We are excited to announce a joint webinar with F5 and GoGrid that discusses the top Use Cases and Best Practices for load balancing in a public cloud. When GoGrid launched several years ago, we were pleased to have F5 as a technology partner in our initial offering. It remains a core feature of the GoGrid Cloud today. Recently, with the addition of our East Coast datacenter, we released load balancing for GoGrid infrastructures in that datacenter as well.

Many current GoGrid users are not taking advantage of our free F5 load balancing so if you are one of those customers, we encourage you to attend this webinar. Things to think about:

• You can prevent application downtime – when you have more than one server in a load balanced environment, you can rest assured that if one of those servers happens to become unavailable, traffic to your site is automatically redirected to the other available server(s).
• Scaling infrastructure – without a load balancer in place, it can be difficult to scale up (or down) your infrastructure.
• 1-2-3 Process – deploying a load balancer is just a matter of filling out a form and once you configure it, your new load balancer is available in minutes.
• Moving beyond the “Free” offering – if your routing needs are more complex, we are here to help with other solutions.

Webinar Details

Title: “Load Balancing in the GoGrid Cloud – Utilizing F5 BIG IP to Manage Traffic Spikes and Uptime”
Date: Wednesday, 8/25/10
Time: 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/webinars/20100825

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GoGrid Partner, Librato, who provides a service called Silverline which enables customers to control and maximize the utilization of resources within their cloud servers and datacenter servers, today announced the availability of the Silverline service within the GoGrid cloud.

With a GoGrid server running Silverline, customers can control the amount of resources each workload can consume meaning that you can process your workloads on a smaller number of servers but still ensuring that SLAs with your customers are met. More information about Librato Silverline can be found within the GoGrid Exchange.

There are currently 10 GoGrid Partner Server Images (PGSIs) available with Librato’s Silverline installed:

• CentOS 5.2 (32-bit)
• CentOS 5.2 (64-bit)
• CentOS 5.3 (32-bit)
• CentOS 5.3 (64-bit)
• RHEL 5.4 (32-bit)
• RHEL 5.4 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (32-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)

The following Press Release was delivered today about this new offering:

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This month, we tried something a bit different with our Customer Newsletter for August 2010 in that we sent the newsletter from our Service Teams. In case you didn’t already know this, every GoGrid customer is assigned a service team to help our customers manage and grow their GoGrid account and answer any questions customers may have. The teams consist of an Account Manager, a Support Specialist, a Billing Specialist, a Data Center Technician and a Network Specialist.

Even though it is the summer here, we are hard at work growing the GoGrid product and feature offering as we strive to live up to our new Unique Value Proposition: “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™”.

Below is the full content of the August 2010 Customer Update newsletter that went out to all GoGrid customers:

Hello,

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Ever since the launch of GoGrid, we made sure that we included Open Source stacks in our server offerings. As the GoGrid ecosystem grew, we partnered with several companies who provide various Open Source solutions. Since these offerings have been gaining traction and popularity, we are now working much more closely with Partners providing Open Source Software within the GoGrid Exchange.

The following Press Release was distributed last Wednesday:

Open Source Community Embraces the GoGrid Cloud

GoGrid announces the launch of its Open Source Software (OSS) Partner Program. GoGrid is the industry leader in partnering with open source companies to enable their software in the cloud. Through the GoGrid platform, open source companies can deliver their offerings as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

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Today, Objectivity, a leader in distributed, scalable data management technology, delivered a press release about InfiniteGraph, a new distributed graph database product which is now available on GoGrid.

About Objectivity & InfiniteGraph

Objectivity, Inc., the leader in distributed, scalable data management technology, formed the InfiniteGraph business unit in 2010. The team was tasked with creating a product to meet a global need to obtain real-time answers from deep analysis of very large volumes of complex data.

The InfiniteGraph team has developed a solution that gives organizations significant technical cost savings and time-to-market advantages, in developing advanced and large-scale social networking, business intelligence, scientific research and national security systems across highly distributed environments. InfiniteGraph is unique among other products in the marketplace, providing a high-performance, distributed graph database with virtually unlimited scalability.

The InfiniteGraph graph database leverages enterprise-proven technology that supports the highest graph computing requirements, helping partners and customers to find and utilize the valuable connections and multi-dimensional relationships that exist within their data.

InfiniteGraph on the GoGrid Exchange

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Yesterday, Cranium Solutions, a GoGrid Partner announced the launch of an automated cloud-based security assessment tool within the GoGrid Exchange.

About Cranium Solutions

Cranium Solutions’ flagship product, ASAP™ (Automated Security Assessment Program), is the first fully automated end-to-end network security testing solution that runs as a Cloud Based Service.  Businesses can perform simple and automated Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests of any systems they have deployed on the GoGrid Cloud. Furthermore, the Cranium Solutions ASAP Service is a GSI based service that can be setup in minutes and requires no configuration by the customer unless they are performing assessments of servers that do not have external IP addresses.

Cranium Solutions on the GoGrid Exchange

There is currently 1 image live on the GoGrid Exchange for Cranium Solutions. It is on a CentOS 5.3 (64 bit) image:

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If you are already a GoGrid user, most likely your inbox has a copy of the June 2010 GoGrid Newsletter. But for those of you who are not customers or are simply interested in receiving the latest and greatest information straight from us, below you can find the content of the newsletter. It was definitely an action-packed month for us at GoGrid as you will indubitably see from reading.

Below is the full content of the newsletter:

Hello,

It’s been a busy start to the first half of the year for us at GoGrid. We’re excited to fill you in on all of our important news and how we’ve been working to make your GoGrid cloud even better. From opening a new East Coast data center to our release of GoGrid version 3.0, you’ll find this newsletter full of information on how you can enhance and expand your GoGrid cloud.

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The ASCII Group held their ASCII Reseller Success Summit in Chicago, IL in June 2010 and GoGrid was there to spread the word about the GoGrid Reseller Program we have in place. And at the end of the Summit, GoGrid was awarded the “Best Channel Incentives” award!

The ASCII Success Summit was attended by about 130 IT resellers that sell into the SME market and about 30 vendors. GoGrid announced our Premier channel program that provided the resellers the opportunity to get involved with an IaaS provider that really understands their reselling business. GoGrid offers a program that provides for a true partnership between the reseller and the vendor by helping evolve their business into a cloud services model versus asking them to make wholesale changes to their business strategy as most vendors do. Our lucrative discount strategy, joint marketing incentives and deal registration programs provide the business tools that resellers need in order to make this transition into IaaS business.

The main focus of the show was Cloud Services. Most resellers were highly interested in the space but, confused as to how to go about getting a piece of this growing market segment. The overall message was that up to 30% of their legacy infrastructure and software business was going to go away in place of as a service type business. Resellers wanted to know what role they had in this market and how they were going to make money by participating.

Reid Cooper, Sr. Channel Account Manager at GoGrid, represented GoGrid at the show and helped GoGrid secure the “Best Channel Incentives” award.

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GoGrid is pleased to announce a new Cloud Management option using enStratus as a management service for GoGrid. The following Press Release describing the new offering was issued by GoGrid Partner, enStratus. enStratus is a cloud infrastructure management platform that allows for the deployment, operation and management of enterprise-class application in public and private clouds. Its multi-cloud architecture is focused on the security and high-availability of mission-critical web applications.

enStratus enables enterprises to run applications that operate with sensitive data all within a cloud infrastructure environment.

Webinar – June 23rd

enStratus is hosting a webinar on June 23rd titled: Cloud Security Best Practices from 11:30PM to 12:15 PM Central Time where you can learn how enStratus and GoGrid work together to ensure your security policies and procedures are met for your cloud computing infrastructure. Topics include:

• How can I best manage my keys for the cloud?
• Can I encrypt my data?
• If lawyers subpoena my cloud provider, can they get access to my data?
• Can I have users with varying levels of access to my infrastructure?
• Is LDAP or SAML 2.0 supported?
• What auditing is available?

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Network World this week published a comprehensive review of 3 GoGrid Partners titled “First-ever test of public cloud management wares” and how their services can be used to monitor and manage Public Cloud resources including GoGrid. In the article, Thomas Henderson and Brendan Allen put RightScale, Tap In Systems and Cloudkick through some fairly rigorous testing to show the strengths (and weaknesses) of each Cloud Management vendor.

Source: NetworkWorld.com

The point of the article is pretty clear to me. We (and Cloud Infrastructure providers Rackspace and Amazon) have been providing Cloud Infrastructure for several years now with 100,000′s combined customers actively using our respective clouds. Obviously, depending on the provider, this process can be quick and easy or a bit more involved. But once you have your infrastructure deployed in the Cloud, how do you monitor and manage it effectively? The authors take this challenge of deploying, managing and taking down jobs hosted in the cloud and discuss their findings within the article.

Summing it all up in a quote:

Our findings in this test are that RightScale impressed us most with its overall control and deep understanding of specific cloud vendors like Amazon. Tap In Systems has more breadth in terms of different clouds that can be used, it’s just not as easy to use. And we liked Cloudkick for its simplicity and ease of use.

My opinion of these three Cloud Management vendors is that each have various specialties and are better at one function than another. Also, each vendor handles integration and control of specific Public Clouds in different ways. Be sure that you conduct some due diligence when choosing one as well as when selecting a cloud for them to manage. Regardless, I do recommend that you give the article a read as it provides some pretty good insight into these three vendors and how their products works with the 3 leading cloud infrastructure providers out there. (more…)