With so many different types of cloud infrastructure available – public, private, internal – and with so many conflicting opinions in the industry, finding the right cloud for your business can be a confusing and frustrating process.

In order to bring clarity and understanding, we recorded a new educational webinar, hosted by GoGrid, where guest speaker James Staten, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., and Mario Olivarez, VP of Product Management of GoGrid share new research and discuss the status and direction of the Cloud infrastructure landscape.

These cloud experts discuss:

• The 4 characteristics of cloud computing
• Why are companies using the Cloud?
• What is the difference between Public and Private Cloud?
• Why is 2011 the Year of the Hosted Private Cloud?
• What is the ROI of the Cloud?

The recorded webinar also includes all the answers to the questions submitted by the live audience.

So if you are interested in learning more about the cloud industry or want to have a greater understanding of how cloud computing technology can help your business The Future of the Cloud will be well worth viewing. Starting today, this webinar is now available as a free download (.wmv and .mov versions available).

Please download the webinar by clicking the download link and leave your thoughts in comment section on this blog post.

Download “The Future of the Cloud – Why 2011 is the Year of Hosted Private Cloud”

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!

This is a really educational webinar that covers a lot of content. Ubuntu in the GoGrid cloud discusses the following topics:

• An overview of the cloud landscape
• A Ubuntu retrospective
• Ubuntu server adoption statistics
• Benefits of Ubuntu in the GoGrid Cloud
• Use cases – applications best suited for Ubuntu
• Q&A

Whether you’re a Linux expert or just getting started with open-source software, we’re sure you’ll enjoy this recorded webinar.

Click here to view the webinar.

This past weekend, cloud benchmarking site CloudHarmony released a case study of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for public cloud services titled “Do SLAs Really Matter? A 1 Year Case Study of 38 Cloud Services” and GoGrid was notably featured at the top of SLAs provided in the marketplace.

The CloudHarmony Study

The study includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors who provide services like cloud servers, cloud storage and CDNs as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors as well. For their study, they used Panopta (a monitoring, outage confirmation and availability service) as well as a manual process to confirm and document any outages that were greater than 5 minutes. The full result of CloudHarmony’s comprehensive documentation and audit of SLAs is included in their post.

From the survey, CloudHarmony writes:

“GoGrid: provides a 100x credit policy combined with 100% SLA for any hardware and network outages and no minimum thresholds (e.g. 1 hour outage = 100 hour credit). This is by far the most generous of the 38 IaaS vendors we evaluated. GoGrid’s service is also one of the most reliable IaaS services we currently monitor (100% US West and 99.999% US East)”

CloudHarmony discovered three general themes as a result of their study, specifically (from their site):

• Pro-rated Credit (Pro-rated): Credit is based on a simple pro-ration on the amount of downtime that exceeded the SLA guarantee. Credit is issued based on that calculated exceedance and a credit multiple ranging from 1X (Linode) to 100X (GoGrid) (e.g. with GoGrid a 1 hour outage gets a 100 hour service credit). Credit is capped at 100% of service fees (i.e. you can’t get more in credit than you paid for the service). Generally SLA credits are just that, service credit and not redeemable for a refund
• Threshold Credit (Threshold): Threshold-based SLAs may provide a high guaranteed availability, but credits are not valid until the outage exceeds a given threshold time (i.e. the vendor has a certain amount of time to fix the problem before you are entitled to a service credit). For example, SoftLayer provides a network 100% SLA, but only issues SLA credit for continuous network outages exceeding 30 minutes
• Percentage Credit (Percentage): This SLA credit policy discounts your next invoice X% based on the amount of downtime and the stated SLA. For example, EC2 provides a 10% monthly invoice credit when annual uptime falls below 99.5%

About GoGrid’s SLA

When we launched our Public Cloud service, we wanted our customers to be assured that they would have the most robust SLA in the cloud computing industry, not just limited to hosting. We stand by our SLA and work with our customers closely to ensure that they both understand it and can utilize it as appropriate.

We are proud that an independent and trusted benchmarking firm also recognizes not only the importance of having a vendor with a solid SLA but also a provider with “one of the most reliable IaaS services we currently monitor (100% US Web and 99.999% US East [uptime])”.

Do SLAs matter? We believe that they do! When you look to choose a cloud provider, be sure that their SLA and Uptime reflect what your business and your customers demand and don’t settle for anything less!

As 2010 draws to a close, I thought that I would take a look back at some predictions about Cloud Computing that I made at the beginning of the year, but with a bit of an added spin. This reflection could be pretty lengthy so I will focus mainly on how GoGrid matched up to the predictions. While that can be perceived as a bit one sided, I believe that it is important for the Cloud Computing community to contemplate on what they did for the Cloud from a “personal” perspective and how they are driving this evolutionary movement forward.

Here were my predictions from January 2010:

1. Cloud Outages – There will be several Cloud Outages that get high visibility this year. As complexity and associated infrastructure grows and more users turn toward the cloud, any hiccups therein will receive quick and broad media coverage, with naysayers quickly stating “I told you so”. Unfortunately, any type of outage may be perceived as a “cloud failure”, resulting in the masses becoming increasingly doubtful in the reliability of the cloud. This “F.U.D. Factor” will be a steep hurdle that cloud providers and partners will have to overcome. Those companies with sound IT strategies and best practices in place will be able to weather any outages well, assuming they employ Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions and have them implemented.
   
   End of Year Update: Yes, there were outages in the cloud but the term “cloud” expanded to include a variety of items that were indirectly related to the Cloud Pyramid. No hosting service or data center is fully immune to outages or disruptions. Several SaaS providers had disruptions of service that were pretty high profile (most recently Tumblr, a micro-blogging platform, affected countless customers across the globe). ReadWriteWeb has a good listing of significant disruptions that occurred including Wikipedia, WordPress, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and yes, even WikiLeaks.
   GoGrid Update: I’m happy to say (knock on wood), that GoGrid has maintained a 99.99% uptime throughout the year which means that customers who have implemented their infrastructure solutions within our cloud offerings have made an important choice. With our rollouts of new service offerings as well as an East Coast data center, our customers now have a choice on the type of infrastructure to provision and where they want it to reside.
2. The Rise of Hybrid Hosting Solutions – While relatively new in 2009, more providers will consider implementing the ability to have the “best of all worlds” hosting solutions. Whether this be the combination of physical and cloud environments or, cloud bursting, or private and public clouds working congruently, there will definitely be a blurring of lines between what hosting is.
   
   End of Year Update: There was definitely some significant movement in this arena, with a couple providers announcing “Cloud Connect” or “Hybrid Connect” features that cross-connect physical and virtual environments. This is an important item for corporations looking to have flexible network topologies.
   GoGrid Update: We first launched Cloud Connect back in November of 2008 as we understood this need by businesses to have hybrid environments. Coincidentally, it was released using the “Cloud Connect” name which other providers seem to have attempted to capitalize on. However, back in February 2010, we released our GoGrid Dedicated Servers offering that effectively integrates physical and virtual infrastructure within the GoGrid Cloud. More recently (December 2010), we announced that GoGrid Dedicated Servers and our Hybrid Hosting environment was available within our East Coast data center as well, thus providing these hybrid solutions in multiple locations. The important take-away here is that 2 years ago we realized that this would be an important service that enterprises, businesses and corporations would desire, so our products and engineering teams ensured that the physical and virtual components that comprise our offering were tightly integrated and easy to use, all within the same web portal and private network.
3. Security Concerns, Vulnerabilities and Malware – this is an only logical prediction. As the number of cloud or virtualized environments increase due to their ease of use and lower cost, the possibility of environments being created and left unattended also increases. Also because of the ease of use, with “average” users deploying environments that are not hardened or at least audited from a security standpoint, there are more possibilities for hackers or users to unintentionally open their systems up to malware, botnets or other malicious code.
   
   End of Year Update: With the exception of DDoS attacks which any hosting provider is susceptible to (and which are typically targeted at a specific site, not a provider), and with the obvious exception of the WikiLeaks attacks, cloud “hacks” or vulnerabilities seemed to remain fairly low. There is still obviously the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but since cloud computing has really seemed to have hit mainstream IT, companies are doing their due diligence when selecting a cloud hosting provider, obviously looking toward robustness and security as core requirements for IT implementations.
   GoGrid Update: We have strengthened our DDoS mitigation services, engaged with new technology partners and service providers, and continue to provide robust support should malicious activities occur. GoGrid has been conducting regular educational webinars (including some with our partners) to help our customers reduce risks associated with technology as well as develop redundant, N-level architectures designed for fault tolerance and resiliency.
4. A “Cloud” for Everyone – Towards the end of last year, we started to see a blurring of the definition of “cloud” and “cloud computing”. The mainstream media is to blame for much of this confusion. To that end, people seem to be ubiquitously interchanging the word “cloud” and “cloud computing” where they are actually quite different. Most people are simply using the word “cloud” to describe anything where the data is stored somewhere else, whether it be truly using a “cloud computing” environment or simply a cluster of servers somewhere. I predict that this confusion will get worse long before it gets better. People will continue to interchangeably use “cloud” and “cloud computing” thus forcing those of us in the industry to (re)define what “cloud computing” truly is. However, as the word “cloud” becomes incredibly mainstream, it will grow to mean anything that is delivered via the web, regardless of if it is applications, services, infrastructure, data or what have you. (In fact, I used “cloud” interchangeably throughout this post…for me, I’m talking about “cloud computing.”)
   
   End of Year Update: Unfortunately to those of us in the Cloud Computing industry, the term “cloud” continues to morph into an encompassing of anything related to “stored on the Internet somewhere”. Recent advertising campaigns now throw the term “cloud” around extremely loosely, polluting the true definition. We believe that Gartner’s definition of Cloud Computing is one of the best in the space currently: “A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to customers using Internet Technologies.”
   GoGrid Update: At GoGrid, we make it our mission to adhere to the important qualities of cloud computing: self-service, scalable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go and as a service. While we may use the term “cloud” loosely, our core competency is “cloud computing”, being the largest “pure play” provider in the space. What I mean by pure play is that our business is devoted to providing infrastructure services entirely, not diluted by other add-on services or products or physical items. This year we developed our Unique Value Proposition (UVP) – “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™” which we live and breath by. So while the term “cloud” continues to become fractured, representing many things that it wasn’t initially supposed to, we fully believe in ensuring that our “cloud” represents industry definitions and standards.
5. Analysts will Shorten their “Coming of Age” Stories – Many of the big name players predicted that cloud computing wouldn’t really be adopted by the mainstream for another few years. I believe that they will retract or refine their statements to show how much closer to mainstream cloud computing really is. While Fortune100 companies may still be slow to adopt, the “rest of us” will get on the cloud a lot faster than analysts originally predicted.
   
   End of Year Update: Cloud Computing continues to “infiltrate” corporations and enterprises as these companies look to alternatives to traditional IT requisitioning. While corporate entities as a whole might not fully throw themselves at replacing their existing infrastructure with cloud infrastructure, business units and other departments therein are seeing the advantages and embracing them. I still believe that the adoption curve is moving a lot faster than what analysts are predicting.
   GoGrid Update: Our increase in corporate and enterprise customers clearly indicates that there is a significant uptake in interest as well as implementation of cloud and hybrid scenarios and solutions. Also, our ever-growing numbers of SMB and Web 2.0 customers reflect an even healthier adoption of cloud computing as outsourcing of IT services remains a critical component of financial savings, human resource optimization and other unrealized IT rearchitecture.

So there you have it. A quick look back at my predictions for 2010 and how the market and GoGrid faired. What are your thoughts on the past year and how Cloud Computing did therein? What about 2011? Would love to get your read! And Happy Holidays from all of us at GoGrid.

Our software “elves” have been hard at work preparing the latest and greatest feature and service updates to the GoGrid cloud. We are excited about our December 2010 release as it is packed with enhancements and new and updated features to truly make GoGrid your choice for deploying Cloud Infrastructure or setting up a Hybrid Hosting environment.

Some of the noteworthy features and changes include:

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast Data Center
• Limited Time Promotion on East Coast Dedicated Servers and West Coast GoGrid Firewall
• GoGrid Image Sharing
• GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering
• Increase Windows Sandbox Server Size
• Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

Read on for more details on each of the items above.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers on East Coast

GoGrid has been leading the industry when it comes to Hybrid Hosting as is evident with other providers rolling out similar features. However, we are 2 years ahead of most of our competitors in providing integrated cloud and dedicated infrastructures within GoGrid. To complement this, we have rolled out GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast facility (US-East-1). GoGrid Dedicated Servers (GGDS) in our West Coast data center (US-West-1) have been incredibly successful for our customers.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are provisioned via the GoGrid web portal and can be fully publicly and/or privately networked with our F5 load balancers, Firewalls, and Cloud Storage. There are a variety of use cases you might want to consider that are optimal for using Dedicated Servers or a hybrid of Dedicated and Cloud Servers including:

• Disaster Recovery – now you can set up a DR environment on either the East or West Coast.
• Fail Over – similar to DR environment, mirroring or providing a portion of your infrastructure on either coast can help you recover from costly outages. You can also set up a secondary presence to handle routine maintenance periods.
• Unique Application Sets – there may be some applications that have requirements for particular hardware or operating systems not available within the GoGrid Cloud Server list. In many cases, Dedicated Servers can meet these requirements.

The steps to provision a GoGrid Dedicated Server are the same in all of our data centers.

When you first launch the Add screen, you can select either US-West-1 or US-East-1. Selecting US-East-1 will show you the following:

You can see that “Dedicated Server” is now an option. Selecting that will start you down the easy process of provisioning a Dedicated Server.

Fill out the form and choose a Configuration option and Pricing plan.

Accept the Terms of Service for the Dedicated Server:

Once the server request has been created, it will be available within 2 business days as per GoGrid’s Service Level Agreement (SLA). You can track the progress by viewing the icon within the Grid and List views. Yellow means that it is being provisioned. When it is Green, your server is ready to use. The server below (GGDS East #1) is in the “Processing” state:

You can also view the status via the Jobs tab.

Once the Dedicated Server is ready, the Job will show as “Succeeded”:

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are also displayed within the List View.

Promotion on GoGrid Dedicated Servers or GoGrid Hardware Firewall

Beginning on 12/15/2010, GoGrid will be making minor price increases on Standard Dedicated Servers and Advanced Dedicated servers. The new pricing is reflected below:

• Standard Dedicated Servers: $300/month or $3,000/year if prepaid annually
• Advanced Dedicated Servers: $400/month or $4,000/year if prepaid annually

NOTE: If you purchase a GoGrid Dedicated Server prior to 12/15/2010, you will be GRANDFATHERED into the current pricing plan. What that means is if you purchase a Dedicated Server before 12/15/10, your price will remain at the old rates as long as you have the server deployed. The price for Ultra Dedicated Servers is not changing.

GoGrid Image Sharing

Have you created a server image that you are proud of? Or perhaps you want to share a Diaspora server to help spread the Open Source alternative to Facebook? With this release, we have launched a new GoGrid Image Sharing feature that allows for true collaboration between GoGrid users across the globe. The process is extremely easy. You start with a MyGSI (GoGrid Personal Server Image) and then simply click on the Sharing icon to make it available to all GoGrid users. Let’s walk through this briefly.

First, start with a private server image (MyGSI). Details on how to create a MyGSI can be found here.

Once you create your MyGSI, it will appear under the Images tab:

Note the Sharing state is set to “Private” by default and the icon next to it shows a single user.

To make the image “Public“, simply click on the Server Image line. It will launch the editing screen (where you can change the Name and Description of your server, as well as the minimum RAM required to use your image):

When you choose to make your image “Public” be sure to choose a clear, descriptive name to make it easier for users to find. Also, be sure to set the minimum amount of RAM for that server image to be at a level that it would perform well for other GoGrid users who deploy it.

Simply change the Sharing status from “Private” to “Public” and click the Submit button. Your server image will then be available to all GoGrid users.

Should you ever need to make changes to your server image, be sure to mark the image as “Private” and then go through the Image change process of using that Server Image to create another Image Sandbox, making your appropriate edits and then creating a new MyGSI.

Once the image is publically shared, it will appear within the GoGrid Cloud Server Image Selector (note the Owner column):

Creating a new server based on this Shared Server Image is the same process as creating any other Cloud Server within GoGrid. The only exception is that when you select a shared image, you will be presented with a screen that says GoGrid does not provide support for this image.

Once you agree to the terms, you can create your server.

GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering

With this release, you can now easily order a GoGrid Fortinet hardware firewall. To provision a hardware firewall via the GoGrid Customer Portal you simply need to click on the Fortinet Firewall link in the portal. It appears under the Quick Links section:

As well as within the List view when the Network section is active:

Once you click on that link, you will be presented with the Fortinet Firewall Order Form:

Fill out all of the required and appropriate information and your GoGrid Hardware Firewall will be available within 2 business days. You will be notified via email when your Firewall is available to use. Please note, the Fortinet Firewall option currently is only available in our US-West-1 data center.

The GoGrid Hardware Firewall is $200/month and this price includes one type of VPN connection. Additional VPNs are available at $50/month or $500/year with a pre-paid plan.

Increase Windows Sandbox Size

Users of Windows Servers and the GoGrid MyGSI feature will rejoice with this enhancement. Due to popular request, we are increasing the GoGrid Sandbox Image size from 20 GB to 30 GB. The sandbox disk size for Linux distros will remain at 20 GB.

This increase in size will allow you to have more space for software and OS updates as well as your code and data.

Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

This release also includes some other changes of note. For starters, we have renamed the “Upgrade” icon to “Scale”. This is part of the RAM Scaling feature that we released previously. To scale your servers vertically (meaning increasing or decreasing the amount of RAM allocated to your server), simply click on the server you want to scale and click the Scale icon:

For more details, please read our blog post on this feature.

We have also updated our base GoGrid Server Images for Windows to include the latest software updates and security patches as of November 30, 2010. The following servers have been updated:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Express / PHP5 / IIS 7.0 + FastCGI
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup

Several bug fixes have also been applied and the GoGrid API has been updated to version 1.7. Please see our Wiki for documentation on the new API items.

More to Come!

I’m sure that you’ll agree this is quite a list of enhancements and new features. There’s plenty more coming in 2011! I encourage you to attend our Webinars or request a 1-on-1 consultation with one of our GoGrid Cloud Specialists to learn more about how GoGrid makes Complex Infrastructure Easy!