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 is pleased to announce today our technology partnership with Zeus Technology. This strategic partnership brings Zeus’ leadership in software-based application traffic management to GoGrid’s Cloud Hosting infrastructure. Using Zeus’ ZXTM VA (Virtual Appliance), GoGrid customers can now add robust traffic management capabilities like traffic shaping and prioritization, content compression and service level monitoring, among others.

Other benefits of using Zeus’ ZXTM include:

• TrafficScript—the most intuitive traffic routing language available
• Java Extensions for sophisticated traffic processing needs
• Server Load Balancing providing Layer 7 traffic management for all applications
• TrafficCluster Scalability to grow capacity and prevent compound failures
• Application Acceleration for enhanced ROI on new and existing deployments
• Control API for tight integration between ZXTM and other devices
• Event Handling for automated alerting and resolution of key events
• More are listed on the Zeus GoGrid Partner page

The full press release is below as well as available online.

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Today we released a new Whitepaper written by Randy Bias, GoGrid’s VP of Technology Strategy titled “Scaling Your Internet Business.” If you are a Web Application Developer or interested in learning about scalability, specific to how it relates to Web Applications in or outside of the Cloud, I encourage you to give this whitepaper a read.

The whitepaper can be downloaded here from the GoGrid site.

Scalability is critical to the success of many organizations currently involved in doing business on the Web or who are providing information that may suddenly become heavily demanded. While there are many strategies that IT organizations can undertake, the way they are designed and implemented can make or break these businesses.

The GoGrid whitepaper discusses the following topics:

• How web applications scale
• Cloud Computing and scalability therein
• Thinking through and choosing a scaling strategy
• GoGrid & ServePath scalability options

Scalability can come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. You can scale “up” (vertically) or “out” (horizontally). Choosing the right option can be tricky, if not daunting. Depending on what you want your strategy to be, you can choose “cloud-only”, “dedicated/colocated-only” or a “hybrid” approach.

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With the MacWorld Expo 2008 hitting the Internet today, many users were looking for a good way to get live updates from the Steve Jobs’ Keynote Address. There were many sites offering the traditional “write and update” blog posting method where the blogger continually update their blog post. Those sites actually turned out to be slow and with spotty service. Even the big names like Engadget and Gizmodo and C|net had issues of demand.

Recently, I tested out a new service from CoverItLive.com whose service allows for the embedding of live-blogging within a blog post. It’s actually a pretty well thought out, feature-rich service that we may use in the future at our local Meet-Ups like SFBeta or SFNewTech. However, there was one part of the service that they didn’t “think out” very well today…that of capacity.

I believe that several sites were planning on using CoverItLive’s service during the Keynote address (sites like geekbrief.tv). Unfortunately, when I went to look at GeekBrief, it simply did not load. So, digging deeper, I looked to see if perhaps CoverItLive was showcasing some of today’s Apple Live-Blogging events. What I was greeted with on their site was this:

“Global demand exceeded our capacity.” Those words hurt. They hurt CoverItLive and they hurt all of their customers who were planning on using the service to cover this event. Again, let me reiterate that I believe that CoverItLive seems to be a great product offering. It just seems that their demand forecasting needs a bit of work.

So, where would GoGrid have helped? As I see it, in a couple of ways: (more…)