GoGrid Private Cloud Annexes Public Cloud Resources

GoGrid introduced an enterprise-grade hosted private cloud platform on January 19, delivering to customers both the benefits of cloud computing and dedicated server hosting.

The GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud features the same capabilities as GoGrid’s public cloud offering, the company said. The hosted private cloud offers the same on-demand, programmable, manageable, and scalable service that customers demand from a public cloud.

GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud “delivers the complete set of benefits and features expected from a public cloud computing environment on private, dedicated hardware,” said John Keagy, CEO and co-founder of GoGrid.

Fresh Approach To Resource Allocation

GoGrid allows customers to deploy infrastructure components with a self-service and metered pricing model, making the environment more like public clouds than the traditional hosted services.

France Telecom’s Orange is one of the first companies to use the Hosted Private Cloud, GoGrid said.

For its platform, GoGrid integrated the hosted private cloud with its public cloud to speed up the process of allocating new resources. Customers use the public cloud to quickly add or expand capacity as needed while running the applications on the hosted private cloud side, the company said. Users can automatically deploy individual virtual machines on their own, but GoGrid will need extra time to source additional hardware when needed.

The hosted private cloud is more than just adding virtualisation software to dedicated hardware, which can be cost-prohibitive, said Keagy.

Customers typically lose some of the financial benefits of the public cloud because they have to order and pay for an entirely new server or blade in order to scale up, instead of just adding in the little bit of storage or networking that is needed. In return, they gain security and reliability of being on a machine that no one else is using.

Gartner analyst Ted Chamberlin said GoGrid’s private cloud platform will help the company compete with its larger rivals, such as Amazon and Rackspace Hosting. “Amazon doesn’t do this,” Chambers says, and that “limits their attractiveness to enterprise customers who have security and privacy concerns.”

A number of other companies have recently rolled out hosted private clouds, including Unisys and Rackspace Hosting. Hosted private clouds are often used to power back-end systems because they are unlikely to need additional resources to accommodate spikes in performance and traffic.

GoGrid recently expanded its a Hybrid Cloud service, where customers can use a GoGrid data centre to build secure, high-performance infrastructure to power applications on dedicated and virtual servers. The GoGrid Hybrid Cloud combines virtual and physical servers in the public cloud, using hardware-based F5 load balancers, private VLANs, integrated cloud storage and hardware firewall appliances, the company said.

Hybrid Cloud customers can provision dynamically scalable virtual and physical environments via a Web portal, the company said. Users can choose between physical and virtual servers when building out critical business infrastructure, said Philbert Shih, senior analyst at Tier1 research. There are benefits to giving IT teams the flexibility to manage both types of servers from a single interface, instead of creating a physical bridge to connect the two types, according to Shih.