GoGrid Blog

Today I came across a very interesting post, written by Mukul Kumar, which poses an intriguing topic of Cloud availability. Spawned most likely because of some “lack” of availability on Amazon’s S3 recently, Kumar discusses how companies might want to look towards creating redundancy across Cloud providers (such as GoGrid) in order to increase the availability of a company’s online presence.

All too frequently, companies look to a single solution for their hosting options, whether it be within the Cloud or using more traditional hosting methods. These single solutions can easily translate into single sources of failure, “don’t put your eggs in one basket” being the phrase the comes to mind.

Kumar illustrates some ways to make a company’s Cloud reliance a bit more redundant by using some traditional methods of choosing various providers.

Using a fairly straight-forward rsync (an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer) methodology, Kumar shows how servers can be configured as hot-standbys using different Cloud providers, allowing for redundancy to take place.

For those looking to create “bullet proof” installations of their hosted presence, I definitely recommend giving Kumar’s post a good read.

Today, InfoWorld’s Tech Writer, Bill Snyder, brought GoGrid solidly into the race with Amazon’s EC2 with his article titled “Red Hat the latest proof that cloud computing is serious business.” Snyder, who has been following technology and the business of technology for 25 years, discusses GoGrid’s “point-and-click infrastructure” and its ease of use in this article.

While Bill mentions that cloud computing may not be ready for large-scale business or the enterprise, he does point out that it is a force to be reckoned with and that the services of GoGrid and Amazon’s EC now “will give a lot of users a chance to take cloud computing for a low-risk, real-world test drive.” I personally predict that the adoption of cloud computing and cloud infrastructure by the enterprise will be a slow uptake at first, most likely rolling out into skunkwork divisions, short-term projects or IT evaluation scenarios, but that within a few years, business not seriously considering “the cloud” will be behind in their technical and competitive advantages.

Snyder highlights a real-world GoGrid success (that I covered here) about how ScribbleLive was able to handle multiple million page view requests in a short amount of time during the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference. He emphasized the importance of easy and quick scalability coupled with cost-effectiveness provided by GoGrid:

“ScribbleLive, a two-person operation, quickly scaled up using GoGrid, and was able to keep running with little or no loss of throughput. The price: $15 for a day of server time, plus bandwidth charges. Hmm. Maybe the folks at Mozilla, who tried to set a world’s record for downloads of the new Firefox browser but wound up crashing their site, could have done something similar.”

Simplicity is another key factor that Snyder outlines in his review, stating:

“In theory, at least, setting up servers on GoGrid seems almost too easy. Once a client signs up for the service, an IT staffer can point a browser to GoGrid’s site and choose a configuration from a variety of pull down menus. GoGrid supports Windows Server 2003, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

His article also comments on pricing, the GoGrid infrastructure and plans for the future. Definitely give Snyder’s article a read as it successfully boils GoGrid down to a few nicely-crafted paragraphs of analysis.

Clouds are sexy right now. In this article, I tracked how “Cloud Computing” is becoming a hot, up and coming Google Search term. But why is it that there are so many new user communities that are conglomerating around “the cloud” versus other more traditional hosting concepts. I would say because of the social environment where this technology is emerging.

Asking the Question

Where does one learn about technology trends? How does one test it out or know if it is a match for your offering?

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Traditional Hosting in the 90’s

The early 90’s were marked with the presence of AOL being the primary way that users got on the World Wide Web (now just called the Internet because people are using far more than just HTTP for content delivery). AOL brought a new sense of community and an easy way to “get online.” As AOL tried to continue its monolithic domination of online access, other companies started popping up offering alternatives to advertising-heavy AOL within metropolitan markets. Companies like Netcom, CompuServe and AT&T became notable AOL dial-up competitors.

As dial-up companies became more mainstream, they had to compete against the daily CD-ROM mailers congesting the traditional direct marketing channels. Advertising and PR among traditional hosting providers ranged from print ads to directory listing services like Yahoo!. Also, dial-up service was the main method of getting on the WWW. When people wanted to find dial-up providers, one’s choices were pretty limited, either go with a large “closed” community like AOL or national or local dial-up provider. As dial-ups expanded, the ISPs began to offer hosting packages as well. As hosting slowly became more mainstream and competition started heating up, perspective clients had to hunt around to find reviews or opinions of these providers, frequently leaving more confused than not. In the end, word-of-mouth played a huge part in the final decision as well as simple bulletin boards were the place where a majority of end users did their research. Communities were there but frequently closed or hard to find.

“In-between” Hosting of Dot-Com

Step forward to the end of the 1990’s and we saw an even more cluttered landscape. Traditional hosting provides still existed. Managed hosting was becoming mainstream and the Dot-com era was upon us. Suddenly, anyone could make a “business” on the web and have vast quantities of money thrown at them, even without having a solid business plan. Companies, like WebVan, spent huge amounts of money on portions of their business that really had little impact to their bottom line. Actually, the Sub-Zero refrigerators and $800 Herman Miller chairs that were purchased eventually helped to de-value the company rather than help it in any way. Dot-coms were all about making as big of a splash as possible, gaining brand visibility at all costs possible, and not looking back to check spending.

Nobody seemed to care about IT spending. It just happened along with the IPOs and Venture Capitalist dolling money out like it was going out of style. It was very hard for a company to rise above the fold without these capital expenditures. Companies planned on becoming the next big thing and invested heavily in data centers and computer infrastructure. Hosting providers simply rode the wave. The people talking during this time were the CEO’s, Executives, Investment Bankers and Venture Capitalists; all the rest (of us) just held on tight to our thousands of stock-options, hoping that we would be the next multi-millionaire on the block, and worked 15 hour days without coming up for air. The decisions were made by those with the money.

Then it all burst.

Web 2.0 and “Evolved” Hosting

As the shrapnel fell from the Dot-Com bomb, companies were forced to re-group, re-engineer and re-architect. Everybody knew that the Internet was here to stay as a viable marketing channel, but also as a business marketplace. Companies who survived the bust, continued to limp along while others sat back to watch what would happen. Then began Web 2.0, emerging from the ruins as a completely different beast. Gone were the days of money being thrown around haphazardly and business decisions made on a whim. Companies now had to be self-funded, with a proven business model and an established user base.

The commonality during this and previous times was that all business needed places to host their products. What had changed were the ways to host and the cost associated with hosting. Traditional hosting providers continued to cut their costs while adding more and more services. 1and1.com, for example, entered the US market in 2003. They broke into the US market softly and then started taking out huge, multi-paged spreads in traditional, even main-stream, print publications. This is just one example of how hosting was becoming even more mainstream and less reserved for the technologist.

This sudden influx of cheap and available hosting helped to foster the emergence of new Web 2.0 companies and services. But as technology continued to better itself exponentially, hosting alternatives to the traditional  began to be more prevalent. Virtualization was an important catalyst to this, allowing servers to be used differently, more efficiently and more broadly. Hosting providers started carving out services with Virtual Private Servers (VPS’s) as well as offering a full gamut of dedicated servers at increasingly competitive rates.

Web 2.0 companies now had a choice: traditional, dedicated, shared and in-house hosting, each offering advantages and disadvantages. But that wasn’t enough.

Social Media and the Cloud Community

So why is “Cloud Computing” suddenly so hot? I would say that it is not due to the technology alone, but rather because of the new super-social community driving it. The people making Web 2.0 what it is today are connected in so many different ways than before. Communication has evolved from bulletin boards to instant communities and relationships through services like Twitter, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, Facebook and podcasts, to name just a few. Couple these social communication tools with online publications like TechCrunch or Mashable who cover emerging companies and trends, and communities start flooding the market. These communities aren’t just connected, they are talking with fervor and passion. Creating a community takes a fraction of the amount of time than in the past. Look at the Cloud Computing Google Group, for example. This group did not have any messages or members back in March 2008, as of mid-June, there are over 1000 members and the group discussions are growing exponentially. People simply want to talk about these new technologies and understand how they can provide a competitive advantage to their own business.

Communities are driving the clouds. Web 2.0ers talk at meetups, on Twitter, at conferences and directly among each other. They are looking for the best technological match for their offerings and the best price to do so. To touch on the price issue, this is a paradigm shift from the Dot-com era of free spending. Startups are bootstrapped and given the state of the “recessive” economy, so are larger companies and enterprises. So as the features of cloud computing are attracting technologists and developers, the pay-as-you-go or utility pricing models are attracting CFO’s and budget-minded IT managers.

So why the heavy adoption of products like Cloud Hosting products like GoGrid or Amazon’s EC2 within the Web 2.0 community? It’s because of social media professing the advantages, the new pricing models and possible uses of this technology. Any Web 2.0 company that I talk to I ask the question, “what are you built on?” This is a pretty open-ended question which could be answered by the software powering a service or the technology behind it. Traditional hosting is not sexy, Cloud Computing and Hosting is. If a Web 2.0er is using the newest technology to drive their business, they epitomize this new generation as well as potentially show sound technical and financial business decisions.

Keep the Cloud talks going, it’s the technology driving Web 2.0 and Social Media.

Everyone seems to be either talking about cloud computing, launching their product “within the cloud” or developing a “cloud” infrastructure. I would like to take a step back and really think about why the word “cloud” is being used in the first place.

First, a quick side note: as I tried to track down the origins of the term “cloud computing” I did come across a very insightful post by Paul Wallis that does a fantastic job stepping through the evolution from “supercomputing” through “the cluster” into “the grid” and eventually up into the “clouds.” The concept of having “data clouds speaking to supercomputer clouds” is becoming a reality, according to Wallis, however, I echo his concern that in order for this magical marriage to take place, there needs to be a new level of Quality of Service connecting the two, among other things.

Even with the foundation being laid by some heavy players, cloud computing is still in its infancy. But this is not the subject of this article. I still circle back to the marketing “genus” that coined the term “cloud” to describe this new computing paradigm. For that, I move away from the technical and more to the linguistic.

The term “cloud” can be used in many forms of speech:

• Noun - The clouds of smoke filled the room
• Verb - The smoke clouded the room
• Adjective - The cloudy smoke filled the room
• Adverb - The smoke cloudily filled the room

So, cloud is a good word choice from a grammatical perspective since it can be used with a variety of ways. But is it a good term to use to describe a product or technology? I’m not so sure. As an exercise, I started writing down words that came to mind when I thought about “cloud”. In no particular order:

Any patterns here? From my read, most of the terms seem to have negative connotations. I get visions of letting a balloon loose into the air and watching it disappear into the clouds. (Bursting bubble anyone?) To take things a bit further:

• Companies have used terms like “vaporware” to describe software or code in advance of its release which then fails to materialize.
• “Pie in the sky” is a phrase used to describe a promise heaven but continuing to suffer on earth.
• To “have your head in the clouds” comes from the Latin proverb “Caput inter nubila condit,” a line from Virgil’s Aneid which, loosely defined, means to have unrealistic, impractical ideas.
• Fragile, weightless, intangible, nebulous, unclear, impossible to measure - all these connote something that is vacuous and non-solid.

So I ask you this, does this make you comfortable putting your mission-critical data or applications within a cloud? Earlier terms like cluster, super, utility and grid computing, in my mind, make much more “tangible” sense. While I’m sure this term is here to stay and there is not much that I can do to change that, I do question the terms legitimacy within technology and the development of solid business practices. Would you rather work in the cloud or work on a server? Even though the term “virtualization” tends to imply something that is not real, it is closer to the ground and significantly more absolute than something “in the clouds.”

Computing in the cloud, or dare I say, on “cloud nine”…I’m just waiting for reality to hit and the rain to begin.

[Cloud images used by permission.]

As I strive to better understand these new emerging technologies such as “cloud computing”, I frequently find myself reading various blog articles, many professing to be the end-all definition related to the topic. It is not very often that I actually come across an article that is informative, understandable and compelling enough to warrant note.

The post by Alex Iskold is a perfect example of one of these excellent articles. An important definition from his post:

The idea behind cloud computing is simple - scale your application by deploying it on a large grid of commodity hardware boxes. Each box has exactly the same system installed and behaves like all other boxes. The load balancer forwards a request to any one box and it is processed in a stateless manner - meaning the request is followed by an immediate response and no state is held by the system. The beauty of the cloud is in its scalability - you scale by simply adding more boxes.

Some may say that this article is a bit “heavy” on Amazon as the “killer service.” But I believe his point is that Amazon has put a lot of weight behind and person-hours into their products and they will be hard to duplicate, at least for players developing “cloud” products. But some of his general comments hold true regardless of the product: “Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems their product or service is trying to solve.”

I recommend this as a good read on what Cloud Computing is, a la Amazon, and for people really trying to make heads or tails of grid, utility, cloud and distributed computing.

In closing, Alex’s line “…we are witnessing a fundamental shift in our ability to compute and this is just the beginning…” truly sums it up for all players and customers in this market. I echo that whole heartedly.

Today I read an article on TechCrunch which was positioned as a poll eliciting responses on a generalized area of development. The framework, as outlined by Erick Schonfeld, was this: “come up with a killer Web app in 45 minutes” for the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I guess the goal is to actually build the app within the timeframe specified. The categories for the poll were:

• A Webwide Reputation System
• Cloud Computing
• Social Finance
• Webmail - An Alternative to Gmail
• Search
• Life Streaming
• Video Messaging/Publishing

Below are the stats taken @ 2:10pm on 2/12/08 from the TechCrunch site.

The thing that really grabbed me about this TechCrunch poll was not what was in the original post, but the 50+ comments that followed, many with several other ideas on the “killer app.” In fact, yours truly tried to jump into the comment thread as well. I figured that I should keep my comments short, but still the topic and inferred topics kept me thinking and spawned some other ones in the process.

Many other ideas

The fact that so many readers had so many ideas leads me to believe that this is truly a loaded topic. (Well, isn’t that what web development is all about and why we have so many new services springing up?) Regardless, here are some of the other “killer apps” that caught my attention and deserve a bit more press:

• Real-time video conferencing
• Online web-app creator (multiple comments about this)
• App that creates Apps
• Time-Waste monitor that pulls in all social network tools and finds out how much time you are distracted using social networking tools (I really DON’T need to know that)
• Workflow Application
• News personalization, localization and syndication
• Mini-apps to “make your offline lives easier”
• Video equivalent of RSS widget
• Single ID system

I obviously didn’t include some of the tongue-in-cheek ideas but the ones above have some viability, in my opinion. The one that caught my eye, though, was that of “Cloud Computing” since I had recently posted some thoughts on that topic as well. But part of my comment to Erick was to get some clarification around that. Was it related to integrations with other “cloud” or “virtualized” hosting solutions? That is what I asked.

Erick’s response:

“It is open ended, but I was thinking more along the lines of what’s the next step after S3/EC2/etc. We have Web-based computation, storage, querying, and databases. What’s next. Could be built on top of Amazon or standalone.”

My Answer to “…What’s Next?”

My brain churned on this idea and then fractured in a couple of directions.

First, hooking in and/or building on top of clustered, cloud or virtualized computing definitely makes sense to me. That is part of the reason why GoGrid was developed, to provide rapidly scalable alternatives to standardized hosting to host these apps. As I have said before, integration will be key, not only to Web 3.0, but also to the success of these mini-apps, mashups, and new companies developing these products and services in general. I was encouraged to see that “Cloud Computing” was receiving a large number of votes.

The other direction my thoughts took was trying to figure what to do with these “killer apps” once they had been developed. Developing the application in 45 minutes is definitely an achievement in itself. Getting them “out to market” in an hour, is record-worthy!

I would almost extend this challenge to just that: build and deploy a killer app in an hour. The details: build the app in 45 minutes and then get it on the Internet in the remaining 15. GoGrid could do the later part of the challenge without “breaking a sweat.” As a side note, I have been able to deploy 2 servers (1 web/application server and 1 database server) in under 10 minutes combined, from server creation to RDC-ing/SSH-ing in to those servers, without any human intervention (e.g., a sysadmin) aside from my own.

My comment on the TechCrunch article of “build it and they will come” stills stands. Yes, you can build in 45 minutes, but NO, they won’t come if you don’t have a place to put it easily and quickly.

2008 will be all about getting your product developed AND out to market ahead of your competitors. Has that every really changed? Just the tools to do so have. Just be sure that when you hit that final stretch, you have planned on a sprint and your customers have a place to go to watch you finish.

Author’s Note: This post was revised on 6/23/08. The nature of computing is under going a revolution and rather than fully remove this post, I elected to refresh it so as to provide a better framework for readers.

There seems to be a lot of debate around different types of Computing Terms being used to describe server and hosting solutions. In fact, in the past, the blogosphere seemed to throw around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. But, as of this revision, one term is rising to the top: Cloud Computing. (See recent trend analysis here.)

The definitions vary from source to source, author to author. While I cannot (and will not) attempt to articulate the end-all definition, I can write about how I view these terms and how they apply to the products that we offer, namely GoGrid. But before I dive into MY interpretation, providing what others view on these subjects may shed some light on our framework.

Terms as defined by Wikipedia

Many people view Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information but that is always subject to debate. Wikipedia defines some of these terms as follows (not the end-all definitions though) and I have taken some liberties of removing non-relevant information for argument’s sake:

• Grid Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
  • Multiple independent computing clusters which act like a “grid” because they are composed of resource nodes not located within a single administrative domain. (formal)
  • Offering online computation or storage as a metered commercial service, known as utility computing, computing on demand, or cloud computing.
  • The creation of a “virtual supercomputer” by using spare computing resources within an organization.
• Cloud Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
  • Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a “cloud” of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how it is achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computing is done through pooling all computer resources together and being managed by software rather than a human.
  • The services being requested of a cloud are not limited to using web applications, but can also be IT management tasks such as requesting of systems, a software stack or a specific web appliance.
• Utility Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing :
  • Conventional Internet hosting services have the capability to quickly arrange for the rental of individual servers, for example to provision a bank of web servers to accommodate a sudden surge in traffic to a web site.
  • “Utility computing” usually envisions some form of virtualization so that the amount of storage or computing power available is considerably larger than that of a single time-sharing computer. Multiple servers are used on the “back end” to make this possible. These might be a dedicated computer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being rented out, or even an under-utilized supercomputer. The technique of running a single calculation on multiple computers is known as distributed computing.
• Distributed Computing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing
  • A method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. Distributed computing is a type of segmented or parallel computing, but the latter term is most commonly used to refer to processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more processors that are part of the same computer. While both types of processing require that a program be segmented—divided into sections that can run simultaneously, distributed computing also requires that the division of the program take into account the different environments on which the different sections of the program will be running. For example, two computers are likely to have different file systems and different hardware components.

Upon initial read, Wikipedia seems to be fairly close to my definitions but still not exact. Of note, “metered commercial service” rings true within both the Grid Computing and Cloud Computing definitions. However, it also seems to spill into the Utility Computing mantra. As a side note, our newest product, GoGrid, utilizes a metered service similar to how an energy company would charge you for electricity or gas, basing charges simply on what you use.

Traditional “Clouds” vs. Modern “Clouds”

Grid Computing seems to also have some origins in the idea of harnessing multiple computer resources to gain a more powerful source of shared power and computational resources. However, I would like to suggest that this definition is showing some age and, in my opinion, falls more under Distributed Computing. When I think about Distributed Computing, SETI@Home or Folding@Home come to mind, which is definitely very different from where things are moving now. So, let’s put Distributed Computing aside for this discussion.

Traditionally, the “cloud” was loosely defined as anything outside of a controlled network. When we, as Hosting Providers, discussed “the cloud” in the past with our customers, it was about the nebulous network that is known as the Internet. The cloud is loosely managed and traditionally unreliable. To that end, we do not refer to anything within our control or our networks as “the cloud” as it is too vague and un-manageable. It is outside of our Service Level Agreement and nothing that we can guarantee or deem reliable. However, once traffic enters our network, we manage it. That is where the modern interpretation of the “Cloud” comes into play. Products like Amazon’s EC2 and ServePath’s GoGrid have internalized Cloud Computing by building a reliable infrastructure around it. While the Internet remains as a Cloud of coupled servers and networks, GoGrid, for example, extends this by creating an infrastructure that offers “control in the cloud.”

Originally, I wrote that “Cloud Computing does not necessarily equate to reliable service.” This, obviously, is a contradiction in itself if you apply both the historic and modern definitions at the same time. If one views the Internet as “Cloud Computing,” there are obvious weaknesses within this vast network. With the Internet, you are at the whim of various service providers, Internet backbones and routers managing the traffic within the Cloud. But if one applies the more modern interpretations of this, Cloud Computing now offers robust infrastructure, features and services that were previously unavailable.

Tying the Grid to the Cloud

In order to provide “modern” Cloud Computing, a provider must have some sort of an organized and controlled network infrastructure and topology. What any particular service provider chooses is up to them. For GoGrid, we elected to build our Cloud offering on top of a Grid of servers as well as utilize a Utility-based billing model to only charge the end-user for what they use within our “Cloud.” The end-result is a tightly controlled Grid infrastructure that provides a Cloud Computing experience, more so than most if not all of the other hosting providers out there.

However, what is important here is looking at Cloud, Grid and/or Utility Computing from the perspective of a Hosting Provider. Definitely this is where things get contentious. As I mentioned before, GoGrid offers a traditional utility billing process where you simply pay for what you uses. This breaks from many “old school” hosting billing processes of paying up-front for server(s) and bandwidth, month or year-long contracts and then paying for overages. Does this mean that it is Utility Computing? Not really. One has to dig into this a bit more. GoGrid uses a network of similarly-configured servers bound together by management and administrative servers and virtualization tools to provide a very unique Cloud offering that is distinct from traditional hosting.

Dedicated, Managed and Cloud Servers offered by ServePath guarantee hardware resources like RAM and Load Balancing and full root and administrator access but these paths rapidly diverge at this point. Once one steps into the virtualization arena, or dare I say “the cloud,” new features are available including rapid deployments, cloning, snapshots, fault tolerance, and on-demand scalability.

ServePath chose Grid Computing to power GoGrid and provide the flexibility, scalability and robust infrastructure as the fundamental foundation of an award-winning Cloud Infrastructure product, GoGrid. The end results is a Cloud Hosting Provider offering that delivers better environmental properties, faster vertical and horizontal scalability and ultimately better fits for cost, performance and energy-concerned customers.

There have been several articles and predictions written recently related to grid computing, virtualization and virtualized hosting, cloud computing and “green” hosting over the past few weeks. I have read through a number of these and thought that it might be of interested to highlight some that caught my attention. While by no means are these the de facto authorities of what will come, the commentaries do spark my interest and hopefully yours.

In his article titled: “2007: The year in green,” Ted Sampson, senior analyst at InfoWorld, wrote:

Speaking of which, virtualization was the poster child of sustainable technology in 2007. Leveraging wares from the likes of VMware and XenSource, companies found they could reduce dramatically reduce the number of servers they needed to deliver their applications and services.

This rings true to me. Green computing is hot and will continue to be so. Companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint are well advised to start looking for alternatives to traditional server computing and hosting. The fact that one is now able to “virtualize” several servers on a smaller set of “noded” servers make this trend a hot one to watch.

Similarly, Jeff Kaplan, author of THINK IT Services mentions in his blog post called “Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008”:

2. Everyone’s Going Virtual: Most industry pundits and participants view virtualization as a technology trend, but it is also a business trend. Employees are increasingly working outside the four walls of a traditional office. Gen Y workers are always on the move and online. Traditional, on-premise applications and centralized servers sitting behind a firewall can’t effectively serve today’s mobile workers. SaaS and managed services are perfectly suited for these new, virtual business requirements.

3. Amazon, IBM and Google Bet on Utility Computing. After experimenting with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for the past year, Amazon has found plenty of demand for its computing power on-demand platform from startups, as well as established companies seeking a ‘sandbox’ for their new initiatives. Amazon is now confident it can deliver its computing power in a reliable and cost-effective fashion to a broader market of business users. So, expect more aggressive PR and marketing efforts to promote and sell this powerful utility computing service.

I thought it appropriate to comment on this post, given the direction of our Grid product lines and others from different providers. It is my belief that the combination of Virtualization and Cloud/Utility computing will give many companies more cost-effective and dynamic solutions to their hosting requirements. GoGrid and Grid Series are two of our products that can resolve the business dilemmas of how to rapidly deploy and scale vertically and horizontally, “green” and robust virtualized server and network environments.

Another article that I found of interest was that of Phil Wainewright who wrote “Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008” in ZDNet. Phil’s focus of this article was how SaaS (software-as-a-service) will become even more “pivotal” in 2008. Specific ideas that struck me as important:

Virtualization makes it easy to go SaaS. One of the factors making it much easier for independent software vendors (ISVs) to adopt SaaS is the emergence of virtualization technology. Late last year I described how people management vendor WorkStream uses VMWare, for example, and I reported on how some SaaS vendors are using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. There are many other examples out there, including Joyent’s astonishing giveaway of application hosting accounts to 3,500 Facebook developers. Virtualization will be a big factor this year in helping many ISVs, large and small, get their first experience of delivering software in a service model.

Do you see a common thread here, capitalized by the above blurb by Phil? Key to everything, in my opinion, is Grid and Virtualized hosting. (To understand what a Grid Server is, watch this Flash Guide.) For several years, I worked at a few ASP (Application Service Provider) companies that transformed/morphed into SaaS offerings. The buzzword “ASP” has been replaced as of recent with On-Demand Software and now Software-as-a-Service. With the “advent” of Web 2.0 companies, SaaS has grown and will be blooming in the years to come. If your SaaS offering takes off due to it being a quality product, being “Dugg” or getting a write-up on LifeHacker, TechCrunch or the likes, scalability does come in to play, and, as Phil says, virtualization helps to combat some of the pains associated with vertical/horizontal scaling.

Just some food for thought and discussion here. I would like to know of other articles or blog posts that people have found that are particularly compelling or insightful around this topic. Like these authors, I too think that it will be a big year for “the cloud” and “the grid.”