In the early morning of Oct. 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plants grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.

The activists, most of them in their 30s and 40s, expected the climb to the top of the smokestack would take less than three hours. Instead, scaling a narrow metal ladder inside took nine. It was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done, 35-year-old Ben Stewart said later. It was like climbing through a huge radiator the hottest, dirtiest place you could imagine.

In the end, the fatigued, soot-covered climbers were only able to paint the word Gordon on the chimney before, facing dizzying heights, police helicopters, and a high court injunction, they were compelled to abandon the attempt and submit to arrest. They could hardly have known then that their botched attempt at signage would help transform British debate about fossil-fuel power plants and that it would send tremors through an emerging global movement determined to use direct action to combat the depredations of climate change.

The case took on historic weight only after the Kingsnorth Six went to court, where they presented to a jury what is known in the United States as a necessity defense. This defense applies to situations in which a person violates a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm from occurring: for example, when someone breaks down a door to put out a fire in a burning building.

In the Kingsnorth case, world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, flew to England to testify. According to the Guardian, he presented evidence that the Kingsnorth plant alone could be expected to cause sufficient global warming to prompt the extinction of 400 species over its lifetime. Citing a British government study showing that each ton of released carbon dioxide incurs $85 in future climate-change costs, the activists contended that shutting the plant down for the day had prevented $1.6 million in damages a far greater harm to society than any rendered by their paint and that their transgressions should therefore be excused.

What surprised both Greenpeace and the prosecution was that 12 ordinary Britons agreed. The jury returned with an acquittal, and the freed defendants made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. The tumult also produced political results. In April, British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband announced a reversal in governmental policy on power stations, declaring, The era of new unabated coal has come to an end. Discussing Kingsnorth, Daniel Mittler, a longtime environmental activist in Germany, told me recently, it was probably one of the most impactful civil disobedience cases the world has ever seen, because it was the right action at the right time.

If not now

The idea that now is the right time for more resolute action to address the climate crisis is spreading fast enough to dot the global map with hot spots of disobedience. As it turns out, the Kingsnorth Six are part of a rapidly growing population. Joining them are the Dominion 11, arrested after forming a human blockade to stop the construction of a coal plant in Wise County, Va., in November 2008, and the Drax 29, who went on trial this summer for boarding and stopping a train delivering coal to a power plant in North Yorkshire, England, last year.

In fact, arrests are piling up quicker than journalists can coin name-and-number nicknames. The Coal Swarm Web site keeps track of an ever-lengthening list of protests. New headlines now appear weekly:

Activists scale 20-story dragline at mountaintop removal site in Twilight, WV

See the original post here:

Preparing for the big one

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYzQ5H160w

Read more:

Comparative Planetology – Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndtYXVsWJJE

The rest is here:

Eve Online › Observing ships in Jita 4-4 (max graphics details) – Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tavISz-5tI

Read the original here:

Marvelous – Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXKWkBZEB0E

Follow this link:

Waves Ripples Dunes – Mars – Video

As we became more familiar with the iPad, we started seeing a few key areas where SoftLayer Mobile could benefit from the large format iPad user interface. We’ve been able to incorporate a phenomenal feature set in the SoftLayer Mobile application, and as our desired feature set has become more and more complete, we’ve gotten a bit of breathing room from our iPhone releases. We used that breathing room to re-visit the iPad and what it could mean for the SoftLayer Mobile customer experience on a tablet. The result of that investigation is the SoftLayer Mobile HD application:

As you might expect, SoftLayer Mobile HD shares quite a bit of functionality with its iPhone sibling. The application offers a window into your SoftLayer environment so that you can browse, create and edit support tickets; discover information about computing resources and bandwidth; and keep up-to-date on the latest notifications from our data centers. The iPad application also helps you keep track of financial information by allowing you to browse your account and its invoices. All this functionality benefits from the intuitive interface of the iPad. You have more room to browse, more room to edit, and fewer screens to navigate as you manage and explore your virtual SoftLayer data center.

Best of all: The application is only in its first release, and already shows great promise! We have plenty of room to grow and tons of ideas about the next features and functions we want to add. If you’re iPad-equipped, get the SoftLayer Mobile HD application in the iTunes App Store. When you’re navigating through the interface, take note of anything you’d like to see us change or add, and let us know!

-Scott

Scroll down to read a guest blog from Server Origin’s Kevin Hatfield about ethProxy. ethProxy is perfect for any company that wishes to secure its web presence against DDoS attacks and intrusion-based hacking attempts. Its filtering was built to provide enterprise-grade technology and uptime while still remaining below the cost of the competition.

More Information
Company Website: http://www.serverorigin.com/
Tech Partner Marketplace: http://www.softlayer.com/marketplace/ethproxy

DDoS Protection: Do you need it?

In the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen a references to denial-of-service attacks in the news and how the fallout from those attacks can leave businesses ‘picking up pieces’ for weeks or months after the they occur. Think about the helplessness you’d feel if the business you poured your heart and soul into is shut down by some malicious person or group’s attack on your web presence. Worse yet, those attacks are usually for that person’s or group’s own monetary gain or to satisfy some ego-driven urge to punish you for being successful in either your business or a cause you believe in.

It happens all too often, and most people don’t realize that it can actually happen to them. On a weekly basis, I speak to at least one person that tells me, “We’re small, and we really don’t have any competitors … Our website is down. If we can’t stop this attack, I am going to have to send all of my employees home and close down!”

The truth is that denial-of-service protection providers normally sell “fear.” They do this because people don’t have answers to a few key questions about DDoS protection:

• What are the real statistics?
• What is the probability that my website will be hit with an attack?
• What is the real cost of impact?
• What about my data center? I’m sure they already have protection, right?
• We’ve never been hit before, so why should we consider it a priority?

Many of the causes for hesitation regarding the purchase of denial-of-service protection revolve around the lack of education and valid, statistical data. Most know about Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS), but the details are hard to come by. Most people don’t have experience with attacks, so many assume it’s only the big companies or governments that need to worry.

The untold truth is that DDoS attacks occur on a daily basis, and as many as 2500 attacks occur every 24-hour period throughout the world. In the first 6 months of 2011, ServerOrigin saw 2.3 times the number of attacks we observed and mitigated over the course of the 2010 calendar year.

Let’s say you’re considering protection, and you want to ensure that you remain in control and your business continues operating even if you’re the target of extortion or a collective political or religious movement … and that’s assuming there is a reason behind the attack. Over 86% of attacks occur with no explanation! Considering that statistical tidbit, maybe fear isn’t just a manufactured, marketing gimmick to get you buying.

One of the biggest roadblocks in proactive DDoS mitigation in the past has been cost. The average cost for 12 months of a DDoS mitigation appliance or service to protect 1000Mbps is $78,942.00 – just for the equipment/service. Then you have to factor in the variable cost of the bandwidth USED during an attack.

Server Origin created ethProxy as a service that overlays your current server platform at an affordable price point. SoftLayer provides one of the best dedicated hosting environments, and we’ve built our reputation on DDoS protection, not hosting, so we bring our service to you.

How do I get protected? How time consuming is this process?
Contrary to the belief that DDoS mitigation is some mystical technology that is painful to implement, our ethProxy mitigation service works on the same premise as a Global Load Balancer or reverse-proxy. Setup is as simple as changing your website’s DNS record to a protected IP in our ethProxy filtering cloud, and once that is done, inbound connections are filtered so only clean traffic is sent to your web server. Transition to the ethProxy service is transparent for the end-user and requires no downtime to implement.

The average deployment time is less than 1-hour and the ethProxy protected IP becomes your public interface to the world. Not only does our service pass rigorous PCI certifications, it guarantees your hosted infrastructure is no longer vulnerable to attack, it allows for upgrading your bandwidth/protection in seconds, and it removes the need for additional web application firewalls or accelerators. On average, customers save around 71% by going with ethProxy when they compare us against the cost of traditional filtering methods.

Our ethProxy service is the combination of many different features or services that you may already pay for separately. This allows businesses to transition to our protection service by replacing one of their current providers which would be prove redundant with the ethProxy subscription. Why go through a budgeting process again when you can simply use a different provider that offers you DDoS protection in addition to the service you’re already paying for?

Included in Every ethProxy DDoS Mitigation Package

• Global Load Balancing
• DDoS Protected AnyCast DNS Services
• Multiple US locations / Complete Datacenter Redundancy
• Instant Scalability – Powered by ServerOrigin’s Cloud Network
• Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The options and overall value of these services provide protection that no website should be without, while saving you a ton of money … Especially when you consider that running all of these services separately could cost as much as $10,000/mo.

ServerOrigin Communications services more than 1,200,000 million domains worldwide. Our ethProxy service is the single largest globally deployed mitigation service worldwide, and we protect everyone from non-profit organizations to entire governments and some of Wall Street’s largest online providers (No, we’re not allowed to tell you which ones).

Let us show you why our expertise has saved hundreds of businesses and how we can ensure you never have to ‘pick up the pieces.’

- Kevin Hatfield, ServerOrigin Communications

I’m sure you’ve been to job fairs and read companies’ websites where they talk about how their company encourages teamwork, employee empowerment and innovation … It’s usually right next to a picture of someone skydiving or kite boarding, right? Well I’ve been with SoftLayer for about a month now, and as you saw from my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview, I spent my first two weeks on the job in Dallas.

I can tell you without hesitation (and with no need for a kite boarding picture) that when you walk around the office in Dallas, you can feel a buzz in the hallways … An energy that only comes from from people who are passionate and work well together. When I made the trek back to Amsterdam, I knew the environment and culture our team in Europe would need to foster to earn our three bars.

Last week, we had our first Truck Day in the new Amsterdam data center, and it was a perfect opportunity to show off the SoftLayer spirit and work ethic to our newest AMS01 SLayers with the help of the Go Live Crew:

As soon as two large truckloads of servers were delivered, the team jumped into action. We unpacked, sorted, scanned and racked the servers in record time, and it was actually a lot fun. When I walked into the data center the next day, it felt like Christmas: new toys, flashing lights and Barbara Striesand.

It’s safe to say that SoftLayer is the Mohammed Ali of hosting. We make bold statements and can back up them up!

If you’re interested in joining the SoftLayer team in Amsterdam, we’re hiring for several different positions right now, and we’d love to have you join us. When talking to prospective employees in interviews, I always tell the SoftLayer story with Ali-like pride, and moving forward, Truck Day is going to be a perfect example to share. Where else are you going to find a company culture where everyone in the company (even the CEO) celebrates the company’s continued growth by helping to unpack and sort hardware?

Based on the conversations I’ve had since Truck Day, I can tell if they are right for the team simply by their reaction to that story. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves to help out your teammates and have fun doing it, call me.

-@jpwisler

To give some context, I’ll usually explain, “SoftLayer is an on-demand data center provider. We host dedicated servers, cloud computing instances and integrated solutions for customers around the world.” When that overview sinks in and the attendee understands that we are an infrastructure provider, I get to share some of SoftLayer’s biggest differentiators along with some pretty amazing statistics about our business. With a huge sample pool of conversations to pull from, I thought it would be fun to put together a “Top 10″ list of the facts that usually impress attendees the most.

The Top 10 SoftLayer Facts

Based on “oohs” and “ahhs” from attendees

1. No Hidden Fees: Our pricing is listed on our website and is straight-forward.
2. Huge Product Catalog: SoftLayer offers load balancers, CDN, firewalls, managed services, and storage. If you need something we don’t offer, we can usually find a way to make it work.
3. No Long-Term Contracts: Dedicated servers are offered on a month-to-month basis, and cloud instances are available on a monthly or hourly basis. We have to earn your business every month.
4. Built By Geeks For Geeks: We offer a fully programmable API that gives you complete control of your server(s) from your own application or system.
5. Free Private Network Traffic: Every SoftLayer facility is interconnected via our private network. All private network traffic and inbound public network traffic is provided at no charge – We only charge for outbound public network traffic.

The Top 5 are facts that almost always amaze:

1. Global Network: We have 13 data centers in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Jose, Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and Singapore. We also operate 16 additional network Points of Presence (PoPs) around the world.
2. Our Business is Strong: SoftLayer has 24,000+ customers in more than 150 countries. We manage more than 100,000 active servers, hosting more than 20 million domains. Oh, and we’re doing about $350 million in annual revenue.
3. Infrastructure On-Demand: Our dedicated servers can be deployed in less than four hours, and cloud instances can be provisioned in less than 15 minutes.
4. Everything Works Together: Our dedicated servers and cloud instances are fully integrated. You can have a dedicated server in Seattle and a cloud instance in Singapore, and they’re both managed by a single industry-leading portal. The fact that they can communicate with each other over SoftLayer’s private network is a huge plus there as well.

And the simple fact that impresses people most: *drum roll*

1. SoftLayer is the largest privately held hosting provider in the world!

Every time I shock attendees with these facts, I can’t help but be even more proud of our accomplishments. Let’s keep up the good work! We’re taking over the world, one data center at a time.”

-Natalie

In a HUGE upset, the Mustangs beat the Horned Frogs 40-33 in overtime to break a four-year losing streak. The past four years have been “rebuilding” years under June Jones, so this win over a quality, ranked opponent was even more significant … Which is clear since I’m still talking about this game in particular a few weeks later. But this lingering buzz is nothing compared to the roar of attention to SoftLayer’s international expansion.

We’re not exactly the “underdog” anymore, but October marked a huge step in the growth of our company when our Singapore data center and network points of presence in Tokyo and Hong Kong went live. The SoftLayer passport is starting to fill its pages with stamps.

As we put the finishing touches on Amsterdam, we have Softlayer staff on three continents, so day-to-day operations get a little more complex in some areas of the business. As a member of the social media team, I’ve been watching the clock a lot more these days … And that’s not to suggest that I’m counting down every day until 5pm (which isn’t really a “stop time” for me anyway since social media doesn’t turn off at the end of our time zone’s business day). What I mean by “watching the clock” is that I’ve had to start thinking about reaching customers on the other side of the world with relevant SoftLayer messages. I feel like I need five clocks above my desk like what you usually see in newsrooms.

When engaging in the world of social media, timing is everything. Whether it’s a matter of coordinating with a press release, trying to reach people in a completely different time zone, or just responding to issues, being where you need to be when you need to be there is 90% of the battle. When you think about it, everything in life comes down to that!

Sometimes events can be planned like SoftLayer’s global domination. Others catch you by surprise … like the SMU Mustang victory. As I get close to my three-month mark as a SLayer, I’m glad I was in the right place at the right time to join the SoftLayer team. I’m excited to see how our business is going to grow, and I’m looking forward to having to invest in more time zone clocks to keep track of the local times in all of our new data center markets.

Oh, and GO MUSTANGS!!

-Rachel

Because I hadn’t been a SLayer for too long, he took it easy on me, and we had a great discussion about SoftLayer’s strategy in Europe and what customers can expect from our continued global expansion:

In the next week, you’ll get a few behind-the-scenes glimpses of our final Amsterdam data center preparations leading up to our November 7 “Go Live” date. If you haven’t already seen the “Amsterdam Ready to Launch” blog or the instant-classic “SoftLayer is Coming to Town” video about our international expansion, take a few minutes to check those out.

If you’re based in Europe, have a significant customer base in Europe or you’ve just always wanted a server in Amsterdam, you can pre-order your first AMS01 dedicated server or cloud server right now, and you’ll be one of the first in your neighborhood to enjoy our newest facility!

-@jpwisler

If you saw the epic “SoftLayer is Coming to Town”, you may have noticed a clip of the Go Live Crew (GLC) team members in Amsterdam at around the 1:05 mark:

With pallets of wrapped equipment and a few racks constructed in the background, it’s pretty clear that as of October 1, the data center was a long way from calling itself a SoftLayer Pod. A few short weeks ago, I shared an update on the progress of our first European facility, and now we’re less than two weeks away from the first customer servers being provisioned in Amsterdam!

Mark your calendar: November 7 – The date your first SoftLayer server in Amsterdam will go live.

In addition to customer servers being provisioned when the data center officially opens its doors, our network points of presence throughout Europe will be humming along nicely. That means if you’re a SoftLayer customer in Europe, you should see some fantastic improvements in your network paths and speeds to servers in the United States (and Singapore) since you’ll be able to hop onto our network sooner and ride with SoftLayer across the Atlantic.

Amsterdam Server Special
To coincide with the launch of our Singapore facility, we brought back the Triple Double server special to reward early adopters, and we’re doing the same thing for customers in Amsterdam. Order a server in AMS with promo code TRIPLE, and you can double your RAM, bandwidth and HDD space for FREE.

The guys on the GLC in Amsterdam have worked tirelessly to ensure that everything is perfect (fueled by daily “Da Bobby G” sandwiches), and we’re all ecstatic for customers to start taking advantage of the latest addition to the stellar SoftLayer infrastructure.

What are you waiting for? Shouldn’t you be clicking through to pre-order your Amsterdam server right now?

-@quigleymar

Scroll down to read a guest blog from the MODX team. MODX offers an intuitive, feature-rich, open source content management platform that can easily integrate with other applications as the heart of your Customer Experience Management solution.

More Information
Company Website: http://modx.com/
Tech Partner Marketplace: http://www.softlayer.com/marketplace/modx

Free your Website with MODX CMS

Just having a website or a blog is no longer a viable online strategy for smart businesses. Today’s interconnected world requires engaging customers — from the first impression, to developing leads, educating, selling, empowering customer service and beyond. This key shift in online interaction is known as Customer Experience Management, or CXM.

For businesses to have success with CXM, they need an efficient way to connect all facets of their communications and information together with a modern and consistent look and feel, and without long learning curves or frustrating user experiences. You don’t want a Content Management System (CMS) that restricts your ability to meet brand standards, that lives in isolation from your other systems and data, or that fails to fulfil your businesses needs.

MODX is a content management platform that gives you the creative freedom to build custom websites limited only by your imagination. It certainly can play the central role in managing your customer experience.

Freedom from Hassle & Frustration
The most productive tools are those that simply allow you get your work done. To make life easy for content editors MODX uses familiar concepts like a hierarchical tree – similar to the folders and files on your computer. This allows content editors to relate their content to the overall website structure. But, like everything else in MODX, you aren’t limited to hierarchical content and can easily employ taxonomy-, list- or category-based structures.

Similarly, editing documents should be easy. With MODX, anyone who can open a web browser and send email has the skillset to create and edit content in MODX. Most tasks are a matter of filling out simple form fields into which content is placed and is accompanied by a sensible MS Word-like editor for your main content. Furthermore, site builders and developers are able to create custom fields for custom content types and custom data allowing non-technical employees to work in an intuitive, tailored environment.

Total Creative Freedom
Your website is one of the most visible parts of your brand and you certainly don’t want it limited by your CMS. MODX makes it possible to do anything that’s on the modern web now — you don’t have to wait for a year or hack the core to launch an HTML5 or mobile optimized site. MODX can do it all now, and even what’s coming next. It outputs exactly and only what you or your site builder dictate.

MODX uses a brilliantly simple template engine that allows web designers to work with what they already know, like HTML, CSS and any JavaScript library they chose. MODX can even output things not typically associated with most content management platforms like XML, JSON or even Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that automatically download to your desktop.

Freedom to Extend
MODX provides all the requisite tools for CMS, but it also functions as a fully capable web development platform upon which you can extend functionality, employ custom applications and do just about anything you can dream up. In fact, the “X” in MODX comes from the word “extensible”. Whether you want to build a Member-only website, Client Extranet, Resort Booking and Reservations system or private Social Network, you can do it on MODX.

For developers the fully-documented Object Oriented API and xPDO, MODXs database layer, provide all you need to build almost anything with MODX, even extending or overriding its core functionality. Critically, you can do all this using the API and retain a painless upgrade path without hacking the core. The MODX API architecture provides all the flexibility you or your developer might need to make MODX your own without painting your self into a corner.

Freedom from Bottlenecks
Modern web pages are made up of many component parts – site-wide headers and footers, navigation menus, articles, products and more. At some point, all these pieces need to be put together and delivered to the visitor as a single page that users expect to load quickly or they’ll leave your site.

To deliver pages fast, top-performing sites use server-side caching to take all those pieces and pre-process them for fast delivery to a browser. The problem with many CMS applications is that they manually rebuild pages every single time someone visits your site. That’s fine if you only have a few visitors, but your site can bog down or even fail under moderate traffic. In these circumstances, it would be disastrous if your website is featured on an industry magazine or website, national media or on a popular TV show. Your site could literally grind to a halt, costing you customers, damaging your reputation and ultimately making a bad first impression.

MODX’s native page caching delivers your site quickly by default. Additionally, MODX can use high-end caching like memcache to further improve performance under load. To handle millions of pageviews daily, you need robust servers and you need to optimize your environment … That’s where scaling across multiple servers and replication with SoftLayer works perfectly with MODX.

Free Your Legacy Systems
Keeping your data, content and business information in disconnected silos is ineffective and costly. Accessing existing systems, like an Active Directory or Enterprise Content repository, makes huge difference in getting your work done headache-free. You don’t have to worry about data duplication across systems, significant extra work to make everything work or synchronization issues. A new website platform should increase your productivity and enable your employees, customers and everyone else surrounding your business to find what they need and to interact efficiently and effectively.

MODX works with the tools and technology that organizations already have in place. It can easily interact with external web services or data feeds and can drive other applications via RESTful web services.

Security and Freedom to Rest Easy
Website Security is a topic that rarely surfaces during the early stages of a web project and often never comes up until your site has been compromised.

A high-quality hosting environment like those from SoftLayer are the foundation of website security. Your web CMS and its add-ons, plugin-ins or modules should not be a liability. MODX is designed with security at its core to protect your valuable website from malicious attacks. Every input is filtered, and every database query using the API eliminates the possibility of SQL injection compromises. Most importantly, the development team rigorously and continuously audits MODX to make sure its up to date and patching any new issues that may arise.

Freedom in the Community
With MODX and the MODX Community you’re not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of websites built on MODX and we have a friendly, active and growing community of raving fans over 37,000 strong to whom you can look for assistance, support, education and camaraderie.

In fact, the MODX Community is one of our greatest assets.

They provide mentorship, assistance and help make MODX software better through active reporting of issues and feature requests and contributing improvements for integration by the core team.

If you’re not a site builder or developer, but you want your website powered by MODX, one of the best places to start is with a MODX Solution Partner. Our network of 90+ global Solution Partners enables you to get the right-fit expertise for your project and in many cases work locally. Solution Partners are experts at MODX and know how to do things right.

Get Free
There really is a cure for the all too often restrictive, unintuitive and frustrating experience of putting content on the web. Get on the road to content management freedom with MODX. It’s easy to start since MODX Revolution itself is free to download and use.

Learn more at http://modx.com/.

-Jay Gilmore, MODX

If you have not had a chance to visit a SoftLayer data center, you’re missing out. The number one response I get when I begin a tour through any of our facilities is, “I have been through several data centers before, and they’re pretty boring,” or my favorite, “We don’t have to go in, they all look the same.” Then they get a glimpse at the SoftLayer facility through the window in our lobby:

What makes a SoftLayer DC so different and unique?

We deploy data centers in a pod concept. A pod, or server room, is a designed to be an identical installation of balanced power, cooling and redundant best-in-class equipment in under 10,000 square feet. It will support just about 5,000 dedicated servers, and each pod is built to the same specifications as every other pod. We use the same hardware vendor for servers, the majority of our internal network is powered by Cisco gear and edge equipment is now powered by Juniper. Even the paint on the walls matches up from pod to pod, city to city and now country to country. That’s standardization!

That all sounds great, but what does that mean for you? How do all these things benefit you as the end user?

First of all, setting standards improves our efficiency in support and operations. We can pluck any of our technicians in DAL05 and drop him into SJC01, and he’ll feel right at home despite the outside world looking a bit different. No facility quirks, no learning curve. In fact, the Go Live Crews in Singapore and Amsterdam are all experienced SoftLayer technicians from our US facilities, so they help us make sure all of the details are exactly alike.

Beyond the support aspect, having data centers in multiple cities around the world is a benefit within itself: You have the option to host your solution as close or as far away from you as you wish. Taking that a step further, disaster recovery becomes much easier with our unique network-within-a-network topology.

The third biggest benefit customers get from SoftLayer’s data centers is the quality of the server chassis. Because we standardize our SuperMicro chassis in every facility, we’re able to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster when a customer contacts us. Let’s say the mainboard is having a problem, and your Linux server is in kernel panic. Instead of taking time to try and fix the part, I can hot-swap all the drives into an identical chassis and use the portal to automatically move all of your IP addresses and network configurations to a new location in the DC. The server boots right up and is back in service with minimal downtime.

Try to do that with “similar” hardware (not “identical”), and see where that gets you.

The last obvious customer benefit we’ll talk about here is the data center’s internal network performance. Powered by Cisco internal switches and Juniper routers on the edge, we can provide unmatched bandwidth capacity to our data centers as well as low latency links between servers. In one rack on the data center floor, you can see 80Gbps of bandwidth. Our automated, high-speed network allows us to provision a server anywhere in a pod and an additional server anywhere else in the same pod, and they will perform as if they are sitting right next to each other. That means you don’t need to reserve space in the same rack for a server that you think you’ll need in the future, so when your business grows, your infrastructure can grow seamlessly with you.

In the last installment of this little “SoftLayer Features and Benefits” series, we’ll talk about the global network and learn why no one in the industry can match it.

-Harold

Asia is the largest growth market for SoftLayer right now, and the flood of orders we’ve had to keep up with in our Singapore branch is a testament to the customer demand in that region. With our ambitious growth plans and early successes in SNG, you’ll be seeing a lot of SoftLayermobiles delivering servers around the world pretty soon. Maybe we need a SoftLayerOceanTanker?

When I made trip to Dallas, I met Jonathan Wisler, another newly hired SLayer responsible for the Amsterdam data center and our future Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) expansion. Because I didn’t want him to feel left out, I selected him as my successor in the next 3 Bars 3 Questions interview.

If you have any questions about SoftLayer in Asia, our Singapore data center or Singapore in general, just let me know.

-Michael

• Smile
• Present yourself honestly and openly
• Be positive, confident and courteous.

I remember when I applied to SoftLayer back in April of 2010. I was working for one of SoftLayer’s competitors at the time, and one of my previous coworkers moved over to SoftLayer. He made mention of what a great company SoftLayer was and that I should think about applying. After submitting my resume, I received a call from the data center manager to come in for an interview at the DAL01 location. I prepared myself to make the best first impression I could. I heeded the words of my father saying, “A firm hand-shake goes a long way.” After my initial interview, I was given a tour of the one of the server rooms:

I was completely blown away by the organization and structure of the server room. I was overly impressed with how organized the work benches were, how the crash carts all had their place, how everything was labeled, how all the cables were bound up neatly, and how the automation system was in place to do the everyday, menial tasks. Here I was trying to impress the DC Manager with my skills and but I can honestly say I was more impressed with SoftLayer. It left a definite first impression on me.

I drove home after the interview thinking I would LOVE to work for this company. When checking my email a short time later, I found an offer letter from the HR department! I started for SoftLayer a few weeks later as a Customer Support Administrator. My next “first impression” of the company came when I walked into the break room and noticed all of the amazing snacks provided to employees. I opened up the refrigerator to place my lunch bag and realized that SoftLayer provides soft drinks and energy drinks to keep their SLayers hydrated. I joked with the DC manager that “SoftLayer should put this information in the job description as a company benefit.”

Although making a good first impression is important, making a lasting impression can set you apart from your competition. SoftLayer is a cut above the rest from the other hosting providers out there. Whether you are a new customer or a long-time customer, you have to agree that SoftLayer makes fantastic first and lasting impressions. And just like this blog post, you can’t help but tell other people about the SoftLayer difference.

-Greg

English
We are the largest private hosting company in the world, providing cloud, dedicated, managed and integrated computing environments to over 25,000 customers around the world. We have recently added additional data centers and now have facilities in Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapore and Washington D.C., and network Points of Presence worldwide. On top of that, we have automated every part of our platform, giving our customers complete control, security, scalability and ease-of-management through the best Customer Portal and Open API in the industry.

Mandarin
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Malay
Kami adalah syarikat swasta yang terbesar di dunia yang menyediakan pengkomputeran awan (cloud), hos berdedikasi yang diurus dan diintegrasikan ke dalam infrastruktur pengkomputeran untuk lebih daripada 25,000 pelanggan kami di seluruh dunia. Kami baru-baru ini telah menambah pusat data tambahan dan kini mempunyai kemudahan-kemudahan di Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapura dan Washington DC dan juga rangkaian “Points of Presence” di seluruh dunia. Selain itu, Kami telah mengautomatikkan setiap bahagian platform kami, memberikan para pelanggan kami penuh kuasa dan kawalan, keselamatan, kemampuan yang luas dan kemudahan pengurusan menggunakan pelanggan portal kami yang terbaik dan API terbuka (Open API) di dalam industri ini.

Dutch
Wij zijn het grootste, private hosting bedrijf in de wereld dat voorziet in cloud, dedicated, managed and integrated computing-omgevingen voor meer dan 25.000 klanten wereldwijd. We hebben recent extra datacenters toegevoegd en hebben nu vestigingen in Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapore en Washington DC en netwerk Points of Presence over de hele wereld. Bovendien hebben we elk deel van ons platform geautomatiseerd, waardoor wij onze klanten volledige controle, beveiliging, schaalbaarheid en gemak van beheer bieden met behulp van het beste Customer Portal en Open API in deze bedrijfstak

Back to English
While I might not be able to communicate those translations in conversation (yet), it’s an incredible visualization of how SoftLayer is growing and changing. It’s also exciting to think about how many more languages we’ll need to include next year!

-Summer

When it comes to NFL football, things are a little different. Prior to the launch of our San Jose facility, supporting each data center’s home NFL team with some playful banter was normal. When San Jose came into the mix, that meant we’d have a lot of new employees (Yay!) who are probably going to be fans of my Seahawks’ divisional rivals, the San Francisco 49ers (Booo! ). Now cheering for games gets a little trickier since we don’t want a football-related civil war between offices.

In reality, I’m sure it’ll never be an issue, since SLayers are like a big, diverse family … That being said, I’m glad I wasn’t in the office on the Monday after the Seahawks’ opening game loss against the 49ers. My California peers would have probably been quick to chat about the game, and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it. It’s different for me to have coworkers who are die-hard fans of a rival team due to their geography (and not just because they are a bandwagon fan), and as we keep growing, I’m sure the football support between offices is going to keep getting more and more diverse … My vote is that we avoid adding a data center in another NFC West rival’s market, though.

The interoffice atmosphere is just another reason why I love working for SoftLayer. Our team is so different, but we’re united by the common goal of making SoftLayer the best company in the world (for our customers and for our employees). For right now, I’m glad that there aren’t as many soccer fans in our halls … You don’t want to see me in my soccer hooligan mode.

-Robert

Our “Go Live Crew” of 16 dedicated SLayers has been working ’round the clock to make sure everything is up and running on time. The biggest challenge has been building out both data centers simultaneously … With the “Go big or go home” mindset, when we decided to go international, we went all in. Our growing customer base of 23,000 won’t stand still, so we need to deliver, whether it be through innovation or expansion. In less than 60 days we’ve been able to add 31,000+ servers to our network platform, bringing our unique cloud, dedicated and managed hosting solutions closer to our customers around the world.

This accomplishment has been something of a “miracle,” and I really need to shout out to my team members on the GLC. Putting in 16-hour days and working weekends while still finding time to go out on the weekends (Jägermeister and Red Bull have been sampled at many a fine pub) has made us a pretty close-knit family. The old “work hard, play hard” saying is an understatement when it comes to the SoftLayer team.

If we’re ever dragging a bit in the morning, we can always rely on Duck Sauce to get our pulses racing again by the time we get to the data center. With such a full work schedule, we become creatures of habit, and “Barbara Streisand” is only one example of a staple for the crew. Our daily consistency has even carried over into meal time: My favorite luncheon spot in Amsterdam even named a sandwich after me – Da Bobby G Meat Sandwich. Apparently the combination of meatballs, salami, ham and (a smothering of) ketchup on a bun is not a common order at this establishment, so my innovation needed to be recognized. Nutritional considerations aside, this is one fine sandwich:

I’ve been on the road for a while now, and these are just a few memories I’m taking with me. Jumping around between three continents has definitely had its challenges, but with a great team of focused SLayers, we’ve been getting the job done. I’m proud to have had a hand in making our international aspirations a reality, and I know that even though this has already been an unbelievable adventure, we’re just getting started.

-Robert