It’s always difficult to be self-congratulatory, but when two distinct organizations post articles putting GoGrid in the limelight, I feel that they have to be mentioned. The two sites, CRN and OnDemand, both posted articles that we, as a company, are proud of. If you are a current customer of GoGrid, you should be proud as well, as it is a recognition of your selection process in making GoGrid your cloud partner.

The first to appear was on CRN, a website providing news, analysis and perspectives for VARs and technology integrators. In his article, author Andrew Hickey, lists out “The 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors” of which GoGrid is one of the 20.

As Hickey describes:

If you want to be in the cloud business, these are some of the cloud infrastructure companies that will help you get there. These are the providers that will host your customers’ business applications and provision them on-demand as Software-as-a-Service. They will store customers’ data in the cloud and secure it there as well. Whether customers want to use a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid mixture of both, these companies can help make it happen. And they can even help your customers exchange their expensive legacy hardware for a simple monthly payment plan.

(The others mentioned are, alphabetically: Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Bluelock, Cisco, Dell, Eucalyptus Systems, Gale Technologies, GoGrid, HP, Nebula, NephoScale, OpenStack, Opscode, OpSource, Rackspace, Savvis, SoftLayer, SunGard Availability Services, Terremark, and Verizon. Congrats to the other companies in the list!)

The second article of recognition comes from AlwaysOn (“Networking the Global Silicon Valley”) OnDemand. OnDemand is an event “where top Internet companies disrupt the enterprise and square off with the incumbent players pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.” This month, they posted their “2012 OnDemand 100 Top Private Companies“.

The editors describe this list as such:

This year’s 100 top, private on-demand and SaaS companies-plus 20 to watch-are creating a complex world of interconnected business intelligence, merging valuable legacy data and systems with new, vital streams of information. AlwaysOn is proud introduce the third annual OnDemand 100-the top emerging Internet companies disrupting the established enterprise, reinventing legacy data streams, and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.

This year’s OnDemand 100 companies are true leaders, developing game-changing approaches and technologies that are pushing outside the bounds of existing markets and away from entrenched institutions. Companies were selected based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

(Companies in the “Cloud-Infrastructure” space include: Actifio, AlienVault, Box.net, Centrify, CloudShare, Coraid, Delphix, Dropbox, Evolve IP, GoGrid, IntelePeer, LiveOps, Mu Dynamics, Opscode, Plantir Technologies, RainStor, RingCentral, Skytap, Sonian, Spiceworks, Syncplicity, Veracode and WhiteHat Security. Great job to all those companies!)

Again, thanks for being a GoGrid customer and making us even stronger and better as a company. We look forward to providing you with industry-leading technologies and services! For those who are not yet GoGrid customers, please be sure to contact us to find out why we are a recognized leader in the cloud industry.

I recently celebrated my 5-year anniversary with GoGrid! That’s me holding the service award we hand out to employees who celebrate 3 and 5-year anniversaries. It was 5 years ago that I implemented the idea of handing out these gems, gems that GoGrid employees proudly display at their desks.

I remember my first interview with, then, ServePath, and interviewing in a very small office down the street from our current corporate office. The office was so small my interview was conducted in the break area/lobby surrounded by cubes. 5 years later GoGrid’s corporate office occupies the second floor in the Hills Plaza complex that overlooks the Bay Bridge. Talk about an upgrade!

Image source: www.noehill.com

My first tour of our San Francisco Data Center was amazing. Back then the data center shared the floor with cubes and offices, housing our small engineering and support teams. Now the data center is so big, with only servers and more servers lining pretty much every inch of our space, that I get lost on the occasional tours I give to my vendors and employees.

Although I have witnessed many changes over the last 5 years what hasn’t changed are the people that work for GoGrid. We are still that group of people I saw on the Craigslist posting for my job 5 years ago but better. We still work hard and like to have fun. This is what makes GoGrid a great place to work and why there are quite a few of us who have been here for a very long time.

So now that I have been inducted to the unofficial (still working on internal marketing) “Old School” club I join the ranks of 14% of the company who have been here for 5 years or more and another 12% that will hit their 5 years sometime this year! This means as an Old School member I get one week to Take a Break this year- that’s GoGrid’s way of saying thanks for your continued years of service and that’s in addition to the 25 other days I get for PTO. Thoughts on where I should vacation would be appreciated!

I’m looking forward to more years to come with GoGrid!

In January, we announced the opening of GoGrid’s new EMEA Headquarters and deployment of our cloud infrastructure in Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. To mark this collaboration, we’re pleased to announce an upcoming event jointly hosted with our friends at Equinix. The “Heads in the Cloud” happy hour will take place Thursday, 15 March, 2012, from 16:30–19:00 at De Goudfazant, Amsterdam (Noord). If you’re in the area, we’d be delighted to have you join us for the celebration.

The highlight of the evening will definitely be the comedy of Greg Shapiro, our guest speaker. If you haven’t heard Shapiro perform, check out his website and learn how this Chicago native ended up in Amsterdam and why his humor helps make everyday business bearable. We expect it to be a terrific event, so make sure to block the date out in your calendar.

After Shapiro’s performance, relax over drinks and chat with your peers—partners, suppliers, and customers—as well as the GoGrid and Equinix teams. We’ll be happy to answer your questions about our plans for the region moving forward. And for those who’ve never visited De Goudfazant before, ”Heads in the Cloud” provides the perfect complement to the stylish waterfront location and unique atmosphere.

If you’re interested in attending, we encourage you to register ahead of time via email to Geesje.Duis-Bakker[AT]eu.equinix.com. We look forward to seeing you on the 15^th!

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.

Every day I talk with customers about the benefits of cloud computing—everything from faster provisioning of resources, to reduced management overhead, to flexible workload management. The benefits are becoming well-known; however, when it comes to managing an IT budget, these benefits can also present a challenge. Unlike virtual compute, network, and storage resources, budgets aren’t elastic. Your company’s CFO doesn’t want to see that your nimble IT organization is spending $100 today and $1,000 tomorrow. He doesn’t care that you’ve matched IT resources to your customer’s demand curve. No my friend, what your CFO wants is predictability. Fortunately for you, that’s a challenge we’ve solved with our improved plan pricing for cloud servers.

To demonstrate how this new plan works, let’s build a simple model where your usage changes from one month to the next. In month 1, you need three servers for 400 hours, one server for 80 hours, and two servers for the entire month. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume all servers are 1 GB and 1 core. Using Pay-As-You-Go pricing, this configuration of servers on GoGrid would cost you $0.12 for each hour an individual server is running. The math for the first month’s configuration looks like this:

3 X 1 GB server x 400 hours = 1,200 hours used
1 x 1 GB server x 80 hours = 80 hours used
2 x 1 GB server x 730 hours = 1,460 hours used

The total hours used for all servers = 2,740 hours at a rate of $.12 per hour.

Total Pay-As-You-Go cost for month 1 = $328.80.

Now imagine that in month 2, you only need three 1 GB servers for the entire month. The math for that configuration looks like this:

3 x 1 GB server x 730 hours = 2,190 hours used

Total Pay-As-You-Go costs for month 2 = $262.80.

In a perfect elastic cloud computing world, it’s rare for any two month’s costs to match up exactly. You’re probably fine with this flexibility, but I can assure you that your CFO hates it. So the challenge becomes how to make the costs predictable. The answer is simple, and it’s something we’re are all used to: a payment plan that works like a mobile phone plan that includes an estimate of the number of hours you’re going to use and features a substantial savings in return for your commitment over what you’d pay on a pure minute-by-minute basis. Even with the ups and downs inherent in compute usage, most organizations have a general idea how much compute they need in a given month—even if they don’t know the exact number and configuration of servers they’ll have deployed.

In month 1 in the above scenario, the company knows it needs about 2,740 hours of capacity. In month 2, it needs about 2,190 hours of capacity. Assuming that month over month its capacity floats between 2,000 and 2,800 hours of capacity, the company would simply look at our cloud server pricing plans and determine the best fit:

Based on the table above, the Professional Cloud Plan seems like the best fit for this company. For $199 per month, the company can consume up to 2,900 RAM Hours. So for each 1 GB server deployed for 1 hour, the company consumes 1 RAM Hour.

In the above scenario using Pay-As-You-Go rates, you were paying:

$328.80 – month 1 costs

$262.80 – month 2 costs

And simply by selecting the right pricing plan, you’re now paying:

$199 – month 1 costs

$199 – month 2 costs

So, by moving from Pay-As-You-Go pricing to the Professional Cloud Plan, you’re saving $193.60 ($591.60 – $398.00) over the 2 months in the example above. Plus, you have “spare RAM Hours” to use: month 1 = 160 hours and month 2 = 710 hours.

By choosing the right plan, you get all the flexibility and predictability you need. Month 1 and 2 resource configurations are the same; you can match IT resources to the needs of your org, only now you have a stable, predictable bill and a significant cost savings. Which means you can create a budget at $199 per month—and your CFO will no longer hate you.

Want to test out other scenarios? We have just the tool for you. Visit our **updated** cloud hosting pricing calculator (used in the screenshots above)to estimate your costs and find a plan that will keep you and your CFO happy!