On Wednesday February 24, 2010, GoGrid hosted a webinar for new and existing GoGrid users designed to discuss the recent February 2010 Feature updates to GoGrid. There is a blog post that details all of the new features included in the release as well as a screencast which walks through these features and important changes. The webinar covered the following information:
What is our view of Cloud Computing
What is GoGrid
New feature: GoGrid Dedicated Servers
What is Hybrid Infrastructure
A GoGrid Portal Demo
Deploying a GoGrid Dedicated Server
The new GoGrid List View
Walk-through of other Interface Enhancements & Links
Question & Answer Session
The entire Webinar is below and is broken into two parts:
Part One – Overview presentation, discussion of Cloud & GoGrid, demonstration of the GoGrid Portal & GoGrid Dedicated Server Deployments (30 minutes in length)
Part Two – Question & Answer session from the audience and Additional Information (19 minutes in length)
Also included later on in this post is the stand-alone presentation (without audio, demo walk-through or question and answers).
This past Wednesday night, GoGrid was the host of another StartUp SF (along with co-host Microsoft BizSpark of which we are a Hosting Partner). The guest speaker was David Weekly, founder of PBWorks, a client of GoGrid & ServePath. StartUp SF is a regular meetup in San Francisco designed to help young businesses become more successful. Each meetup has a format designed to stimulate, engage and network in a social learning environment. Each event has a guest speaker who talks about expert subject matter and how it relates to helping startups. Also, successful companies showcase their products and services in an interactive manner with product demos occurring throughout the event.
Tomorrow, strategic partner Stratonomic and GoGrid will be hosting a webinar where you can learn how you can enable the lowest cost Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions in the cloud (specifically the GoGrid cloud). Disaster Recovery is often either ignored because of high-cost concerns or the complicated nature of it. Doing it yourself can be extremely time consuming, difficult and frequently, customers don’t even know where to begin.
I particularly like how Stratonomic phrases it on their site:
(COST) EFFECTIVE FAULT TOLERANCE: Can your disaster recovery (DR) site handle all of your traffic, securely and reliably? Do you even have a DR site? Setting up and maintaining DR site in the cloud is not only extremely cheap, but it will let you sleep soundly at night. How cheap? Save 75% in your OPEX, and over 90% in CAPEX compared to building out and hosting your own DR site. We like to call it DR on a dime.
Luckily, the Cloud offers a great solution for DR, and Stratonomic has created many various Disaster Recovery solutions within the GoGrid cloud that will fit most IT organization’s needs, all starting as low as $349 per month.
Last week, CloudWorld09 Expo took place in San Francisco and GoGrid’s CEO, John Keagy, did a presentation titled “How To Get Started in the Cloud” to a fully packed room in one of the sessions at the Expo.
The speaker abstract was as follows:
The Cloud Computing phenomenon is happening NOW – it’s a reality and can provide more flexibility for your web hosting – faster, easier and at a lower cost. Companies do not need to own their own server hardware or network infrastructure anymore. The ease of scaling up or out when the need arises, the speed which new web applications can be designed, prototyped, tested, and deployed, and the inherent cost savings (CapEx to OpEx) are truly attractive. Cloud Computing is not just a buzz term we are hearing more and more, but the next wave of hosting infrastructure. As the Cloud continues to gain acceptance, developers, designers, sysadmins and IT professionals need to understand the advantages, best practices and how to get started using Cloud Computing.
In this session, John Keagy, founder and CEO of GoGrid discussed:
What is Cloud Computing – The Cloud Pyramid
The Benefits of Cloud Computing & Hybrid Hosting
What can Cloud Computing do for me and my business
The Competitive Landscape & Key Differentiators
Cost Savings of Cloud Computing – pay only for what you need
How to determine when to utilize Cloud Computing
How should you get started using the Cloud?
How to identify what to put in the cloud first
The presentation is available below as well as on SlideShare.
CloudWorld Expo 2009 kicks off this week in San Francisco, and GoGrid is an exhibitor. Come visit us at booth #525 and see first hand our exciting new release of GoGrid 2.0 (which you can read about here). This show was previously known as LinuxWorld. Last year, we (GoGrid) wonBest of Show and the year before that, our parent company, ServePath, won the Best Grid Solution Product Excellence Award.
We will be giving out high-value credits ($100 and up) for GoGrid at the booth so you are encouraged to drop by and meet with us. Do note that the Exhibit Hall is only open between the following hours:
However, we will be at the booth during the various speaking times so if you do not want to hear a speaker, stick around after the Expo Hall “closes” for more personal time with us.
Last week GoGrid held a joint webinar with AppZero titled “Moving Windows Server Applications to the Cloud in Three Easy Steps.” Over 70 people attended and many others have requested that we publish the webinar and presentation.
For your convenience, we have the full webinar available below:
It’s with great pleasure that we announce the guest speaker for the StartUp SF (version 2.1) event coming on June 4th, 2009. (StartUp SF is a San Francisco Technology Meetup co-hosted by GoGrid/ServePath and Microsoft BizSpark.)
Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic, has graciously agreed to do a presentation titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community.” Learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.
You may have seen Loic and Seesmic Desktop mentioned in the New York Times site.
Seesmic is Loic’s 5th business so he definitely has lots of experience under his belt. Some more information about Loic:
Loic is the Seesmic CEO. He founded the company in 2007 with the goal of turning online video into a powerful medium for threaded, interactive video conversations.
Yesterday, GoGrid’s VP of Technology Strategy, Randy Bias, gave a presentation titled “Managing Storage in the Cloud” which discusses some of the challenges facing companies looking to using Cloud Storage as a storage solution. Highlights include:
Last week, I participated in a webinar with GoGrid’s partner, Appistry, that was titled: “Unlock the Power of Scalable, Agile Cloud Platforms.” To quote: “Cloud computing has grown from a little-known buzz word into one of the hottest topics in IT today. View this On-Demand Webinar to learn how to get started with this exciting new technology. More importantly, learn about the best practices for enabling your applications to scale and truly harness the power of cloud computing.”
Sam Charrington (Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at Appistry) and I (Michael Sheehan – Technology Evangelist of GoGrid) discussed not only what the Cloud currently looks like (especially as related to Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Platforms) but also showed a demo of how the Appistry/GoGrid solution works through a live demo of the product.
Shown below is the Webinar in its entirety (complete with plenty of audio mishaps, dropped calls and scratchy voices).
Also, there were several questions related to GoGrid asked during the webinar that were quickly answered or not answered at all. I wanted to provide some responses to those questions within this post. (Note: not all questions that were asked have been answered.) So without further ado…
Q: What is GoGrid’s role in this partnership? A: GoGrid provides the Cloud Infrastructure on which the Appistry Platform runs. Customers who wish to dynamically scale their application code and deploy across multiple cloud servers use Appistry to manage these dynamics and the application code is deployed and scaled across GoGrid servers within the GoGrid infrastructure.
I have been working on a Cloud Computing presentation that provides a basic overview of the technology and how it (and GoGrid) fits into the marketplace. While this presentation continues to evolve (as does the Cloud) and will subsequently undergo other iterations, I felt that many readers might find the content to be useful and informative so I’m publishing it for commentary, compliments and criticism. It also further develops the concept of the “Cloud Pyramid” and offers additional segmentation of the Cloud Computing space.
GoGrid CEO John Keagy has been presenting this at various conferences and meetings. If you are interested in having John present to your organization, please let us know. The presentation continues to evolve, representing our current thinking on Cloud Computing. We hope you enjoy it. Send us your comments!
