GoGrid Hosts Private Clouds

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.

That infrastructure makes use of Xen virtual machines, virtual local area networks (VLANs) and IT automation tools to create an elastic environment that can dynamically scale to meet enterprise application requirements.

But unlike public cloud infrastructure environments, all the IT assets in the service are dedicated to the customer’s application, which means the customer doesn’t have to worry about sharing IT assets with any other organization. This not only greatly simplifies management issues, it also removes any concerns customers might have related to compliance issues, he says.

Keagy adds that over time customers are going to discover that despite their current popularity, internal private cloud projects are going to fail. The issues that will primarily limit the effectiveness of these projects is that customers will not be able to take advantage of the economics the same way a service provider can in terms of total costs, and they do not have the internal skills and tools required to effectively manage a private cloud computing environment.

Some, he says, may temporarily find it expedient to adopt a hybrid cloud computing environment, but will quickly discover the economic advantages of running their private clouds on IT infrastructure that is managed by companies such as GoGrid.

Keagy adds that he also expects to see the cloud computing market segment with companies such as Amazon focused on application developers while a handful of cloud computing companies provide the IT services that will be required by traditional enterprise customers. However, he says that companies that standardize on VMware virtual machines will be at a competitive disadvantage because of the licensing fees that VMware charges versus relying on open source Xen technology.