New Recorded Webinar – Ubuntu in the GoGrid Cloud

April 25th, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

We recently hosted a joint webinar with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, and discussed Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud. I had the privilege of hosting this webinar with Nick Barcet, Canonical Cloud Solution Lead, and Zane Williamson, GoGrid Key Accounts System Administrator.

This webinar focuses on the relationship between Ubuntu and cloud infrastructure, how open-source software is fueling innovation and some examples of an Ubuntu environment on GoGrid.

If you weren’t able to make the live webinar, don’t worry because we recorded and it’s available on demand!

Read the rest of this entry » «New Recorded Webinar – Ubuntu in the GoGrid Cloud»

Tags: Canonical, cloud, cloud hosting, Cloud infrastructure, GoGrid, How To, Recording, Ubuntu, Webinar
Posted in Cloud Computing, General, GoGrid, How To, Images, Industry, Partners, Video, Webinar | 2789No Comments »2011-04-25+17%3A00%3A39Michael+Sheehan

Updates Now Live to “Payments and Invoices” Section within GoGrid Portal

April 19th, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan - 2,587 views

Yesterday we pushed out some enhancements to the Billing section of the GoGrid customer portal. As we mentioned previously, recently we have been focusing on the “billing experience”. In March, we provided three important updates to Billing which included: Monthly Invoices, Account Plan Changes and Usage reporting. Yesterday, we rolled out some enhancements and updates to the Billing section, specifically, the “Payments and Invoices” area.

To access this updated functionality, simply navigate to: My Account > Billing. Once there, you can click on the “Payments and Invoices” section within the Billing Menu:

From there, you will see the latest 10 Payments and 10 Invoices. (Note that the pictures used in this post are from an Employee account on GoGrid and may not reflect all possible scenarios that a GoGrid customer might see.)

The Items are sorted by Date.

Read the rest of this entry » «Updates Now Live to “Payments and Invoices” Section within GoGrid Portal»

Tags: Accounting, billing, Features, GoGrid, Invoice, Invoicing, Metrics, Payment, Update, Usage
Posted in Features, General, GoGrid | 2781No Comments »2011-04-19+18%3A13%3A48Michael+Sheehan

GoGrid Cloud Survey Report – What is Cloud Computing and Do You Use It?

April 18th, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan - 4,175 views

In January and February of 2011, GoGrid polled over 500 IT professionals, CTOs and developers and asked for their thoughts on cloud computing, how they currently use the cloud and where they think the industry is headed. The results of this survey shed new light on how the cloud stands in 2011 and what we can expect as we move towards 2012.

We have taken the key findings of the survey and created several interesting charts and graphics. Because of the extensive nature of the survey, we will be releasing the findings in topical blog posts over the coming months, but you can download the full survey results data at any time by clicking here.

With much speculation and debate about what cloud computing is, the first questions we asked the industry is what they believe cloud computing encompassed – Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (SaaS).

Question: When you think of “cloud”, what does it mean to you? What does the “cloud” encompass?

As seen in the responses to this question the majority of IT professionals are in agreement that all 3 services make up cloud computing, but emphasized Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. More importantly, we wanted to know what percentage of the IT industry actually uses cloud technology for their business. Most people are familiar with SaaS (e.g., Gmail and SalesForce). But interestingly, IaaS seems to be almost on par with SaaS according to respondents. Read the rest of this entry » «GoGrid Cloud Survey Report – What is Cloud Computing and Do You Use It?»

Tags: cloud, Cloud Application, Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure, Cloud Platform, IaaS, PaaS, Results, SaaS, survey
Posted in Cloud Computing, General, GoGrid, Hosting, Industry, Public Cloud | 2760No Comments »2011-04-18+16%3A00%3A17Michael+Sheehan

Learn How a GoGrid Customer Created a Multiple Data Center Routing & Failover Infrastructure Environment

March 22nd, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan - 5,498 views

We absolutely LOVE hearing how GoGrid customers are using our cloud solutions to create unique “cloud fingerprints” and environments using the features and data centers of GoGrid. Paul Trippett just published a very interesting write-up of an infrastructure environment that addresses many of the common concerns facing any company looking to provide a highly-redundant infrastructure while also ensuring a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) for their customers.

You can find Paul’s original write-up titled “Utilizing GoGrid’s Multiple Data Centers for Routing and Failover” on his site. With his permission, we have reposted the article so that others can learn, mimic and build upon his unique scenario.

At the beginning of the year one of our customers asked us if we can provide an SLA for StormRETS and with it, the sound gritting teeth suddenly echoed around the room. As you can imagine, this caused more questions than which we actually had answers for:

What kind of SLA did we want to provide and what could we realistically provide?

Our hosting provider, at the time, had an SLA which entailed “We don’t give any guarantee that your servers will be available, but if for any reason they are unavailable we will get the back up and running as soon as we can.”, erm, how on earth can we build a SLA based on that. It was decided at this time we would migrate our servers to another hosting provider, one at least with a SLA we can build on and a company we can actually contact directly should a problem arise.

Read the rest of this entry » «Learn How a GoGrid Customer Created a Multiple Data Center Routing & Failover Infrastructure Environment»

Tags: CouchDB, Customer, Customer Showcase, Disaster Recovery, DNS, f5, failover, geo-aware, Load Balancer, MySQL, OpenVPN, redundancy, routing, Showcase, SLA
Posted in Cloud Computing, Customer, Datacenter, General, GoGrid, Hosting, How To, Load Balancer | 2748No Comments »2011-03-22+16%3A28%3A53Michael+Sheehan

MyGSI Update and Tutorials – Save Server Images in One Step!

March 14th, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan - 2,794 views

Last week we announced several updates to GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure services. One of the highlights of this update was the enhancement we made to the saving your GoGrid Server Images (MyGSI) process.

Up till now, saving your MyGSI has been a fairly simple 3-step process that was helpful for horizontal scaling, re-imaging of servers, disaster recovery, or setting up failover environments. Through the update, this process can now be completed in a single step.

We’ve created several helpful tutorials to help educate users on the new process. Please reference our video and text tutorials below or take a look at the MyGSI User Manual on the GoGrid wiki for more information regarding the new process.