ServePath Blog

Last week, we had some very exciting news. Our Cloud Computing Hosting Division, GoGrid, has been positioned in Gartner’s Visionaries Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand) in the Magic Quadrant.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted July 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

For a limited time, the full Gartner Magic Quadrant study is available on the ServePath home page. Simply look for this graphic and click through for the full report:

The report is only available until October 7th, 2009 so get it now!

The press release is available online and the full text is provided below:

GoGrid was positioned in the Visionaries quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand) in Magic Quadrant

Evaluation is Based On Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

San Francisco, CA July 8, 2009 — GoGrid, a leader in Cloud Computing Infrastructure Hosting and the Cloud Computing division of ServePath, LLC, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc., in the Visionaries quadrant in the “Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On Demand)” report.

Gartner evaluated each provider against five use cases, specifically: Self-managed hosting, mainstream managed hosting, highly complex managed hosting, global solutions portfolio and enterprise applications hosting in order to produce a composite rating.

“We think our positioning in the visionaries quadrant is validation of our industry-leading cloud computing technology.  GoGrid pioneered cloud computing before any other leading hosting company was in the game. We continue to offer a more complete hybrid hosting solution consisting of on-demand cloud infrastructure and robust managed hosting environments,”
said GoGrid CEO and Co-Founder, John Keagy. “We think this will position us well to promote our technology as a standard in the field that lends itself manageability, scalability and portability of computing environments around the globe.”

The “Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On Demand)” report is available currently on the GoGrid home page.

GoGrid is the only Cloud Infrastructure vendor that supports the automated instantiation of Windows Server 2003 and 2008, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cloud servers through a user-friendly GUI or the GoGrid API. Customers can instantly deploy servers and quickly and easily create cloudcenters (datacenters-in-the-sky) using a variety of tools and features that are included in GoGrid, including free hardware-based F5 load balancing, Cloud servers, Cloud Storage, public and private networks and Cloud Connect, which enables Cloud infrastructures to be connected to dedicated or colocated backend environments via private, dedicated megabit connections.

Cloud Connect handles database servers, transcoding and statistical analysis environments on custom, managed hardware with the power and I/O to perform well. Entire cloudcenters on GoGrid are easily controlled and managed by an industry-recognized web interface or programmatically via a REST-like API.

GoGrid offers customers including startups, small/medium businesses, government and enterprises, the ability to provision, scale and manage complex and robust server networks and infrastructures quickly and easily in the Cloud.

Parent company, ServePath, LLC was included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the April 2009 “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing Systems and Application Infrastructure, 2009″ report by Gartner, Inc. published April 6, 2009.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted July 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About the Cool Vendor Selection Process
Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

About GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com)
GoGrid is the leading Cloud Computing, hosted, Internet provider that delivers true “Control in the Cloud™” in the form of cloudcenters. GoGrid enables system administrators, developers, IT professionals and SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors to create, deploy, and control load balanced cloud servers and complex hosted virtual server networks with full root access and administrative server control. GoGrid server instances maintain the industry standard specifications with no requirement to learn and adapt to propriety standards. Bringing up servers and server networks takes minutes via a unique web control panel or GoGrid’s award winning API. GoGrid delivers portal controlled servers for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, and ASP.NET. GoGrid hosts multiple open-source server operating systems including several Linux operating systems (Red Hat Enterprise and CentOS) and supports application environments like Ruby on Rails. Free f5 hardware load balancing and other features are included to give users the control of a familiar datacenter environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud, a “cloudcenter.” GoGrid won the coveted 2008 LinuxWorld Expo’s Best of Show award.

About ServePath (http://www.servepath.com)
ServePath, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is the leading managed and dedicated hosted server provider, delivering custom solutions and managed services to businesses that require powerful Internet hosting platforms for their production environments. Thousands of companies worldwide look to ServePath for its reliability, customization, and speed. ServePath has a Keynote-rated A+ network and guarantees uptime with a 10,000% guaranteed™ Service Level Agreement. The employee-owned company has been in business for nine years and operates its own San Francisco data center and is SAS70 Type II certified. ServePath uniquely delivers server infrastructures optimized for complex databases with cloud front-ends and application servers with Cloud Connect.

If you haven’t given GoGrid a try, what are you waiting for? Find out for yourself why we were placed in the Visionaries Magic Quadrant!

Today we released a new Whitepaper written by Randy Bias, ServePath’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 the Cloud, Dedicated, or Colocation environments, I recommend you download and read this whitepaper.

The whitepaper can be obtained here from the ServePath 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 ServePath whitepaper discusses the following topics:

• How web applications scale
• Scalability within different hosting scenarios
• 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.

If you are currently using dedicated or colocated hosting, you should potentially re-evaluate your current hosting strategy and architecture to see if it makes sense to use Cloud Computing or a combination of Dedicated and Cloud as a scalability option.

A “Hybrid” environment using Dedicated and Colocated servers in conjunction with a Cloud front-end using Cloud Connect.

“Businesses need more than just cloud computing to solve their scalability problems,“ says the whitepaper author Randy Bias. “Web operators and developers want to use the best tool for the job and, right now, cloud computing is one tool in their arsenal. GoGrid has pioneered the concept of cloudcenters, datacenters-in-the-cloud, which provide the full range of scalability tools needed for a growing business including cloud servers, managed dedicated database servers, private VLANs, VPNs, and even co-location for those who need their own hardware. This whitepaper describes how a growing business can use vertical and horizontal scaling techniques to the most advantage to save money and never miss a prospect, customer, reader or interaction.”

Companies interested in learning about Web Application Scalability, Cloud Infrastructure, hybrid hosting and scaling solutions available from GoGrid or ServePath are encouraged to download this whitepaper from either the GoGrid site or ServePath site.

Chances are, if you are reading this post on the ServePath Blog, that you are a Managed Hosting customer of ours or simply interested in Managed Dedicated Hosting. But, you probably have also been hearing about Cloud Computing (if you haven’t, you should probably take a look at our Cloud Computing product, GoGrid or read some of the posts on the GoGrid blog). Cloud Computing isn’t the solution to every hosting dilemma. There are some hosting requirements that simply cannot be handled within “the Cloud.” High-end, data intensively or highly transactional database servers are a good example. Also, if your product offering requires some eCommerce transactions and associated compliance therein, you may want to opt for a  dedicated environment for that sensitive data.

Back in November 2008, we announced a new product that is a hybrid hosting solution called “Cloud Connect.” The idea behind Cloud Connect is fairly basic. It is essentially a dedicated connection between a Cloud Computing front-end infrastructure (with GoGrid) and a Managed Hosting back-end server (with ServePath). This is a “World’s First” product offering!

When you configure a hybrid infrastructure, you are enabling the “best of both worlds” between Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Not only do you get the configurability and high-performance of a dedicated server, you also get the elasticity and scalability of Cloud Computing. In our press release and on our product page, we outlined some possible uses of Cloud Connect:

• Hybrid Load Balanced Server Network – hybrid infrastructure lets you combine cloud and dedicated servers to build a hosted load-balanced server network allowing you to harness the elasticity and low CapEx of cloud computing while getting the hardware control you need from dedicated hardware.
• Development and staging environment – build a development and staging environment in the cloud and conveniently connect to your dedicated server production environment.
• Sandbox –build a sandbox development area in the cloud to test websites, website operations, and untested code in an isolated manner.
• Spikes/surge – deploy servers in minutes to handle seasonal or sudden spikes of internet traffic and pay only for what you use. Avoid long-term contracts for the servers required to handle short-term internet traffic fluctuations.
• Database-intensive applications – deploy large databases with lots of bandwidth, processing power and persistent storage needs with very flexible front-end web servers that interact very efficiently with the database.

You can add a variety of ServePath services to your dedicated back-end environment including:

• Unified Security & Backup
• Managed Server Security & Hardware Firewall
• ProActive Monitoring
• Managed Data Backup & Storage Area Network (SAN)

Cloud Connect uses secure gigabit private networks to “cross connect” GoGrid Cloud Servers with custom-built, managed and dedicated ServePath servers. The gigabit private networks, the GoGrid Cloud and ServePath dedicated servers are all located in the same data center with hard-wired  connections to ensure high performance.

If you are interested in setting up a Cloud Connect solution using GoGrid Cloud Servers and ServePath Dedicated Servers, please contact a ServePath sales representative at 1-977-946-4743 or via the Live Chat on the ServePath site.

“Don’t Panic!” These are two words (made popular by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) that every day become more appropriate and valid. Credit has dried up as has funding by Venture Capitalists, Angel Funders and the like. If you are a bootstrapped company, a startup or a company in “stealth mode,” right now you might be wishing that you had taken a more stable job at a large corporation (hopefully not in the Financial sector) or that you had planned better for another bubble to burst. Well fear not…there is always a way to survive, through careful planning and management.

I would like to offer the following “Guide” of my own to those small companies or startups that are struggling now, on the verge of closing shop or just ready to give up. First, let me restate Adams’ words: “Don’t Panic!” There are methods to keep your company and vision moving forward, maybe in a different direction or perhaps a bit more slowly.

Here are a few things that you may want to consider as you re-architect your survival strategy:

1. Start Now – don’t take a “wait and see” attitude. If you have a great idea, keep moving forward, but DO start your cash conservation immediately. The mere fact that you are searching for information and reading this post is a great sign that you are being active!
2. Outsource – sure, doing things in-house can save you some cash, but only part of the time. Truly evaluate what makes sense (cents) in your day-to-day operations. If it takes your developer a week to do something and an outside “specialist” a day or two, evaluate the costs of both actions. If you aren’t paying your employees and they are doing work in their free time, try to factor in the time-to-market of that approach. While you may save money in up-front costs, you may lose it in terms of beating your competitors to market. Here are a couple factors within “outsourcing” to consider:
   • Human Capital – frequently small boutiques who are experts in a particular field can do things faster and better than you can in-house. They, too, might be effected by the economic downturn and may be willing to cut some of their costs just to have your business.
   • Operations – this can be both on the technical or just the basic company operations side. If you are providing healthcare benefits, see if you can change your plans or even ask your employees if they have other means to get healthcare (e.g., through a spouse).
3. Avoid Capital Expenditures (CapEx) – hardware costs money, lots of it. Of course this all depends on what stage your company is at. If you are just starting, you may be able to get away with repurposing old computers and sharing bandwidth, but as you grow and get closer to having to “prove your value proposition” to investors or even end-users, you do need some sort of infrastructure. Consider using Cloud Computing (e.g., GoGrid) to host your infrastructure, whether it be a development environment or eventually your production infrastructure. By using “the Cloud” you have zero CapEx, no monthly/yearly contracts and are billed by your usage. This is a great way to control your costs and scale only on-demand. You can easily control your capacity, and avoid having your infrastructure sitting around unused or idle.
4. Simplify/Set Realistic Goals – The more complex you make things, the harder they are to undo. Figure out what you really want to do with your business. Is it a hobby or your life work? Do you want to be the next Google? If so, you probably want to rethink that. While it is good to have lofty goals, keep them closer to earth. Did you hire someone who sold you on reaching something unattainable? You may want to reconsider that, hard as it may be, and let those people go. Re-architect your strategies. Clearly identify the most fundamental and basic goals you want to achieve. Sometimes through simplification, you can find a niche that others haven’t. That makes you more viable and attractive. If you are doing something that everyone else is gunning for, and you are struggling, it probably isn’t worth it. You don’t need to throw it all away, but you might want to evaluate what you want to do and choose 1-2 things that are (somewhat) unique. Remember K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
5. Remain Flexible – the worst thing that you can do in these trying times is not move or be rigid. Being a startup or small company has definite advantages. You have the ability to move much more quickly than larger companies. Look to be flexibility in many areas: strategic direction, product or service feature set, tools and infrastructures and even work ethic. Keep your employees happy by finding out what works best for them. I’m reminded of a story I heard about a hair dresser who was looking for a change. After some soul searching and help from some personality profiles, they became a landscape architect: similar ideas of grooming but in a completely different field (literally). So stay flexible in your own thinking as well.
6. Network & Socialize – as you start to panic, the worst thing you can do is do it alone. Trust me, there are many people and business who are sharing your same concerns. Some may be further down the process of recovery or re-architecting and may be willing to share with you their experiences and what to or not to do. There are so many ways to connect with people nowadays. There is the obvious Social Media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and I’m a big proponent of these methods. However, in this case, you may really need to just “get out” and talk to people face-to-face. If you live near a big metropolitan area, there is most likely some sort of meetup (check MeetUp.com for example – their video really is great!) or event that meets your needs. Go to them. Start talking to people. (If you are in San Francisco, check out an event I host called StartUpSF.) You may be surprised as to how many great ideas you may get and even how many people really want to help. New strategic partnerships are frequently started at events like this. It’s important to listen to new ideas and see how they apply to your own. Some of the things you hear may influence how you attack other points on this list. Remember too that you can socialize your Public Relations very easily now. Read some experts’ tips and you may save costs and time there too.
7. Conserve Expenses – this is obvious enough. Watch your energy expenditure especially. I mentioned the Cloud before; by outsourcing your IT infrastructure, you can save tremendous costs, especially if you are doing it yourself through your own server rack in your closet. Don’t travel if you don’t need to. With large bandwidth pipes, it’s easy to have video conferencing with almost the same result as a face-to-face. Save the face-to-face for closing the deal. Oh, and pack your own lunch.
8. Don’t Ignore the Rest of the World – the US economy may be seeing some hard times, but there are other markets out there that may want to spend their money with you. Invest some time in reviewing these other markets. Their currency may be a lot stronger than the US dollar, so they may be more willing to pay for your product or service, or even invest in your business. Don’t ignore the fact that with advances in technologies, the world is a much smaller place than we actually realize.
9. Cash Flow Management – this is true on both billables and receivables. If you have existing vendor contracts and they are part of your lifeblood, see if you can renegotiate them. As I mentioned before, you are not alone in this economic crunch and many vendors (and even lenders) would rather renegotiate than lose your business. If your own business model is not getting the traction that you desired, you might want to try to tweak it a bit. Consider offering pre-payment discounts (e.g., have people commit for a longer amount of time but discount it against a monthly or smaller cycle rate). ServePath does this type of thing with managed hosting, by offering “server specials” at a lower cost. Old inventory may be sitting around so leverage it through discounts as well.
10. Keep your Day Job – I had to end with some humor. If your startup is your life-long passion, it is your day job so take these tips to heart. If it isn’t, remember you have to pay your bills somehow.

Do you have any other ideas, tips or suggestions? If so, I would love to hear them. And remember, “Don’t Panic!”

[This was originally posted on the GoGrid blog.]

Perhaps that subject was not strong enough. The Financial Sector is currently weathering a hurricane, recently suffering the largest drop since 9/11. Merrill Lynch fell into the hands of Bank of America. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy and looking for a buyer with Barclays buying some of their assets. The Airline industry is failing. AIG and other financial companies are looking for some sort of an economic bailout. HP is eliminating 24,600 jobs. And this was all over just a few days. If one extends the look a bit further, the perspective is just a grim: gas prices going up, the dollar losing value and housing going down. One simply cannot be surprised by any of this.

The Tech Sector is getting hammered as well, but this time, it isn’t “our fault.” The Dot Com bust managed to drag down the other sectors last time, but we learned our lesson. Long gone are unproven businesses and their associated models. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are taking long looks at business, not just getting in the car for a drive but doing a full check under the hood, looking at the road both ahead and behind and fully vetting the drivers and passengers. To get money as a start-up is truly an accomplishment nowadays. You have to have a proven business model, installed user base, and a clear direction of where your company and your industry will go.

I recently attended TechCrunch 50 which showcases 50 startups and allows them to present their business or service to a panel of experts. I saw about 1/2 of the companies’ presentations and I noticed that the companies where they couldn’t articulate or prove their monetization strategy, these companies got an earful of criticism from the experts. Similarly, at a meetup in San Francisco, the question asked every presenter is “How are you making or going to make money?” It’s a very simple question, but one that must be answered or the company loses credibility.

Perhaps we should apply these same simple questions to the Financial, Housing and Airline Industries? I guess the markets are already doing that.

It will take a long time before all of these markets start to recover, and corporations and businesses are currently challenged to prevent the hemorrhage of money and capital expenditures within their IT infrastructure. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Cutting Tech’s Energy Bill” by William M. Bulkeley that discusses how large companies are looking at ways to cut electricity usage within the Enterprise. With energy costs directly and indirectly rising, it’s critical for the embattled IT manager or director to make fiscally sound and environmentally responsible decisions to keep their business moving forward will simultaneously ensuring that their technology progresses.

Bulkeley gives several examples:

• IBM has launched a “Green Data-Center Services” business line to help customer redesign their datacenters
• HP purchased a company that specializes in designing datacenters with a focus on energy-efficiency
• EMC has worked to eliminate unneeded equipment and use their cooling infrastructure more efficiently
• Hartford Financial Services Group has shut down 6 of 7 datacenters and host within a “green” IBM facility
• IBM and HP has introduced water-cooled servers and others are hard-selling blade computers that use significantly less power than traditional servers

Outsourcing one’s infrastructure is a core way to tighten your belt of your IT Budget. If you can allow for a managed hosting provider to run your IT infrastructure, you save on capital expenditures as well as human capital running it. Colocation and dedicated hosting were all the rage a few years ago and, while it may be losing its sex appeal nowadays, there are still plenty of IT traditionalists who demand it.

Towards the end of the WSJ article, Bulkeley starts to discuss virtualization as a Green technology that can help cut costs. This is where I pick up the thread and run with it. Virtualization is a key component to helping Corporations reduce their IT expenditures significantly. The ability to consolidate multiple low-end servers onto one or handful of higher-end servers is an obvious and logical cost and energy-savings option. The heavier adoption of virtualization technologies such as Xen or VMware or even Hyper-V is giving corporations or even those self-same outsourced data center and dedicated hosting providers a way to stretch their money and efficiencies even further. To over simplify, reduce the number of servers through virtualization and your datacenter space demands go down, your dependency on IT staff to manage those locations reduces and your CapEx shrinks, giving you efficiencies immediately.

This is where the Technology Sector is starting to get “Cloudy.” I’ve used this metric before to illustrate my point, simply look at the Google (Insights for Search) chart comparing “cloud computing” against “dedicated hosting” keyword searches:

Dedicated hosting will not go away. It’s a viable outsourced technology option that companies depend on. It makes fare more sense (cents?) than doing it yourself within your corporation. There are only a niche of companies that can afford to make the technology and capital investment to support large-scale IT infrastructures, and even those (as exemplified in the WSJ article) are looking to re-architect their infrastructure.

Could “Cloud Computing” be the silver bullet to help corporations survive the financial hurricane? I think so. But there are challenges ahead for both the providers of the Clouds (and even traditional dedicated hosting providers) as well as corporations.

• For Cloud Providers, education of the “Cloud” concept and overcoming the “this technology is only for early adopters” status will be critical. However this can be achieved through collaboration with other Cloud Providers and Enablers as well as standardization of protocols and APIs, for starters.
• For the Enterprise to view the Cloud as a viable alternative to traditional or even self-hosted infrastructures and datacenters, the challenge is larger. While Cloud Computing may be obvious to many  in terms of “green-ness” and cost savings through zero CapEx, IT managers of the Enterprise tend to not quickly jump on board with the latest technology. Some might say they are a bit gun-shy and would rather someone else test the waters and learn from their mistakes. This wait-and-see attitude will be the end of many. Given the current financial weather and outlook, the Enterprise should be looking at the non-traditional and emerging technologies just as hard as within traditional practices.

While I may be sticking my head in the sand by saying that this financial storm will pass soon, I also  have my head in the “clouds” by stating that dedicated/outsourced hosting and Cloud Computing are viable alternatives to “doing it yourself” that all businesses should seriously consider and get on their short term strategic plans. To jump back into the car metaphor, it’s time to dump the old 1970’s Plymouth and get the 2008 Hybrid!