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:

• A more efficient cache
• Cache depth amplification
• An easy to use web GUI & REST interface
• Commercial support
• …and more

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…)

In an effort to be as proactive as possible, GoGrid has officially notified select customers of the removal (End of Life – EoL) of two specific GoGrid images. The users that were notified are ones that are actively using the images. On 2/9/10, GoGrid will be removing the following images from the GoGrid image repository:

• CentOS – CentOS 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux – RHEL 5.1 (64-bit) w/ Apache 2.2

I’m sure that some of you will have questions about this. In anticipation of this, I have compiled some quick Q&A’s:

Question: What does the removal of these images mean?

Answer: Simply that after the removal date, they will no longer appear within the GoGrid Image Selection widget.

Question: I have server(s) deployed that use these images? Will they continue to function?

Answer: Yes, there is no change to how your server(s) will function if they are using one of these EoL-ed images. Just be sure that you keep everything current within those servers.

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Last week, we quietly released some new larger GoGrid Cloud server instances. Today we are making that announcement a bit louder. What does this mean to you? Well, your GoGrid cloudcenter just got a bit broader and more powerful. For a year now, we have been offering 0.5, 1 and 2 Gigabyte RAM options in both Windows and Linux, now we have 4 and 8 GB RAM instances available. These larger instances, available on all 64-bit operating systems, allow for new types of higher-end environments to be spun up using all of the characteristics of Cloud Computing.

The lower size RAM instances (0.5, 1 & 2 GB) are perfect for a web front-end, where either Apache or IIS are running. For extremely high-performance and high I/O instances, we have been offering Cloud Connect as a way to create a dedicated hybrid infrastructure where Cloud Web Servers running on GoGrid can be linked via private dedicated network connections to dedicated and managed servers within the ServePath network.

With the new 4 and 8 GB RAM options, you can now set up a infrastructure with a robust set of high-performance application servers within the Cloud. These types of high RAM instances are perfect for users who want to take advantage of the increased RAM, CPU cores and persistent storage, especially when used in conjunction with specific applications (e.g., Microsoft SQL server or other Enterprise applications) that require more larger amounts of resources like RAM or CPU.

The 4 GB RAM server images can be deployed via the GoGrid web portal and API. The 8 GB RAM server images currently may only be deployed via the GoGrid API. I recommend reading the API section of the GoGrid wiki in order to fully understand how to deploy 8 GB RAM instances.

The 4 and 8 GB RAM images, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, CentOS 5.1, and Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 64-bit operating systems bring a new level of performance to the GoGrid line. 4 GB Cloud Servers have 3 CPU Cores and 8 GB have 6 CPU Cores, ensuring dedicated CPU allocations and high performance.

All GoGrid Cloud Servers come with persistent storage. The new larger RAM allocations announced today, are delivered with increased persistent storage: 4 GB Cloud Servers have 240 GB of hard drive space and 8 GB have 480 GB of storage allocated at boot time. Additional storage can be added using GoGrid’s dynamically scalable Cloud Storage offering which includes a 10 GB free allotment to start with. Each 1 GB thereafter costs $0.15/GB/month.

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2008 was an action-packed year for us here at GoGrid and ServePath and we have many accomplishments to be proud of. I thought it would make sense to reflect back on what major things we did over the year as well as a few other notables that happened within the industry. The easiest way for me to do this is through a blog post Chronology (not every post is highlighted):

1st Quarter 2008

• 01.03.08 – GoGrid Blog was launched
• 01.29.08 – “Sneak Peak” at GoGrid
• 02.01.08 – Twitter and Joyent go different ways
• 02.05.08 – Understanding “Clouded” Computer Terms – a post that made a 1st attempt to explain Cloud, Utility, Grid and other Computing terms.
• 02.13.08 – Dilbert does a series on Virtualization (here, here and here)
• 02.15.08 – Amazon’s S3 has major outage (my comments)
• 02.21.08 – GoGrid launches a new public website in anticipation of the product launch
• 03.11.08 – GoGrid Public Beta LAUNCH! After over 2 years of development, GoGrid hits the streets with many Cloud Computing firsts:
  • 1st Cloud Infrastructure provider with a Web GUI
  • 1st to offer Windows Server 2003 in the Cloud
  • 1st to offer Microsoft SQL Server in the Cloud
  • 1st with free Inbound Transfer
  • 1st with free f5 Load Balancing
  • 1st with free 24×7 Support
  • 1st with Persistent Storage
  • 1st with free managed DNS
  • 1st with 100% Uptime SLA
  • 1st with public and private VLANs
• 03.17.08 – Drilling down on the details of new GoGrid accounts
• 03.18.08 – Even I wasn’t initially on board with the whole “Cloud Computing” term. My thoughts have changed obviously.
• 03.28.08 – The initial GoGrid FAQ’s start rolling out.

2nd Quarter 2008 (more…)

A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a very excited GoGrid user. So much so, that he was working on getting all of his production websites migrated over to GoGrid, but only after he fully installed cPanel. Using cPanel, he said, would enable him to seamlessly migrate all of his clients’ sites. He kept running into little tweaks that he needed to do here and there, but kept working on it, happy that he could so easily build up and rip down server instances with GoGrid. Eventually, he got it to work. His ultimate suggestion? Get an Operating System image with cPanel installed, or at a minimum, have a bare-bones install of CentOS so that cPanel could be installed easily.

As we continue to build out the GoGrid Operating System images (shortly to roll out some new ones), I thought that it would make sense to ask what Open Source software you might want to see in upcoming template releases.

My list of Open Source apps that I would want on Windows and/or Linux is growing and includes:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Bugzilla
• Trac
• Moodle
• Subversion (maybe with Trac)
• SugarCRM
• MediaWiki
• Webmin
• cPanel
• Alfresco
• Twiki
• Community Server

What about actual Operating Systems like Ubuntu or Debian?

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Our second round of new GoGrid templates have been released today, bringing some great new functionality: Ruby-on-Rails and Facebook! As mentioned previously, we are rapidly compiling and releasing new server OS templates with pre-configured useful application sets.

Today we released the following 3 new templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.4 (32-bit) – Facebook-ready
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) – Facebook-ready
• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with Ruby on Rails

We have some other templates queued up for release early next week: (more…)

As part of our regular updates to GoGrid code and functionality, we have released several new Web/Application and Database Sever Templates to GoGrid. This is part of a two set release with the next round coming tomorrow. (More information on the second set of templates in a subsequent blog post.)

One of the great features of GoGrid is the ability to instantly create new servers based on precompiled and tested templates. Our goal is to provide a significant number of templates to match many different development needs and do so in a timely manner.

Yesterday, we released the following templates:

Web/Application Servers:

• CentOS 4.5 (32-bit) with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32-bit) with LAMP stack
• Windows 2003 Server (32-bit) with IIS, ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express

Database Servers: (more…)

Does the picture below look blurry to you?

It shouldn’t any more. You now have the ability to kick the tires, pop the hood and take GoGrid for a test ride. Just head on over to your local GoGrid dealership (that would be us) and sign up for a Trial Account.

I have been writing about GoGrid for a few months now, both on this blog and on others. After almost two years of development, we are launching GoGrid to the general public. While you probably shouldn’t, at this point, host your mission critical servers on GoGrid yet (e.g., NORAD should probably hold off on hosting any Launch Command servers for a while), you SHOULD feel free to set up test environments, Quality Assurance servers, rollover backup servers, and demo servers on GoGrid. That is the nature of beta software, good enough for prime time, great enough to understand how the technology can help your business thrive and grow, helping you plan for the future.

There are several plans that you can choose from when signing up:

• Pay As You Go – Pay only for what you use
• Business Grid – Good for businesses looking to offload a few servers for a good cost-savings
• Advanced Grid – Better for larger computational networks and Internet development platforms
• Enterprise Grid – Best for enterprises hoping to quickly scale or set up failover environments

There are also several server images you can choose from at the launch (with many more being added soon):

• Web/Application Servers (more…)