GoGrid Attacks 'Commodity Clouds' With Open Orchestration

GoGrid launched and is sponsoring OpenOrchestration.org, a repository for on-demand blueprints to simplify technology rollouts in the cloud, multiple clouds, or on-premise. The new community site fights back against what GoGrid believes is the major threat going forward: commodity clouds.

“The Mission of OpenOrchestration.Org is to facilitate and foster orchestration,” GoGrid CEO John Keagy said. “GoGrid is launching and sponsoring the site because orchestrated solutions are a necessary evolution of the marketplace in the face of dominance by one or two large commodity cloud services.

GoGrid offers what it calls one-click deployment of big data solutions that are multi-cloud or on-premise ready from the start. “We’ve actually taken our stack and purpose-built it for big data,” Kole Hicks, senior director of product, said.

In its first release to the OpenOrchestration.org community, GoGrid will publish the blueprints behind its four orchestration solutions for Cassandra, Hadoop, MongoDB and Riak. Members of the community can modify these blueprints in any way they see fit as well as use a free orchestration service powered by GoGrid’s orchestration engine technology to test and deploy.

GoGrid was a pure-play Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider until only a few years ago, when the team found that many customers were using the platform for big data solutions. “When we were doing the research on why many of our customers were using us for big data, we discovered that many were running polyglot applications (using multiple development languages and runtimes), and they were running multi-cloud and on-premises solutions,” Heather McKelvey, GoGrid CTO, said. “Our philosophy now is to stand up the best automation tools.”

The company does not shy away from partnering with with competing clouds and systems integrators. It has recently added Clustrix and Couchbase to the list of partnerships that also includes Basho, DataStax, Hortonworks. and MongoDB.

“The ability to deliver one-click solutions has created ecosystem opportunities," Keagy said. "We can take the friction out of the adoption of partner solutions.”

The company operates out of four data centers: two in California, one in Virginia and one in Amsterdam. While it touts the ability to take your workload anywhere, it has built a cloud platform that is purpose-built to handle big data solutions.

GoGrid allows up to 256 gigabytes of RAM on its cloud platform and provides options for mass storage, including up to 48 terabytes of direct attached storage or options for solid state drives.