Press Coverage

Cloud infrastructure company GoGrid announced the Big Data Solution, an offering based on a hybrid infrastructure architecture that combines cloud computing with single-tenant infrastructure components, all managed through the GoGrid management portal. Built to support high-performance analytic jobs and able to be used for applications that leverage NoSQL solutions like Hadoop to serve up content via app servers.

Cloud infrastructure company GoGrid wants to make it easier for customers to run "Big Data" analytic tools to leverage large datasets. Today it unveiled GoGrid Big Data Solution, a new offering that enables customers to use NoSQL database solutions like Hadoop. The solution uses a hybrid infrastructure architecture that combines GoGrid's cloud with single-tenant infrastructure components, all managed through GoGrid's portal. GoGrid's new bundle includes pre-configured hardware to match requirements for running Cloudera's Distribution of Hadoop (CDH) as an introduction to Hadoop or proof of concept. The bundle consists of 1 Name Node and 3 Data Nodes in a multi-rack architecture plus GoGrid's Professional Cloud plan. With this solution, GoGrid customers leverage cloud servers to quickly scale to handle sudden spikes in traffic, while tapping single-tenant infrastructure specially designed for analytical use cases.

Cloud infrastructure company GoGrid announced on Tuesday it has launched the GoGrid Big Data Solution, a hybrid cloud-based infrastructure that uses single-tenant infrastructure components but is managed through the GoGrid management portal. As data-intensive activities like scientific research, social networking, and photography and video archiving continue to grow, there is an increasing demand in the industry for reliable technologies to process big data at high speeds. GoGrid says it new Big Data Solution provides businesses with maximum flexibility, choice, performance, and control. It is built to support high-performance analytic jobs and can be used for applications that use NoSQL solutions like Hadoop to serve up content via app servers.

GoGrid has launched a big data analytics tool, aiming to help businesses take advantage of the deluge of data hitting the companies using cloud computing. The GoGrid Big Data Solution is based on the firm's hybrid cloud offering, where it offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on either a multi-tenant basis or with dedicated servers within its data centres. With the new launch, businesses can take advantage of the single-tenant environment to house their data and analyse it using big data tools like Cloudera's Distribution of Hadoop (CDH). However, if they then have a sudden spike in traffic where they need more capacity, they can take advantage of GoGrid's cloud servers and burst out into its multi-tenant environment.

GoGrid today introduces its Big Data Solution predictive analytics platform. It adds features that combine the best from cloud computing with hybrid cloud flexibility and front-end apps. Everything is managed from the GoGrid web-based management portal. Amazon and others need more assembly of individual pieces that are less integrated than what GoGrid offers. The idea is to support very high performance analytics. It has preconfigured hardware that includes a collection of four different servers as part of GoGrid's Professional Cloud plan. You can use this to quickly scale up demand to meet traffic spikes in your Hadoop NoSQL databases, for example. This allows for a complete hybrid cloud solution with the added security of a single-tenant infrastructure.

We assembled this list with help from analysts at Cloud Technology Partners, Current Analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC, and Neovise who watch the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service scene very closely. Each was asked to name the companies they believed have the most influence - whether that's measured in market share, mind share, revenue, existing enterprise pull or underlying technology links - in the world of IaaS. GoGrid prides itself on being a pure-play cloud company offering both public and private Xen-based IaaS with optional managed services.

This year's 100 top, private on-demand and SaaS companies-plus 20 to watch-are creating a complex world of interconnected business intelligence, merging valuable legacy data and systems with new, vital streams of information.

Congratulations to all the 2012 OnDemand 100 winners. As the digital information created by businesses continues to multiply at astronomical rates, OnDemand 100 companies are providing the technology platforms and services needed to manage and leverage the emerging data macrosphere, propelling business intelligence into a connected, informed future.

If you want to be in the cloud business, these are some of the cloud infrastructure companies that will help you get there...GoGrid prides itself on being a pure-play IaaS provider, focusing its hosted cloud infrastructure to deploy and manage apps and workloads.

At some point, the founder of almost any business will face a decision about whether to continue in their leadership role when the company reaches certain pivotal milestones around growth, financing and other concerns that aren't necessarily tied directly into the entrepreneurial notions that sparked the business.

Keagy is reassuming the leadership role at a company that definitely has the brand recognition as one of the pioneering organizations in the cloud hosting space - a market with a handful of leaders and a ton of market share to grab.

While it might not make as big of a news splash as when Apple founder Steve Jobs returned to his company as CEO in 1997, cloud company GoGrid recently did some reminiscing of their own. Keagy pointed towards recent initiatives undertaken by GoGrid including the company's opening of a data center facility in Amsterdam, The Netherlands just earlier this month.

Cloud hosting provider GoGrid announced that founder and chairman John Keagy will return to the role of CEO. GoGrid has seen significant growth in the past year with its pure-play infrastructure-as-a-service, offering public cloud and private cloud infrastructure solutions, and recently expanded into the Europe.

eWEEK's main headline for 2012 is "How to Control Data," and ground zero for this is the data center. Those who know how to control both the archival and current views of the data are most often the ones who come up with significant new ideas and promote business progress. IT that is progressive will gain ground in 2012.

From Slide #7 - Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, AT&T, Verizon and others were pleased with their 2011 business as more and more enterprises discovered that they can get exactly the services (storage, analytics, accounting, social networking, application monitoring, for example) from Web services , and get them on-demand, and in reliable fashion.

Amazon Web Services customers this week are worrying about a server reboot the provider is pushing out, but if users have architected their applications properly, they shouldn't be concerned, experts said. GoGrid, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider, also noted that if businesses run their own servers internally, they have to make similar updates. Moving to the cloud saves administrators a lot of management trouble overall, but this kind of required reboot might be "trouble some thought they left behind when they got to the cloud," Jayson Vantuyl, chief engineer at GoGrid, said.

Hybrid hosting services could be a path forward for providers that are waiting for their cloud service offerings to take off while struggling with managed hosting services that have become low-margin commodities. "Hybrid hosting will become the norm," said John Keagy, founder and chairman of GoGrid. "Somewhere in the order of 85% of computing is still done in-house. There is a huge wave of outsourcing coming that will transition to managed services and fully automated cloud services."

GoGrid, HP Enterprise Services have amped up offerings that address security and other issues. The decision to host your data center somewhere else, or to move some of your operations into a cloud, is never trivial. Chief among concerns are security, performance, and management - including disaster recovery plans that meet your requirements. GoGrid, a cloud infrastructure and hosting provider, has made a move to address some of those concerns with a new service called CloudLink, a fast, dedicated private line that's been established via a leased, dedicated line between its data centers in San Francisco and Ashburn, Virginia. Now, GoGrid can dedicate specific amounts of segregated bandwidth to customers. The goal: eliminate worry about sending critical traffic over public lines that lack security and can impact performance.

Infrastructure-as-a-service provider GoGrid is adding a dedicated line service between its facilities so users can be sure of fast and secure transfers. Customers with applications that require fast database replication or that use GoGrid's two data centers for disaster recovery may be interested in the new CloudLink offering, executives said. "Anybody who wants to keep data in sync" will be interested in the service, Rupert Tagnipes, product lead for the CloudLink service said.

Cloud infrastructure provider GoGrid (www.gogrid.com) announced on Tuesday that it has introduced its dedicated private line CloudLink for customers to access a secure connection across its data centers. CloudLink is an ideal solution for corporate environments that require disaster recovery and data replication.

Data center infrastructure management software developer Modius (www.modius.com) announced on Monday that cloud-based infrastructure as a service provider GoGrid (www.gogrid.com) has deployed the Modius OpenData solution. With the deployment of the Modius infrastructure management solution, GoGrid says it will reduce its operation costs by 10 to 15 percent.

Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) player GoGrid Tuesday pulled the curtain off of a new partner program through which the company said will give cloud providers the tools needed to beef up their cloud practices to grab a portion of the IaaS market, which is expected to hit $4 billion in four years.

A new offering from Dome9 is trying to make the cloud more secure by providing an automated service to centralize and consolidate security management across both private and public clouds and in and outside of your data center. They are also announcing a partnership with GoGrid as their first MSP that will resell this service to their customers.

Storage software developer Gluster has partnered with cloud infrastructure provider GoGrid to make its open-source storage solution available on the GoGrid platform. The link with GoGrid means Gluster's software can be packaged with GoGrid Server Image, letting enterprises embed shared storage into GoGrid cloud infrastructure deployments. GoGrid customers can deploy scale-out NAS cloud storage to petabytes of capacity, according to Gluster.

Forrester Research projected that by 2020, the cloud computing business will be worth $241 billion dollars! There are at least 25 cloud vendors who are brawling for the big chunk of the market share, that SaaS and the cloud has created, and which continues to grow tremendously. GoGrid offers their customers a secure and scalable platform where they can easily move and manage their applications and work projects.

While many commodity cloud providers price their cloud services at very low on-demand rates, GoGrid offers the best value for money by providing enterprise class services at close-to-commodity prices. GoGrid started off as a commodity cloud provider but is soon emerging as a strong competitor among enterprise cloud providers.

Users have different reasons and preferences for deciding between shared and dedicated resources in the cloud. But most shouldn't be making those decisions based on the infrastructure, but based on the application that they're trying to run, according to executives from GoGrid, Nimbula and Softlayer at GigaOM's Structure conference on Thursday.

Leading cloud infrastructure leader GoGrid had some news to spread at Cloud Expo East 2011 last week, including the fact that Compuware (News - Alert) Corporation is using its cloud infrastructure to run the industry's first free IPv6 Website Performance Comparison Test. At the Cloud Computing Expo, GoGrid was not only spreading the word about its IPv6 infrastructure, but Executive Chairman and Founder John Keagy was also holding a session on the economics of cloud computing. Keagy told TMCnet at Cloud Expo that his session explored what drives the economics of the cloud and what people assume drives the cloud that does not.

Compuware, a provider of application performance management (APM) software, is offering a free IPv6 Web site Performance Comparison Test... Compuware will be running the performance test on the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service network of GoGrid. The company provisions blocks of IP addresses on its IaaS platform for interoperability with IPv6, said Mark Worsey, chief information officer of GoGrid.

Earlier this week, cloud provider GoGrid announced that founder and original CEO John Keagy is leaving that post and transitioning into a new role, a decision Keagy told me Friday morning is the result of the company growing too quickly. Keagy, now executive chairman, will now focus on the latter two responsibilities - leaving the day-to-day management to new CEO Warren Heffelfinger.

IT shops interested in moving workloads to the cloud should check out the performance rankings of cloud providers by CloudSleuth, a cloud monitoring service owned by Compuware Inc. Google App Engine came in first, followed by Microsoft Azure, then GoGrid. The rankings measures the response time to a test application that all providers in the study agreed to run in their cloud. The tests are run from 125 end-user U.S. locations in all 50 states and from 75 international locations in 30 countries and are conducted every 15 minutes.

GoGrid CEO John Keagy wrote on his blog Thursday that when it comes to cloud computing, there are a couple of things that have been overrated in the industry, like cheap hydroelectric power and massive-scale data centers. What Keagy says does matter for making cloud computing financially compelling to both providers and users are things like pay-per-use pricing, automation, shared platforms and commodity hardware.

GoGrid is among the first true public cloud providers, and now offers a variety of cloud hosting option out of multiple global data centers ... the company has been quietly leading cloud innovation for years.

GoGrid is attempting to simplify cloud licensing for its independent software vendor (ISV) partners via a system called Image Rights Management ... The IRM just takes this a step further by helping ISV partners monitor unauthorized use in IaaS environments.

GoGrid, which offers infrastructure-as-a-service computing in a fashion similar to Amazon's, offers service credits to customers when uptime falls below 100%...

GoGrid prides itself on being the biggest pure-play Infrastructure-as- a-Service company in the world. Its infrastructure lets businesses deploy and manage apps in the cloud platform within minutes and with a flexibility that separates it from the Johnny-comelatelies.

This week one the richest comparisons of GoGrid and Amazon from user experience emerged from Postgres Online Journal, the blog of small company with big computational needs that focuses on custom database and web application creation as well as prototype hosting.

The authors note that there is no one-size-fits-all nugget of advice since so much is dependent on any number of factors. Nonetheless, they do note, while it making it completely clear that there was no monetary or other incentive behind their statement, that for their particular needs GoGrid was the winner for their projects most of the time.

With all the urgency and excitement revolving around cloud computing these days, it's not surprising that differentiating among the various services becomes important -- and one of the top criteria is sure to be performance -- Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) came in fifth with a 10.942 second average. GoGrid came in third at 10.468 seconds, while Teklinks held down fourth place with a response time of 10.568 seconds

GoGrid Launches Hosted Private Cloud - What's a "hosted private cloud"? A public cloud generally lets customers rent virtual infrastructure shared with other customers. Customers pay for what they use. A private cloud is built by an organization to advantage of virtualization and resource pooling internally

GoGrid wants IT organizations to run production applications on a virtual private cloud computing architecture that runs in its data centers. According to GoGrid CEO John Keagy, the company’s new GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud gives IT organizations access to a set of shared IT infrastructure resources that are dedicated to running their applications.

GoGrid expands its portfolio of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings with the latest Hosted Private Cloud, which lets customers run applications in a public cloud environment that uses hardware dedicated to their use.

GoGrid has rolled out a hosted private cloud offering, designed to offer customers the benefits of the public cloud on dedicated hardware. GoGrid's service is similar to the public cloud in that it offers an on-demand, programmable, manageable and scalable service, but with the added security and reliability of dedicated hardware, said John Keagy, CEO of GoGrid.

Cloud provider GoGrid has expanded its infrastructure-as-a-service catalog by launching a Hosted Private Cloud that maintains all the features of GoGrid’s standard multitenant cloud offering, but on dedicated physical servers.

Cloud hosting provider GoGrid announced on Wednesday it has introduced an enterprise-grade hosted private cloud solution (http://privatecloud.gogrid.com), which offers the capabilities of its public cloud in a completely dedicated and secure environment.

San Francisco's GoGrid is launching a new service to help wary companies warm up to "cloud computing," an industry term that refers to accessing computing horsepower and software applications over the Web.

GoGrid: provides a 100x credit policy combined with 100% SLA for any hardware and network outages and no minimum thresholds (e.g. 1 hour outage = 100 hour credit). This is by far the most generous of the 38 IaaS vendors we evaluated. GoGrid's service is also one of the most reliable IaaS services we currently monitor (100% US West and 99.999% US East)

Cloud hosting provider GoGrid announced on Wednesday it has expanded its hybrid cloud capabilities, enabling customers to deploy its hybrid cloud solution at any of its two data centers.

The most interesting layer - the only one that really deserves to be called "cloud computing", say purists - is "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS). IaaS offers basic computing services, from number crunching to data storage, which customers can combine to build highly adaptable computer systems. The market leaders are GoGrid, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services, the computing arm of the online retailer, which made headlines for kicking WikiLeaks off its servers.

GoGrid is joining forces with Ingram Micro to bring cloud computing infrastructure offerings to Ingram's Cloud Marketplace. The move puts GoGrid among the first cloud service providers to contribute to the Ingram Micro Cloud, a reseller enablement platform and online Cloud Marketplace for VARs and MSPs. By teaming up with Ingram Micro, GoGrid is looking to bring VARs and MSPs into the cloud by filling the demand to migrate customers from on-premise IT to the cloud, and to help resellers adapt their business models to support new mechanisms for scale and sustained profitability, said Jack Duffy, GoGrid executive vice president of sales and business development.

Ingram Micro has announced a strategic marketing alliance with infrastructure-as-a-service provider GoGrid, which becomes one of the first cloud service providers to be featured within the recently announced Ingram Micro Cloud and online Cloud Marketplace. It's the first relationship between the two companies, as GoGrid was not previously a member of Ingram Micro's Seismic community.

Most hosting providers use Amazon as a yardstick for their own cloud services. But few actually think of themselves as competitors. At pioneering cloud infrastructure firm GoGrid, the company thinks of itself as the hosting company with an infrastructure product comparable to Amazon. CEO John Keagy and CMO Jeff Samuels spoke to WHIR editor Liam Eagle about the company's products and its plans.

At the center of the program is GoGrid Exchange, the San Francisco-based cloud provider's cloud solutions marketplace. Through the new program, open-source partners and businesses can package on-demand versions of software to boost cloud computing deployments and the usage of open source software. GoGrid's OSS Partner Program is another signal that the open-source community is embracing cloud computing.

GoGrid, which until now had one data center in San Francisco, has opened a second data center in Ashburn, Va. Both data centers are SAS70 Type II certified and Cisco-powered networks. Virtual servers with GoGrid base images are available for immediate deployment at the east coast data center...

...GoGrid's disk IO performance was excellent across instances of all sizes. Even the low end 1GB cloud server scored almost 10% faster than the baseline. The 4GB cloud server was the #2 performer in this post at over 60% better performance than the baseline...

...GoGrid, one of Amazon's chief competitors in the cloud storage and compute markets, distinguishes itself from Amazon in a couple ways. GoGrid offers Windows Server 2008 instances (Amazon offers only Windows Server 2003) and 100% uptime service-level agreements (Amazon offers 99.95% for compute and 99.9% for storage).

GoGrid is competing with Amazon and Rackspace, among others, to host your Enterprise data on its cloud services. Here CEO, John Keagy, and VP of Tech Strategy, Randy Bias, tell me about GoGrid's business.

...The company prides itself on being first to market with a unique Web-based GUI, Windows and Linux cloud servers, free f5 hardware load balancing, and free 24x7 support, among other breakthrough features. And now, GoGrid is proud to offer what it describes as yet another industry first: a public API that gives users what it calls true "Control in the Cloud."

...Amazon doesn't do Windows; it doesn't have a GUI; it charges $72 a month for load balancing, $500 a month for support and 10 cents/GB for inbound data. GoGrid calculates that - assuming 100GB of outbound data (and in Amazon's case 10GB on inbound data) - the total cost for 30 days with load balancing and support runs $68 at GoGrid and $662 at Amazon.

GoGrid offers the widest range of machine images, including Windows systems. A clean, AJAX-based control panel makes it simple to get a sophisticated network up quickly and efficiently, and saves you the trouble of cutting and pasting IP addresses and other details...

GoGrid has gotten a lot more interesting over the last few months, going from what we had previously called Utility Computing to more of a full-on Cloud approach...GoGrid delivers true "Control in the Cloud" by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting

GoGrid's API is the kind of positioning that all service providers should adopt - complete openness on the front end so that customers can use the default user interface or where they have specific service goals they can interface to the service with alternative and extended user interfaces.

...the folks at GoGrid actually believe their product is more true to cloud computing's notions of openness, simplicity and flexibility than is EC2. In terms of simplicity, Sheehan says GoGrid is all about making cloud computing "less nebulous and [more] tangible to the end-user." Whereas Amazon has an 18-minute video instructing EC2 greenhorns on how to get started, he says a Go-Grid first-timer can be up and running in five minutes using the company's almost-too-easy GUI. (Ed. Note: He's not lying - at least in terms of provisioning a few machines and adding a load balancer and a database.)

...we setup a quick network on GoGrid consisting of a load balancer, two web servers running Linux and a larger database server running Linux and MySQL. In all, it took a few minutes and the instances were live within 15-20 minutes. We were then able to login and configure the virtual hosts and have a simple blog running within another 10-15 minutes - so the control panel and feedback interface has a definite advantage.

Here at the Structure conference, everything is cloud, cloud, cloud. No one wants to own their own Web hardware anymore, it seems, and the company representatives speaking here are happy to provide the software and virtual services to replace the hardware. One of those is GoGrid, which is shooting for the same cloud-computing market that Amazon.com is making a run at with its EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, service and related Web services...

...ScribbleLive, a blogging platform, faced a different, but conceptually similar, problem. The site typically gets 181,000 page views a day. But during Apple's developer conference, usage spiked to 2.3 million page views. Scribble, a two-person operation, quickly scaled up using GoGrid, and was able to keep running with little or no loss of throughput. The price: $15 for a day of server time, plus bandwidth charges.

It works! Despite my criticisms, GoGrid is very easy to expand and contract as needed and there's a choice of operating systems to use (Windows as well as several Linux distros with different services configurations). Add to that 24/7 support and GoGrid is a very interesting platform for a variety of markets.