With so many different types of cloud infrastructure available – public, private, internal – and with so many conflicting opinions in the industry, finding the right cloud for your business can be a confusing and frustrating process.

In order to bring clarity and understanding, we recorded a new educational webinar, hosted by GoGrid, where guest speaker James Staten, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., and Mario Olivarez, VP of Product Management of GoGrid share new research and discuss the status and direction of the Cloud infrastructure landscape.

These cloud experts discuss:

• The 4 characteristics of cloud computing
• Why are companies using the Cloud?
• What is the difference between Public and Private Cloud?
• Why is 2011 the Year of the Hosted Private Cloud?
• What is the ROI of the Cloud?

The recorded webinar also includes all the answers to the questions submitted by the live audience.

So if you are interested in learning more about the cloud industry or want to have a greater understanding of how cloud computing technology can help your business The Future of the Cloud will be well worth viewing. Starting today, this webinar is now available as a free download (.wmv and .mov versions available).

Please download the webinar by clicking the download link and leave your thoughts in comment section on this blog post.

Download “The Future of the Cloud – Why 2011 is the Year of Hosted Private Cloud”

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen me ask (and answer) the question “what is cloud computing?” I continually focus on this question because “cloud” has become a buzzword that means many different things to different people – even in the IT industry. Many people have asked that question. And the answers 2-3 years ago were vague. But it does seem that people are fine-tuning their thoughts on what it means nowadays.

(image source: pyramid.GoGrid.com)

A few weeks ago, I set out to clear up this cloud confusion, at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, CA., by asking several experts “what is cloud computing?” Hear what they had to say in the video or read highlights below:

Martin Tantow – President of Amiro Consulting

Martin Tantow reminds us that cloud computing is a concept we’ve been familiar with for well over a decade. Hotmail, founded in 1996, was a web-based e-mail service that could easily be referred to as one of the original cloud services. Martin believes cloud is a movement where businesses are moving their data storage to the Web and removing the need to store data centrally.

Sven Hammar – CEO of Apica

Sven Hammar contrasts the differences between cloud infrastructure and hosting your own physical servers. Some of the benefits he listed were:

• No upfront capital expenditure
• Scaling on demand without worrying about physical dependencies
• Creating elasticity by circumventing server failure by switching backup data centers

Siddhartha Agarwal – VP of Americas Field Operations, Zend Technologies

Siddhartha Agarwal shares what cloud means for the developer community. Siddhartha points out that developers are not infrastructure people. Cloud computing is valuable because it enables developers to test and deploy their applications quickly without having to worry about infrastructure. Using cloud gives developers peace of mind and let’s them focus on what they are best at.

George Reese – CTO enStratus

George Reese states that cloud computing is on-demand self provisioning of IT resources (virtual, hardware, software, platforms, etc.). He believes that this evolution alters the way we use IT and foresees that this technology will completely change the way businesses use infrastructure.

I believe that it is important to continually ask this question and track the evolution. From 3 years ago, definitions were more nebulous – now, they are much more defined and people can truly articulate what they believe the cloud to be.

What is your definition of cloud computing? Leave a comment!

Some pretty big things are happening at GoGrid. Today we announced the release of our Image Rights Management (IRM) service for GoGrid Partners, a very powerful technology that assists with the software and licensing management in the cloud, specifically within the GoGrid Exchange. As many of you may know, GoGrid Exchange is a catalogue of software server images and solutions from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are available on-demand for those who use GoGrid cloud infrastructure. IRM adds several benefits for ISVs and, in turn, customers.

To better explain IRM technology and why it is so important, I sat down with Raja Srinivasan, VP of Cloud Computing at Zeus Technologies, and our very own Paul Lancaster, Manager of Cloud Ecosystems at GoGrid. They discuss how IRM is the solution to licensing software in the cloud and what the GoGrid Exchange means for partners and customers.

Raja and Paul highlight many of the benefits of the GoGrid Exchange as well as focus on our new IRM technology. They break them down into two main areas.

Benefits for Partners:

• License Management – IRM technology automatically verifies if the software is correctly licensed to run within the GoGrid cloud, and will automatically take pre-defined actions should the licensing be invalid.
• Software Management – Simply update your software on the GoGrid Exchange and it is automatically made available to your customers.
• Easier to Deliver Support – When a customer has a support need, the ISV can quickly understand exactly what kind of infrastructure the software is running on so they can identify the support issue faster.
• Easy Payments – GoGrid handles the invoicing of customers for both Partner Image licensing and infrastructure usage, and then pays the Partner for the Partner Service Image usage.

Benefits for GoGrid Customers:

• Single-Button Install – Customers can find the software solution they want on exchange.gogrid.com and instantly install it with little to no configuration.
• Software Management – Users are automatically kept up to date with the latest versions of the software they installed from the Exchange.
• Unified Invoicing – GoGrid handles the billing for Exchange Partner server images as well as infrastructure costs within a single invoice. Customers can manage their software and infrastructure payments from a single portal on a single bill.
• Flexibility & Scalability – the GoGrid Exchange allows customers to get the software they want when they want it. Also, customers aren’t locked into any multi-year licensing deals. The Exchange makes software solutions in the cloud highly efficient and ready to scale with your company.

We’re very excited about the release of IRM what this means for our customers and the cloud computing industry.

For more information, please read our Press Release titled “GoGrid Enhances Partner Exchange Platform with New Image Rights Management Technology” which is available in the Press Release section of the GoGrid site.

For more information, please visit http://exchange.gogrid.com

Last week we announced several updates to GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure services. One of the highlights of this update was the enhancement we made to the saving your GoGrid Server Images (MyGSI) process.

Up till now, saving your MyGSI has been a fairly simple 3-step process that was helpful for horizontal scaling, re-imaging of servers, disaster recovery, or setting up failover environments. Through the update, this process can now be completed in a single step.

We’ve created several helpful tutorials to help educate users on the new process. Please reference our video and text tutorials below or take a look at the MyGSI User Manual on the GoGrid wiki for more information regarding the new process.

Video Tutorial

Below is a video screencast on how to create a GoGrid Custom Server Image (MyGSI). (Direct YouTube link)

Text Tutorial

To create a GoGrid Server Image (MyGSI), the process is very simple and easy to do. First, within the Grid View, click on the server you want to create a Server Image from. When you do that, a Save icon will appear (see the green arrow below):

The Save button is also in the List view:

Once you choose the server that you want to save and click the Save icon or link, you will get the following prompt:

Note that if your server has more than 50 GB of data on it, the saving process will fail and you will need to reduce the amount of data on your server.

Simply give your server image a name, description, and indicate whether it is a Web or Database server.

After this, you server will be gracefully shut down, and the image saving process will start. You will see your server’s status light turn to amber:

And there will be an entry in the Jobs tab that not only states that the action has started, but also after a few seconds, displays the expected time for the server to be fully saved to cloud storage. If there is no “Estimated Job Duration,” just wait a minute and refresh the Jobs tab.

Your server will come back on line shortly.

Once the server image is created, you have the ability to instantiate new servers from it, or share it with the GoGrid community as a Community GSI (CGSI).

Lastly, the MyGSI process is backwards compatible, meaning that if you had created a Sandbox Server previously and it still appears within your GoGrid account, you can still convert it into a MyGSI using the same older process. Also, any MyGSIs created using the legacy process will still be available to create new server instances. However, the creation of Sandbox Images has been removed as of this release, and replaced with the much easier process described above.

Have any questions about the MyGSI update? Contact our support team. We’re excited to help you!

Last week GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, was a guest on “This Week in Cloud Computing” hosted by Amanda Coolong & David Linthicum. The video podcast covered a variety of interesting topics including Fujitsu’s new cloud offering in Asia-Pac, Microsoft’s war of words with Google over Cloud Connect and Intel’s rumored client-aware cloud offerings. John Keagy weighs in with some very interesting thoughts on each of these topics. We’ve embedded the full episode for your viewing pleasure, but we’ve also included highlights and the discussion about GoGrid’s past, present and future!

Note: each of the clips below the main one will jump directly to the relevant content.

Full Episode

Highlights

Australia is the first country outside of Japan to roll out Fujitsu’s standardized cloud offering. Do you think the expansion of cloud computing in Asia-Pac will add a boom to business development?

Google and Microsoft are sparring over Cloud Connect and Microsoft Office. Microsoft claims that Cloud Connect is Google’s ploy to get their hands on more of our data. Should Microsoft be worried and is Google going to succeed with enterprise?

Intel is planning a Cloud Vision event and are expected to reveal client-aware cloud. Will this mean cloud providers will write for devices directly and move further away from the browser and closer to apps?

Amazon launches AWS Cloud Formation to make easier for enterprises to mack stacks of apps and recourses. With this ability to combine resources, will this provide a strategic advantage for Amazon?

Amanda Coolong, David Linthicum and CEO John Keagy discuss GoGrid’s past, present and future.

Do you have an opinion on what’s happening in cloud computing? Share in the comments section below!