero DB’s scalability makes it an ideal data management infrastructure product for cloud-based applications.

• Toad® for MySQL is a freeware development tool that improves the productivity of developers and administrators running MySQL on Windows.

• BitNami Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system featuring document management, Web Content Management, Collaboration Management, Records Management, and Image Management.

• BitNami Opina is a web management tool for poll management. The application is designed so any user is able to create questionnaires, publish them to obtain responses, and process results.

• BitNami EnanoCMS is a content management system that strives to have less bloat and more float than other solutions. It includes powerful administrative capabilities and a variety of plug-ins to add portals, forums, blogs, and other functionality.

• BitNami Moodle is a Course Management System that is designed using sound pedagogical principles to help educators create effective online learning communities. It can scale from one computer to a 50,000-student university and is used in 175 countries around the world.

• Aneka is an integrated middleware package that allows you to seamlessly build and manage an interconnected network in addition to accelerating development, deployment, and management of distributed applications using Microsoft .NET frameworks on these networks.

• ZPanel is a free-to-download Web hosting control panel written to work effortlessly with Microsoft(R) Windows(TM)-based servers or computers. This solution can turn a home or professional server into a fully fledged, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage web hosting server.

UPDATES to the GoGrid Exchange:

• OpenVPN™ Access Server enables secure and granular remote access to your private cloud network resources.

• BitNami Redmine Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of Redmine and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Customer Portal by selecting the BitNami Redmine image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami SugarCRM Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of SugarCRM and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Portal by selecting the BitNami SugarCRM image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami Joomla! Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of Joomla! and its required dependencies. It can be launched via the GoGrid Portal by selecting the BitNami Joomla! server image when deploying a new cloud server.

• BitNami Drupal WordPress 2.8 preinstalled and preconfigured out of the box.

• BitNami Drupal 6.15 preinstalled and preconfigured out of the box.

• BitNami MediaWiki Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of MediaWiki and its required dependencies. MediaWiki is a wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Webinars

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GoGrid Live Training Session

Would you like to have a little more hands-on training? Sign-up for our free live training session where a GoGrid Technical Account Manager will show you the advantages of our new features and provide some use cases and best practices.
Date: October 26
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101026

Upcoming Webinars

Cloud Hosting 101

Do you know anyone who would like to equip themselves with the information needed to take their company into the cloud? Suggest our Cloud Hosting 101 educational webinar. With this educational webinar, we’ll present the basics of cloud hosting, discuss how companies can benefit from the cloud, and what steps to take to get started.
Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101110

Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud: Manage Traffic Spikes and Uptime

Join GoGrid’s Sales Engineer for a presentation and discussion on the top use cases and best practices for load balancing in the cloud.
Date: Thursday, October 28, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101028

Capture Your Share of the Cloud Market: Learn How With GoGrid’s Channel Program

Interested in becoming a GoGrid Reseller? Learn more about the available opportunities with our channel program.
Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 or Thursday, November 18, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/reseller/upcoming

Joint GoGrid and Partner Webinars

Become a Hosting Provider with cPanel and GoGrid

Need to automate and offer competitive hosting services? cPanel is the industry standard for turning servers into a fully automated point-and-click hosting platform. By combining GoGrid and cPanel you get a one-stop shop for your hosting and platform administration needs allowing you to instantly license cPanel and deploy infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.
Date: Thursday, November 4, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101104

Deploy NOSQL in the Cloud

Building a Web 3.0 application? Planning to leverage socially connected data, location based data or web analytics? Looking for alternatives to SQL data bases? Join InfiniteGraph and GoGrid for an educational webinar where we’ll provide you with a powerful data management system to help you build better applications.
Date: Thursday, November 9, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101109

Scale Your Applications in the Cloud Without Downtime or the Headache

Are you ready to scale your applications and business but aren’t sure how to move forward? Join our Cloud experts from GoGrid and Cloudkick for an educational webinar where they’ll present best practices for scaling in the GoGrid cloud.

Date: Thursday, November 11, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. PDT – 12:00 p.m. PDT
Register: go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101111

Events and Other News

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FailCon 2010

GoGrid will be sponsoring FailCon on October 25. FailCon is the premier conference on start-up failures and how to prepare and recover from them. From their site: “You aren’t a real entrepreneur until you’ve had to deal with failure, and recovering from it – financially, emotionally and practically – can be challenging. Hear how major players in the industry have dealt with failure, recovered from it, and kept a positive, tenacious, and energetic attitude through it all.”

SYS-CON 7th International Cloud Expo

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley will feature 200+ technical breakout sessions and General Sessions across four days from the leading Cloud industry players in the world. All the main layers of the Cloud pyramid (see: http://pyramid.gogridcom) will be represented in the 7th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo – the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications. This event is a must-attend for senior technologists including CIOs, CTOs, directors of infrastructure, VPs of technology, IT directors and managers, network and storage managers, network engineers, enterprise architects, and communications and networking specialists.

GoGrid will be exhibiting at booth #510 as well as presenting a few sessions throughout the conference.

As always, you can find more information about GoGrid by visiting the following links:

• GoGrid Product Site – www.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Blog – blog.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Wiki – wiki.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Forums – forums.gogrid.com

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly at maria[at]gogrid.com.

Thank you,

Maria Gallegos

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming from GoGrid!

We are excited to announce the availability of the GoGrid iPhone application, a new way to quickly and easily control your GoGrid Cloud infrastructure on the go. Current GoGrid customers can now enjoy robust and complete control of their GoGrid environment using this new iOS application, designed to work on the iPhone and network-connected iPod Touches. The application can be downloaded from iTunes now.

The GoGrid iPhone application leverages GoGrid’s OpenSource API for full control of the essential GoGrid functionality and mirrors the capabilities currently available within GoGrid’s award-winning web portal. Management abilities include:

• View/Add/Delete/Restart GoGrid Cloud Servers
• View/Add/Edit/Delete F5 Load Balancers
• View Status of Objects and IP Addresses
• View Server User and Passwords
• View and Filter GoGrid Job History
• View Current Billing Information
• Multiple Datacenter Support
• Multiple Account Support
• Access additional information about GoGrid

First, some things to know about the GoGrid iPhone application:

• It is FREE to download
• You MUST have an active GoGrid account in order to use it
• It requires a network connection
• You MUST have an API key and secret configured within your GoGrid account (I recommend using a “Super User” role for this)
• You can configure multiple API keys (e.g., accounts) within the application
• It support API version 1.5 (we are working on an update to include the recently announced RAM scaling features and VM reclassification & description editing)
• It provides most all of the functionality available within the API (and you can even edit load balancers!)

So let’s dive into the application functionality.

Your Initial Setup

When you first launch the GoGrid application, you are asked to create an optional 4-digit pass code. This is recommended as it provides an additional layer of protection of your various GoGrid environments.

Once you create your pass code, you will be prompted to enter in a GoGrid account. In order to do this, you MUST have an API key and secret already set up within your GoGrid account. To do this, simply log into the GoGrid web portal (http://my.gogrid.com) and go to the API tab and create a new API key. After that, go back to the iPhone application and fill out the following screens to create your account.

Fill out the following fields:

• Account Name – this does not update anything on your GoGrid account and is merely a local name within the GoGrid iPhone application
• API key – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal
• API secret – get this from the GoGrid Web Portal

Once the API key and secret are validated (and note, you must have a network connection for this and other actions you do within the application), you will see it listed in the Accounts section. You can Edit as well as Add other accounts as needed now or in the future.

Select the Account you want to manage and click the Log In button. The “doors” will close and within a few seconds open again and you will have access to your GoGrid account.

Now on to the Management screens.

The Various Management Screens

There are a series of management screens available for you to control your GoGrid architecture. The screens are:

• My Cloud
  • Cloud Servers
  • Load Balancers
  • IP addresses
• Job History
• Account
• Settings & More

When you click on the “My Cloud” icon at the bottom bar, you can view your Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and IP Addresses. In the Cloud Servers screen, you can scroll through all of the GoGrid Cloud Servers you have currently deployed in our data centers:

If you flip the screen to the left, you see all of your Load Balancers:

Flipping one more time shows you all of the IP Addresses in your data centers that are either in use or available.

The Job History tab shows all of the events that has taken place within your GoGrid account. Items like creating or deleting objects or restarts will be displayed here.

The Account tab provides a snapshot of your current Billing Summary and your RAM and Bandwidth usage. You can also get the User Names and Passwords for your active servers further down this screen.

The Settings & More tab includes a variety of other non-cloud-management items.

So let’s dive into some of the functionality available within this application.

Cloud Servers

The GoGrid iPhone application provides you with the ability to:

• View all of your Cloud Servers including details of each server
• Create new Cloud Servers in various data centers
• Restart your server
• View Password information about your server
• Delete your server

The graphic below shows a listing of all active servers within your GoGrid account. You can scroll up and down to view the entire list.

Clicking on a specific server brings up all of the details of that server. Within this view, you can also Delete, Restart or view the User Names/Passwords associated with this server.

To create a new Cloud Server, simply click on the Add button at the top of the screen. Next, select the Data Center you want your new server to be located at:

Clicking the Next button will bring up a list of available Cloud Server images within that datacenter. Depending on the datacenter, you will see a list of available GoGrid base server images, Partner Server Images (PGSIs) or your own Personal Server Images (MyGSIs).

Note, you can also Filter the list of images by clicking on the Filter button.

Now, click on the Server Image that you desire. Details (including any associated additional cost) is presented:

Click Next to continue. The next screen contains the Server Details. Here you enter the Name of the server, a brief Description and then select the IP address and RAM allocation for your server.

Clicking on the IP address field bring up a selector of available IP addresses in your GoGrid Account for that data center:

Similarly, you select the amount of RAM you would like your server to have from the available options presented.

Once you have filled out the Server Details form, click Finish create your Cloud Server. The new server request will be then queued for deployment (and you can see the request under the Job History tab discussed later).

Load Balancers

Similar to the management of Cloud Servers, you can also manage the Load Balancers within your GoGrid environment. You have the ability to:

Flipping from the Cloud Server section of My Cloud to the Load Balancer section presents you with a listing of your active Load Balancers. Here, like with the Cloud Server section, you can scroll up or down to see all of your Load Balancers:

Clicking on a Load Balancer brings up the details of that specific Load Balancer.

Clicking on the Delete button at the bottom will delete the Load Balancer. Clicking on the IP List will show all of the IP addresses that are bound to that Load Balancer (e.g., the IP addresses of other servers in your GoGrid network):

To Create a new load balancer, be sure that you are NOT in the detail view of a Load Balancer. You need to be in the general listing of Load Balancers and you will see the Add button at the top. Click Add to start the process. First you select the data center where you want your Load Balancer to reside:

Then you fill out the Details of that load balancer including the Name, brief Description, Virtual IP address of the LB, the port that you want the traffic at, the Connection Type and then the Persistence.

Choose the Type of Load Balancing you want (Least Connect or Round Robin):

And then the Persistence (None, Source Address or SSL Sticky):

Click the Next button to enter in the Real IP addresses of the servers you want the traffic to go to. First click on the Real IPs box to bring up a list of IP addresses to choose from. These could be IP addresses that are either available (e.g., not tied to server) or in use (used by a server). Then click on the Port field and enter the port number for that IP address. Finally click the Add (+) button to add that IP address and Port to the Load Balancer.

You can add multiple IP addresses and ports to the load balancer. When you are completed, click the Finish button and your load balancer will be queued for creation.

In the Job History tab, you can see the Load Balancer’s creation status.

If you want to edit a load balancer, simply click on the load balancer you want to edit. When you see the details, you will see the Edit button at the top of the screen:

The process to Edit the load balancer is much like that of creating a new load balancer so please follow those steps.

IP Addresses

The IP Addresses section of the My Cloud lists out all of the IP addresses that are either In Use or Available for you to use within your GoGrid infrastructure. As with the Load Balancers and Cloud Servers section, you can scroll up and down through the listing.

Clicking on a specific IP Address provides you with additional details.

You can also Filter your IP addresses by Data Center and whether they are In Use or Available.

Job History

To the right of the My Cloud tab is the Job History tab. This contains a running history of all actions (and states – represented by the color dots – green, yellow and red) that have taken place on objects (e.g., Load Balancers, Cloud Servers, Cloud Storage, Account, etc.) within your GoGrid Cloud.

Clicking on a specific Job or Event will bring up details about that event:

And clicking on the Show Timeline will give you the details of that particular event.

You can also Filter events by Type, Date and Status.

Filtering will produce a subset of results.

Account

The Account tab gives you insight into the Usage on your account as well as provides the details of Users Names & Passwords that are also shown in your GoGrid portal. For example, you create a new server using the GoGrid iPhone Application, the User Name and Password for that server will appear within this section (as it is done automatically when servers are created).

Shown above is the Billing Summary which is the same as the billing widget that currently resides within the GoGrid web portal. In it you can see:

• Your Billing Cycle
• Amount of RAM currently allocated in your Plan (if you are on a Volume Discount plan)
• The amount of RAM currently in use
• The amount of GB hours used to date in your billing cycle
• Your Transfer allotment based on your Plan (if on a Volume Discount plan)
• The GBs of data transfer used to date in your billing cycle

Under the Password section, you can click through to passwords by server name. Viewing the details of the server shows the IP address, User Name and Password. These fields can be copied by simply clicking on them. This is useful if you need to send someone the server credentials via SMS or email.

Settings & More

This is sort of the catch-all section of the application with a lot of items that do not directly interface with your GoGrid account.

Here you can:

• Change the Password of your GoGrid iPhone application
• Add, Edit or Delete GoGrid accounts managed on your iPhone application
• Submit a questions or issue related to the GoGrid iPhone application
• Contact GoGrid Support on questions related to your GoGrid account (NOT the iPhone application)
• Read About GoGrid (but you already know a lot about us if you are using this application)
• View mobile versions of our Twitter and Facebook accounts
• View the mobile version of the GoGrid blog
• View our current Service Level Agreement (SLA) – note, the iPhone Application is NOT covered by our SLA currently
• View information about the application developer (flaka.soft)

So, What Do You Think?

A lot of hours were spent on the design and development of the GoGrid iPhone application. It was our desire to create a simple yet powerful solution for GoGrid users to control their infrastructure running on GoGrid. Being able to command your GoGrid infrastructure on the go from wherever you are gives IT professionals, sysadmins and developers an added level of convenience and security.

This was an important personal project of mine as well, so much so that at the beginning of the year, I flat out told our CEO that if we did not have an iPhone application by the end of 2010, I would quit! (I guess I will be sticking around for a while now!) Being able to provide management tools to GoGrid users (e.g., award-winning Web Portal, API and now iPhone application) makes their lives easier and being able to fully control their GoGrid cloud on the go, where ever they are, is truly compelling and paramount to a successful cloud service.

If you are a GoGrid user, be sure to download the GoGrid iPhone application from iTunes NOW! Let us know what you think and if you like it, be sure to give us some ratings and write a review in iTunes!

One of the most powerful aspects of Cloud Computing is the ability to scale your infrastructure. But did you know that there are two components to scalability, horizontal and vertical. GoGrid has been offering easy horizontal scaling since we launched.

So what is scaling and how are you able to do this with GoGrid. Let’s break it down with a quick, high-level definition and then show you how you can do it on GoGrid

What is Scaling?

Horizontal scaling simply means the ability to expand your infrastructure out, for example, adding additional servers to your infrastructure. You can currently do this using the GoGrid web portal or API or even using one of the solutions offered by our partners in the GoGrid Exchange. Similarly, if you use our MyGSI feature to create a Golden Master of your server, you can quickly scale out vertically with cloned instances of that MyGSI. Conversely, you can also scale your infrastructure back by removing servers from the mix.

Vertical scaling means that you can add additional resources to your individual infrastructure components, for example, adding addition RAM or cores to a server.

How To Scale Your RAM on GoGrid

So, how do you scale your infrastructure on GoGrid? As I mentioned, you’ve always been able to horizontally scale your infrastructure and now we are pleased to announce the availability that you can vertically scale using our new RAM Scaling feature. GoGrid customers can now scale the RAM up or down on GoGrid Cloud Servers within their existing and new infrastructure in the GoGrid cloud.

At GoGrid, it is our goal to live up to the phrase “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™“, so we have designed our RAM Scaling feature to be as easy to use as possible.

For starters, the RAM Scaling feature is backwards compatible, meaning that you will have the ability to scale your GoGrid Cloud Server RAM on your existing infrastructure. You can increase as well as decrease the amount of RAM allocated to a particular Cloud Server Instance. An important point to note prior to diving into the details is that there is a “minimum” threshold amount that is set to the original amount of RAM you selected when you first created your Cloud Server. However, you have the ability to scale the RAM up to a larger amount (if available) and then back down to that original level.

Below is an example of how the RAM scaling works. In this case, I started with a server that had 512 MBs of RAM (the original configuration). I then scaled it up to 4 GBs and then back down to 2 GBs of RAM. Note that throughout the process, I always have the ability to scale back to the original RAM allocation.

Once the Cloud Server is available, you can see its original configuration by holding your mouse over the server.

You can also see the server creation history in the Job History tab:

Let’s take a look at the process involved in upgrading the server to have 4 GBs of RAM. First, you click on the Cloud Server you would like to upgrade and you will not a new icon in the task menu:

Simply click on the “Upgrade” icon and you will be presented with your RAM scaling choices. As mentioned above, your minimum RAM options is the amount of RAM the server was originally spun up with. Your maximum  RAM option is the maximum available for your OS. In this case, my server has a 32-bit OS and was originally created with 512 MB of RAM:

Select the new amount of RAM you want allocated to that particular server and click “Submit”. Within 5 minutes or less, your server will have the new allocation in effect. In some cases, the RAM scaling process may take as long as 30 minutes. Below is the updated server:

If your server is powered up with you click “Submit”, it will be gracefully shut down and then restarted, so please be sure that you have already shut down any running processes on your server directly. If the server is powered down, it will remain shut down after upgrading. You can always view the status within the Job History tab:

Conversely, if you want to scale your Cloud Server’s RAM down, you would go through the same process of selecting the server, clicking the “Upgrade” icon and choosing a lesser value of RAM. You can scale it back down to the original creation allocation (in the example above, that would be 512 MB).

You can also perform RAM scaling within the List view by selecting the server you want and clicking the “Upgrade RAM” link at the top of the list:

Hopefully you can see what a powerful feature this is for your GoGrid cloud. It enables you, on demand, to instantly add RAM to your RAM-hungry environments. But it also gives you a way to “upgrade” your existing infrastructure.

Some things to note:

• The Scalability is ONLY for RAM. It does NOT affect your Hard Disk size nor your CPU/Core allotments
• You CANNOT scale below the original amount that your server was configured
• The functionality is FULLY SUPPORTED via the GoGrid API
• Be sure to power your server down or prepare your server for a graceful shutdown by stopping or ending any running applications or processes.

Other Changes in this Release

In addition to the important RAM scaling feature, we also released the following enhancements:

• Edit Server Description via API – using a simple API call, you can now fully edit the description of your GoGrid Cloud Server. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• Change Cloud Server Classification via API – you can now change the server classification via the GoGrid API. Options are: Web/App Server or Database Server. This will affect where your Cloud Server appears in both the Grid and List views. See the API documentation on how to do this.
• More Details about Cloud Servers – you can, in addition to RAM, IP address, and OS, now see the number of Cores and Disk Space of your servers. This is true on the Grid view and List views:
  
  
• Minor Redesign to the Tool Bar in the List view

We believe that with this release, GoGrid continues to show leadership within the Cloud Infrastructure Hosting space. If you have suggestions or other features that you would like to see implemented, please leave a comment to this post.

This month, we tried something a bit different with our Customer Newsletter for August 2010 in that we sent the newsletter from our Service Teams. In case you didn’t already know this, every GoGrid customer is assigned a service team to help our customers manage and grow their GoGrid account and answer any questions customers may have. The teams consist of an Account Manager, a Support Specialist, a Billing Specialist, a Data Center Technician and a Network Specialist.

Even though it is the summer here, we are hard at work growing the GoGrid product and feature offering as we strive to live up to our new Unique Value Proposition: “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™”.

Below is the full content of the August 2010 Customer Update newsletter that went out to all GoGrid customers:

Hello,

It’s August and we’ve hit our stride. The release of GoGrid version 3.0 was a major milestone and we’ve continued at a steady pace for feature parity in our new US-East-1 data center. In this edition of the newsletter, you’ll discover how our new features and system enhancements can make an immediate impact on your GoGrid Cloud.

Specific topics include:

• New Features and System Enhancements
• Unique Value Proposition
• Partner News
• CDN News
• Events and Other News

New Features and System Enhancements

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F5 Load Balancer Support US-East-1

In June, we opened our new US-East-1 data center in Ashburn, VA, which allows for immediate provisioning of virtual servers with GoGrid base images. We’re happy to announce that free F5 load balancing is now available for immediate deployment in the US-East-1 data center as well.

You can use the GoGrid portal or the API to provision virtual servers and F5 load balancers in real time  and in either of our locations: US-West-1 or US-East-1.

16 GB RAM Virtual Servers

In April we began the process of upgrading our node hardware with the latest Intel Nehalem chipset architecture allowing for 25-50% more CPU for virtual servers. We also gave Cloud Servers greater CPU allocations and now have included the ability to provision 16 GB RAM virtual servers in both GoGrid data centers.

As new node capacity continues to be built, we expect to soon have enough new Nehalem nodes to handle 100% of new virtual server adds.  Currently, most virtual servers will be added to new nodes, but depending on demand, some virtual servers may be deployed on non-Nehalem nodes and therefore will receive the older CPU allotments.

Below are some FAQs for this new feature:

Q: Are the new 16 GB virtual servers compatible with my existing MyGSIs and PGSIs?
A: Yes, all of your existing MyGSIs and PGSIs are compatible with the 16GB RAM virtual servers, and that option will automatically be made available with existing compatible MyGSIs and PGSIs. Note that only server images with a 64-bit OS will have the option to add a 16GB RAM server.

Q: Are there any restrictions with the types of operating systems I can use?
A: Yes, there are some restrictions with Windows operating systems due to Microsoft licensing constraints. Please see the chart below for specifics:

New Virtual Servers
RAM                Cores               Disk Storage
16 GB              16 (Linux)          960
8 (Windows)
Existing Virtual Servers
RAM              Cores               Disk Storage
16 GB            8                       960
If you have questions, please contact your dedicated GoGrid account team or GoGrid technical support.

Six New Images for GoGrid Dedicated Servers

We now support 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for our GoGrid Dedicated Servers. All of the existing images continue to be supported and are still available.
See below for new image details:

• Ubuntu 10.04 (32-bit) Dedicated Server
• Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit) Dedicated Server
• CentOS 5.5 (32-bit) Dedicated Server
• CentOS 5.5 (64-bit) Dedicated Server
• RHEL 5.5 (32-bit) Dedicated Server
• RHEL 5.5 (64-bit) Dedicated Server

Make an Impact on Your GoGrid Cloud

At GoGrid you have a dedicated service team with cross-functional expertise that is available to help you every step of the way. Our team of experts can translate your business and technical requirements into the best solution for you.

Interested in or have questions about:

• Getting started with Cloud Storage
• Deploying Cloud Servers and F5 load balancers in the US-East-1 data center
• Hardware and software firewall solutions
• Leveraging F5 load balancing
• Provisioning a Partner GSI (PGSI)
• Building a Hybrid solution

Contact us directly to discuss getting started with a GoGrid solution. We will be happy to coordinate a technical and strategy call, as well as a consultative GoToMeeting on how to use our system.

Unique Value Proposition

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Help Improve GoGrid and You Could Win an iPad

As part of our continued effort to provide a positive experience for our customers we are asking for your feedback. Below is a link to our quarterly customer survey. Simply fill out the survey and you’ll be entered to win an iPad. The survey is super quick (only a minute or two of your time) and will help us assess our ability to serve our customers and identify areas where we need to improve. This is your chance to provide input on the features that will help you. Here’s the link so that you can participate: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D7ZDKTY

Partner News

We continue to add exciting new partners to the GoGrid Exchange. In the past month we’ve added several new Partner GoGrid Server Images (PGSIs) to the GoGrid catalog. You can deploy an image directly from the GoGrid Portal.

NEW to the GoGrid Exchange:

• Trend Micro Deep Security – Trend Micro Deep Security 7 provides advanced protection for servers in the dynamic data center, whether physical, virtual, or in the cloud. Deep Security combines intrusion detection and prevention, firewall, integrity monitoring, and log inspection capabilities in a single, centrally-managed software agent.

• Automated Security Assessment Program (ASAP) – Cranium Solutions’ flagship product, ASAP™ (Automated Security Assessment Program), is the first fully automated end-to-end network security testing solution that runs as a loud-based service.  Businesses can perform simple and automated Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests of any systems they have deployed on the GoGrid Cloud.

• enStratus – enStratus is a cloud infrastructure management platform for enterprise-class applications in private and public clouds including GoGrid. enStratus delivers governance for the cloud through a patent-pending security architecture and a range of management capabilities including financial controls, role-based security, auto-scaling, and auto-recovery.

UPDATES to the GoGrid Exchange:

• BitNami WordPress 3.0 – WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. The project was started in 2003. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

• BitNami SugarCRM 5.5.2-0 – SugarCRM is a flexible customer relationship management solution for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM can be easily customized and integrated with other software to allow companies to build and maintain a more flexible system. The core functionality includes sales force automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project management, and calendaring.

• GigaSpaces XAP – GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of application platforms for Java and .Net environments that offer an alternative to traditional application-servers. The company’s eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) is a high-end application server designed to meet the most demanding business requirements in a cost-effective manner. It is the only product that provides a complete middleware solution on a single, scalable platform.

Webinar: Sentrigo and GoGrid

Title: Learn to Build a Stable, Scalable, and Secure Databases in the Cloud
Date and time: Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:00 am – 11:00am PDT
In this webinar, GoGrid and Sentrigo, a leader and innovator in database security, share our expertise on database deployments and real-time security in this latest frontier of information technology. Click here to register, or paste http://go.gogrid.com/e/3442/7YXX2/RXDE/7101902 into your browser.

CDN News

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18 Global PoPs

GoGrid is pleased to announce that our Parisian CDN PoP (Point of Presence) is now fully functional, bringing the total number of global GoGrid CDN PoPs to 18. Also new to the GoGrid CDN are upgrades to our Flash Live Streaming Platform and new HTTP Rules Engine.

There are no fees to have a CDN account provisioned. Learn more or have yours created today.

Flash Live Streaming Platform

If you’re looking to stream live Flash video, then our new offering Live StreamCast offers superior scalability and performance over our previous Live Streaming service.
Enhancements include:

• Automatic redundancy and failover
• A new live publishing point in Australia
• Simpler URL structure
• Improved scalability

We’ll continue to offer and support our existing Flash platforms: Flash On-Demand and Flash via HTTP progressive download.

HTTP Rules Engine

The HTTP Rules Engine gives you highly granular control over how, when, and if your content is served. The possibilities are endless, but the end result is much more control over the security, cost, and burden of your content delivery.
The HTTP Rules Engine allows you to:

• Easily block content leeching and hotlinking
• Slash bandwidth costs by specifying precise “origin pull” update intervals for each URL or object
• Reduce load on your origin servers by offloading your existing rules to our processing engine

The cost is $299.99/month and $299.99 for setup.
For more information, consult your Service Team Account Manager.

Events and Other News

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Net Promoter Survey

If you’ve filled out our Net Promoter Survey, Thank You! We recently sent you a short survey asking you if you would recommend GoGrid to a friend or colleague. Your feedback is very important to us and will be reviewed closely by our executive team. If you haven’t had a chance to fill out the survey, there’s still time.

GoGrid 3.0 Webinar

On June 28, we hosted a webinar featuring the release of GoGrid version 3.0 and our new East Coast data center. If you were unable to attend or would like to review the recording, visit our blog.

As always, you can find more information about GoGrid by visiting the following links:

• GoGrid Product Site – www.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Blog – blog.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Wiki – wiki.gogrid.com
• GoGrid Forums – forums.gogrid.com

If you have any questions please feel free to contact your service team directly.

Thank you,

[Service Team Account Executive]

Your Service Team

Don’t forget to follow GoGrid on Twitter (@GoGrid) as well as become a fan (or like us) on Facebook. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact your Service Team.