With the March 2010 GoGrid newsletter, we welcome and introduce a new name to our communications, that of Maria Gallegos who has joined us as a Product Marketing Coordinator for GoGrid. Maria comes from a marketing background (from financial services to non-profits) and will be producing the GoGrid newsletter as well as managing other customer experience programs. One of her first tasks has been the March 2010 Customer Update Newsletter.
For those who are not current GoGrid users, we provide the full newsletter on our blog, just so that you can see what you are missing out on! If any of the items that are mentioned here interest you, or if you want to get started on GoGrid right away (remember, we provide a full range of hosted infrastructure solutions ranging from Cloud Servers to Dedicated Servers to Cloud Storage, all within a Load Balanced network), I encourage you to speak with a GoGrid Sales Representative. They can provide you with answers to many of your infrastructure hosting questions. Just tell them that I sent you!
Here is the full March 2010 GoGrid Customer Update newsletter:
Hello,
As 2010 continues to progress, so does GoGrid. From system enhancements to new partners, you’ll find this edition of the newsletter full of information to better help you manage your cloud hosting infrastructure. Specific topics include: (more…)
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).
A couple of weeks ago we released a new version of GoGrid which included a variety of exciting enhancements and features. Most notable are:
GoGrid Dedicated Servers
List View of GoGrid Objects
Edit F5 Load Balancers via the API
New Login Page
Self Service Support Links
More details about these features can be found on the following GoGrid blog post. For a quick overview of the new features in the form of a screencast, please watch the video below. I quickly cover many of the items listed above including:
As you probably know by now, GoGrid released a series of new enhancements to our Cloud Computing Infrastructure Hosting service. You can read more about what was included in this latest release in this blog post. Some of the highlighted new features and improvements include:
GoGrid Dedicated Servers
List View of GoGrid Objects
Edit f5 Load Balancers
New Login Page
Self-Service Support Links
We also sent out a newsletter highlighting some of the changes in the January/February 2010 timeframe.
As with previous releases, I wanted to spend some time with our VP of Products, Mario Olivarez, and discuss some of these items and what they mean to GoGrid customers. (YouTube direct link.)
As always, if you have any questions about any of the items you heard in this video or about GoGrid in general, please leave a comment on this post or ask us on Twitter (@GoGrid). Stay tuned for more updates and videos.
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.
Last week, I published the November 2009 GoGrid Customer Update newsletter on the GoGrid blog. In it, I highlighted the important changes that were included in the recent deployment of GoGrid, including our new GoGrid CDN, the GoGrid Exchange, new RAM Hour & Bandwidth plans, new Windows Server base images and some other items.
To follow up with that newsletter, which was sent to GoGrid customers by Mario Olivarez (VP of Products), I thought that it would be useful for those interested in GoGrid to learn a bit more. So, I spent a few minutes interviewing Mario about these recent changes and what they mean to our customers.
If you have any questions about what you heard or saw on the video or GoGrid in general, please leave a comment on this post or ask us on Twitter (@GoGrid). Stay tuned for more updates and videos coming your way.
I had the pleasure of not only attending the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, CA this week, staffing the booth and generally enjoying talking to a wide range of developers, technologists, vendors, partners and others, but I also was able to do a couple of interviews with Peter Silva, Technical Marketing Manager of f5 Networks. If you don’t already know, free f5 load balancing has been built in to GoGrid since its launch in March 2008.
Below are pair of interviews that appear here as well as on the f5 DevCentral site. We hope you enjoy them!
First is the one with Peter as “interviewer” (also available at f5 DevCentral):
Then the one where I interview Peter about the Expo:
I came across an interesting article in the CNN Tech section of CNN titled “A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’” written by John Sutter. The article itself, takes a unique approach as the author “searches” for his data in the “cloud.” As Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOmpoints out, the goal of the article is to “explain cloud computing to the masses” however, she continues by saying that the premise behind the CNN article is not quite on target. The example that is given in the article is that of uploading a picture to an image sharing site like Flickr or Picasa, and that once you do that, you just “started using Cloud Computing.”
The problem that I have been having with mainstream media is that now putting stuff “into the cloud” seems to be synonymous with “using Cloud Computing.” It is not. Simply uploading data or files to a service that stores it is just that, storing data on someone’s server. Cloud Computing is much more, especially when you factor in the different types of Cloud Computing layers (Infrastructure – like GoGrid or AWS, Platform – like Google App Engine or Force.com, or Software – like SalesForce). Some would say, myself included, that Gmail is a type of Cloud Application, however I’m starting to view SaaS or Cloud Applications almost in a class of their own since the boundaries or somewhat blurred and the characteristics of Cloud Computing (on-demand, scalable, utility billing, elastic, self-service and even virtualized) might not be fully present with the SaaS space. That is a different topic entirely.
While the author, John Sutter, of the CNN article brings up some good points, he is obviously frustrated by the lack of visibility within the cloud and of the vendors that provide Cloud Services of one sort or another. I personally extend an open invitation to John to visit the GoGrid offices where he can fully explore our offering (yes, we too will have to put some things under NDA or “off the record” but we are always fairly forthcoming on our direction and thought-leadership in the Cloud Computing space).
Back to the title of this article. John’s story on the CNN site opens with the following video called “Cloud Computing Explained” and discusses, in a friendly format, how his picture travels into the Cloud. Its a somewhat good attempt at explaining how “the cloud” works, but misses much of the true benefits and features of Cloud Computing. Watch it below and read on.
Over a year ago, I conceived and scripted a video ALSO called “Cloud Computing Explained.” It was produced in-house with our web development team and simply uploaded to YouTube without any real hype. As of this writing, it has over 100,000 views, a 5-star rating (almost 300 ratings) and over 150 (mainly positive) comments about it. Of course, we took the approach of explaining the Cloud Infrastructure layer, because that is what GoGrid provides, Cloud Infrastructure Hosting as a Service.
Yesterday we announced new GoGrid functionality which allows you to edit, delete and restore personal server images known as MyGSIs. Since a picture is typically worth a 1,000 words, I compiled a quick screencast that walks you through this new functionality as well as through the changes we made to the Billing Widget.
If you have any questions about this functionality or other things “GoGrid”, please leave a comment on this post. As always, I’m reachable via Twitter (@hightechdad) and email (Michael AT GoGrid DOT com).
Last week, VMWorld 2009 Expo took center stage in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. With 3+ days of VMWare sessions and exhibits, there was a lot of buzz about VMWare, but also about Cloud Computing in general. GoGrid was an exhibitor at the show, in the Innovators Pavilion, and we found that many of the attendees were looking not solely at VMWare but at other Cloud Computing vendors as well (like GoGrid).
Several of our executives spent time at the show, not only staffing our booth, but also attending sessions as well as talking to vendors and other companies on the expo floor.
During and after the show, I interviewed three GoGrid executives to get their impression of what they saw and heard, as well as their thoughts on what the announcements meant to them and to GoGrid. I interviewed:
