Starting on Sunday, May 8th, 2011 and going until May 12th, cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility and other data center experts will converge on Las Vegas for Interop, a conference that brings all of these leaders together. Interop bills itself as “the leading business technology event, driving technology adoption by providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success.”

GoGrid CEO and Founder, John Keagy will be at Interop, delivering a presentation “The False Cloud Debate” on May 9th. Similarly, GoGrid’s Manager of Cloud Ecosystems, Paul Lancaster, will be doing a “deep dive” about GoGrid’s Cloud Computing offerings.

Details on the sessions are below:

Interop

• Speaker: John Keagy, CEO
• Session: The False Cloud Debate
• When: May 9, 2011 – 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM
• Location: South Seas B, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV
• Event Website: http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/

Abstract: Are private clouds clouds? Or is the third-party business model inherent in what makes a cloud a cloud? As the FUD flies on both sides, everyone’s got a different opinion of what defines cloud computing. We’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it, sitting public cloud providers across from private cloud toolmakers.

Interop – Enterprise Cloud Summit

• Speaker: Paul Lancaster
• Session: Under the Covers: GoGrid in 10 minutes
• When: May 8, 2011 – 3:25 PM – 3:35 PM
• Location: South Seas B, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV
• Event Website: http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/enterprise-cloud-summit-public-clouds.php

Abstract: Major public clouds will respond to our shortlist questionnaire, giving attendees a practical, side-by-side comparison of public cloud offerings. Hear GoGrid answer our shortlist questions on pricing, capacity, service levels, data location, and architecture.

We hope to see many of you at Interop! Please be sure to check our Events page for more upcoming Shows and Webinars.

In order to provide a more “rounded” voice on the GoGrid blog, we are going to start having some new authors. To kick off this initiative, I wanted to introduce Paul Lappas, GoGrid’s VP of Engineering and Co-Founder. Paul manages GoGrid’s engineering efforts, technical operations, IT and the technology vision for GoGrid.

Recently, he and some other team members attending a MeetUp in San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters to discuss and present  JClouds and Pallet and how those tools are being used at GoGrid. Here is Paul’s synopsis of Jclouds and the presentation:

“GoGrid is doing some really cool stuff using an automated provisioning technology called “Pallet”.  Pallet is similar to existing automating configuration technologies like Puppet and Chef but with a key difference that it was built specifically to solve the problem of quickly spinning up and configuring groups of servers in the cloud. It support “Jclouds” out of the box and is implemented as a set of libraries for “Clojure” which is a LISP-based programming language that is quickly building steam.  Jclouds is an open source framework developed by Adrian Cole that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java development skills, with an API that allows you the freedom to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features.

GoGrid is working with the author of Pallet (Hugo Duncan) and a key contributor Toni Batchelli to enable the fast deployment of fully functional GoGrid environments for use by development teams for test & dev. It’s a tough problem for most companies, but especially challenging for us considering how complex (and capital intensive) it is to stage an end-to-end GoGrid environment due to the sheer breadth of technologies that span almost all 7 layers of the OSI stack. With Pallet, we are able to treat our “infrastructure as code” and manage the configuration of systems, networks and applications just like we do our source code so that they can be quickly applied to spin-up new environments. But perhaps the coolest aspect is that we are using GoGrid internally to virtualize the individual components! It’s kind of like Inception where there is a grid-within-a-grid. Our teams are still getting their heads around logging into a GoGrid account and seeing virtual representation of physical GoGrid components represented as VM icons in the GUI! Very cool stuff.

The following presentation provides more details of the implementation and was presented at the recent Jclouds meetup at Twitter’s headquarter in San Francisco. Check out future jclouds meetups here:
http://www.meetup.com/jclouds/”

Below is the presentation that was presented at the Jclouds meetup:

Stay tuned for more posts from some of the thought-leaders driving GoGrid.

A few weeks ago GoGrid launched its revolutionary Hosted Private Cloud offering, receiving quite a bit of publicity in the process. But Private Clouds and even Cloud Computing is still confusing to many organizations, even to this day. As part of our on-going educational webinar series, where our goal is to get knowledge of cloud computing into the hands of our users and other interested parties, we will be doing a webinar specifically on GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud offering.

This is your chance to learn the advantages of cloud computing over traditional (physical) implementations of infrastructure, and then dive deeper into how Private (and Public) Clouds can optimize productivity within your business.

Webinar Details

WHO should attend? – IT professionals, System Administrators, C-Level executives, Infrastructure Managers.

WHAT is the Webinar about? – “Hosted Private Cloud” – presentation on ways in which your business can implement a private cloud environment, quickly and easily, with no capital expenditure.

WHERE is it being held? – In the cloud, of course!

WHY should you attend? – If you have ever had questions about the implementation and usage of cloud computing, specifically cloud infrastructure within your workplace, and specifically would like to learn more about the total cost of ownership of implementing a Hosted Private Cloud versus an On-premise Private Cloud, then this webinar is for you!

WHEN is the webinar? – Thursday, February 3rd from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)

HOW do I register? – Simply fill out the registration form on the webinar sign-up page and you will be registered.

Topics to be discussed include:

• Distinguishing between a Public vs. Hosted Private Cloud – What’s right for your business?
• Use cases – how enterprises are leveraging the private cloud
• Resources – getting started with a Hosted Private Cloud
• Questions & Answers

We believe that this webinar will help any organization understand not only cloud computing but also the choices available within public and private Cloud Infrastructure.

John Keagy, CEO and founder of GoGrid, will be presenting at Cloud World Expo 2011 in London, England. Cloud Expo Europe is a cloud event that is dedicated to the “past, present and future of cloud computing, virtualization and open source.”

The conference is being held on February 2-3, 2011 in the Barbican Exhibition Hall 1 in London, England. The 2-day event has 3 different speaking tracks: Business, Solution and Security & Storage track.

John will be presenting on Wednesday, February 3rd. Details on his presentation are as follows:

Date: February 3rd, 2011
Time: 12:00pm – 12:30pm GMT
Location: Barbican Exhibition Hall 1
Presentation Title: “What it Takes to build a Leading Public Cloud”
Topic Details:

Being a cutting-edge cloud provider has enabled GoGrid to learn the nuances of being a profitable public cloud provider while also passing on cost-savings to its customers. However, there are many cloud vendors who are struggling to survive while providing innovative solutions to their customers. What makes one company more successful than others? And how does this translate to cost-savings to the cloud consumer? Are vendors passing on efficiencies to their end-users so that they can capitalize on the benefits of moving entire infrastructures to the cloud? How are cloud providers innovating internally to invest in their cloud growth and adoption strategies?

As part of GoGrid‘s on-going educational webinar series, we have another important and informative webinar titled “Accelerate Your Website & Deliver Your Content with Lightning-Fast Speed” running tomorrow (Thursday, December 2nd, 2010) at 11:00-12:00 PM (Pacific Time). As many of you may already know, GoGrid has a CDN offering (see our CDN page for more details) that can help you instantly scale your web presence around the globe.

Here are the details of webinar:

Description: Do you depend on your web presence as a critical component of your business? Have you experienced occasional slow load times or video buffering of your content from certain geographic locations? Will increased website speed help you sell your services, products, or advertising on your website?

Topics:

• What is a content delivery network and how it can benefit your business
• Example of businesses and content that should be using CDNs
• Introduction to the GoGrid CDN

Presenters:

• Kevin Lewis, Director of Global Alliances EdgeCast Networks
• Rob Larson, GoGrid Product Manager

Date: December 2, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (PDT)

Registration: http://go.gogrid.com/webinars/20101202

Be sure to bring your questions to the webinar as there will be time during the presentation to ask the experts. Just to get your ideas flowing, here’s some more information about the GoGrid CDN:

Features:

• Website Acceleration—faster page load times for your website
• Large Object Download Service—for software, videos, games, music, podcasts and movies—the best way to provide delivery of downloads
• On-Demand Video Streaming—Flash and Windows
• Live Video Streaming—Flash and Windows
• Security*—all of the important security features needed for online business including SSL delivery and Token-based Authentication
• Cname Support—disguise the GoGrid CDN URL with a customized URL
• Reporting—the most comprehensive reporting and analytics suite in the industry—view bandwidth consumption, breakdowns of downloads by media type, geography, file type and popularity
• Advanced Reporting*—over 60 reports to help improve and optimize website performance

The GoGrid CDN currently has 18 Points of Presence (PoPs) around the globe including 9 in North America, 5 in Europe, 3 in Asia and 1 in Australia.

We hope to see you at the webinar.