For many people (including myself), finding a job this summer was a challenge. Looking back, my classmates and I asked so many questions: Will I find an internship? Will it be paid? Will I have to move? Will they hire me after graduation? You know … those little details.

When I’m faced with uncertainty, I find myself asking tons of questions like those, and the night before starting my legal internship at SoftLayer, the “new question” machine went into overdrive. How early should I leave to get there on time? What projects will I have? How many hours will I work? Will I make a good impression?

Over the years, I notice that I tend to focus on that last question — “What impression will I make?” Time and time again, I’ve found myself answering that question by finding the perfect outfit.

What seems like ages ago (but was actually only four years ago), I began pursuing a career in fashion, so while the question, “What should I wear?” might be natural, when looking at any new job, it’s probably not the right question to be asking for this one. I’m not exactly required to strut down Fifth Avenue in designer shoes to enter the office of a luxury department store (which I did one summer) … I’m driving up to the SoftLayer headquarters in Dallas, Texas, where you’re more likely to see black T-shirts than suits and ties.

Feeling unsure about whether I can “WOW” some of the brightest people in Dallas in an industry where I am a rookie, I am pretty nervous, and I’m sure everyone has been in my shoes. Some of us ask too many questions, others ask too few, and some, like me, ask the wrong ones. My advice is to focus on one simple question: “Do we fit?” To unpack those three little words a little more, “Will this company value me as much as I value it, and will I enjoy being employed here as much as they enjoy employing me? Will our relationship be mutually beneficial?”

In today’s job market, some people can’t afford to ask these questions, especially considering the fact that “the right fit” tends to be the toughest aspect to quantify. Hiring and accepting an offer necessarily involves some risk, and the best choice might be decided by a gut feeling. After my first week at SoftLayer, I’m happy to say that I’m sure I made the right choice.

Walking through the office, the atmosphere is laid-back, but don’t be fooled. As relaxed and friendly as my coworkers are, they are also working hard, pouring themselves into the work they do. Coming from a business and a legal background, I thought this type of environment was only something I could read about in an article covering a cool new startup in BusinessWeek or the New York Times. Luckily I was wrong.

A company that values an employee’s autonomy is hard to find, and it takes the right employees to not abuse that privilege. From my one week of experience here, it’s clear SoftLayer has made it work, somehow finding the elusive combination of work, play, and success. That difficult important question is easy to answer: Yes, we fit … just as perfectly as a Christian Louboutin.

-Sarah

Last week, Thomas talked about his summertime passion, and it immediately got me thinking of mine. There are two things I know in this world: Hosting and Barbeque. They may be on the opposite ends of the spectrum, but both integral parts of the SoftLayer culture.

Being Texas born and bred, I hear stories that my first baby bed was actually a refinished barrel pit, and at the tender age of 4, I started my first fire right where I used to lay my head. By the age of 7, I graduated from grilling to smoking, and by age 10, I was expected to have mastered the art of mixing fire, smoke and the perfect rub to deliver a baby back rib so tender that you have no choice but to ‘slap yo mama!’

I have to admit that I am not an official member of the 3 Bars Barbeque team, but my ribs and steaks have been taken on the road to multiple parts of Texas, and they’ve won contests in Memphis for their fall-off-the-bone tender texture and their “mmm mmm good” flavor. I can’t really divulge my award winning recipe, but I can share my cooking method used to achieve that fall off the bone rib.

You’ve got to understand that smoking takes time. I generally allow one hour per pound on a nice rack of baby back ribs. In SoltLayer operations terms, for a 6lb rack of ribs, that means you’d have time to register a new domain name, provision a RHEL 5 Cloud Compute Instance, provision 2 dedicated database servers (1 in Dallas and 1 in San Jose), configure the CCI as a Web server, clone the CCI once in Dallas and once in San Jose, order eVault and add a second vault for redundancy, add local load balancing to both sites, use the previously registered domain name and set up Global Load balancing between the IPs of both local load balancers, setup rsync between web servers for one website and configure MySQL replication between your two new database servers (and you’d still have just enough time to configure the eVault backup that you ordered about 5.5 hours previously).

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, I promised a “cooking method” lesson:

1. Get Your Ribs
Everyone dresses their meat differently … Some prefer to marinate, some don’t. I find that it doesn’t make much of a difference, so I usually will remove my ribs from the fridge and rinse the before setting them aside to allow them to warm to room temperature. While that’s happening, I continue the rest of the process.

2. Prepare the Pit
I like to use a smoker pit grill … You know, something this:

I like to use split wood logs instead of flavored charcoal & wood chips. The wood you use is up to you; I usually do either hickory or mesquite and occasionally a log or two of apple (Beware that Mesquite burns very hot and is harder to stabilize at a consistent temperature when adding more wood to the fire later). Stack and light your fuel of choice in the smoker’s firebox – the only place where you will have a fire … The only thing that belongs in the pit is the meat and the smoke generated by the firebox.

Once you get your fire started, let it burn for a while so it can stabilize. You want the pit area to stay at a constant 225F ~ 250F. If you have enough prep time, you can also soak your wood logs for a couple of hours before you start your fire. This will cause the wood to burn slower and produce a slightly stronger smoke flavor in the ribs. This will also cut down on the amount of wood you “burn” through.

3. Prepare Your Ribs
While your fire is doing its thing and creating some good smoke, you can trim and season your ribs. Trim the membrane from the underside of the rack and season the meat with a dry rub (since it’s better suited for longer cook times).

4. Start Cooking
Once your pit has stabilized at the perfect temperate, it’s time to add the ribs. I use a rib rack just so I don’t have to flip the ribs while they’re in the pit, but if you don’t have a rib rack, place your ribs on the opposite side of the pit from the firebox bone side down (you have to ensure that the fire doesn’t reach your precious rack of ribs. If you are not using a rib rack, you will want to flip them about an hour and a half into cooking.

5. Keep Cooking
I use the 3–2–1 method when smoking: 3 hours on grill, remove the ribs, wrap them in foil, 2 hours on the grill in foil, remove the foil, and one more hour on the grill. By the time you get to that last hour, you’ll already find it difficult to flip the ribs as the meat will start falling off the bone. If your seasoning is top notch, you won’t need sauce, but the last hour is the time to baste if you want a different flavor in the mix. The 3–2–1 time frame is a loose guide to follow … You’ll need to keep an eye on the ribs to make sure they are not cooking too fast and that you’re keeping the flame away from the meat, and you may need to adjust times if your temperature exceeds 250F.

6. Remove the Ribs
Remove your ribs from the pit and allow them to rest for about 15 minutes before your cut them. This break will allow the juices to redistribute throughout the meat.

7. Enjoy!
No instructions necessary.

Following these rules, you’ll have a great rack of ribs, and if you took time while the ribs were cooking to order and provision that solution I talked about at the top of the post, you’ll have an amazing high-availability two-tier hosting solution by the time you take your first bite!

-Harold

Let’s say you have a website and you notice that any calls to your MySQL database take longer to render. If you don’t have a Database Administrator (DBA), this can be pretty frustrating. SoftLayer’s Managed Hosting line of business employs some of the best DBAs in the country and is one of the only managed hosting providers that offers MySQL and MsSQL DBA services, and I don’t just say that because I’m one of them … We’ve got the certifications to prove it.

Given my area of expertise, I wanted to share a few some simple tips with you to help you tweak variables and improve the performance of your MySQL server. Given that every application is different, this isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’ll at least give you a starting point for troubleshooting.

First: Get mysqltuner.pl. This is a fine script by Major Hayden that will give you some valuable information regarding the performance of your MySQL server.

Second: Look for fragmented tables. What are fragmented tables? If there are random insertions into or deletions from the indexes of a table, the indexes may become fragmented. Fragmentation means that the physical ordering of the index pages on the disk is not close to the index ordering of the records on the pages or that there are many unused pages in the 64-page blocks that were allocated to the index. The symptoms of fragmented tables can be that table can take more disk space than needed or the results may return slower with more disk I/O than needed. INNODB users need to check the fragmentation often because when INNODB marks data as deleted, it never overwrites the blocks with new data … It just marks them as unusable. As a result, the data size is artificially inflated and data retrieval is slowed.

Fortunately, there is a way to see your table fragmentation and that is to run a query against the information_schemea to show all tables that are fragmented and the percentage of fragmentation:

SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME, CONCAT(ROUND(data_length / ( 1024 * 1024 ), 2), 'MB') DATA, CONCAT(ROUND(data_free  / ( 1024 * 1024 ), 2), 'MB')FREE from information_schema.TABLES where TABLE_SCHEMA NOT IN ('information_schema','mysql') and Data_free < 0;

Fixing the fragmentation is easy, but there are a few caveats. When defragmenting a table, it will lock the table, so make sure you can afford the lock. To fix fragmented tables, you can simply run optimize table <table name>; to rebuild the table and all indexes or you can change the engine of the table with alter table <table name> engine = INNODB;

I have written a simple bash script in bash to go through, defragment and optimize your tables:

#!/bin/bash MYSQL_LOGIN='-u<user name> --password=<passowrd>' for db in $(echo "SHOW DATABASES;" | mysql $MYSQL_LOGIN | grep -v -e "Database" -e "information_schema")do        TABLES=$(echo "USE $db; SHOW TABLES;" | mysql $MYSQL_LOGIN |  grep -v Tables_in_)        echo "Switching to database $db"        for table in $TABLES        do                echo -n " * Optimizing table $table ... "                echo "USE $db; OPTIMIZE TABLE $table" | mysql $MYSQL_LOGIN >/dev/null                echo "done."        donedone

You’d be surprised how much of an impact table fragmentation has on MySQL performance, and this is an easy way to quickly troubleshoot your database that “isn’t as fast as it used to be.” If you follow the above steps and still can’t make sense of what’s causing your database to lag, our Managed Hosting team is always here to work with you to get your servers back in shape … And with the flexibility of month-to-month contract terms and the ability to add managed capabilities to specific pieces of your infrastructure, we have to earn your business every month with spectacular service.

-Lee

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog. As Kevin mentioned in the interview above, Postling‘s David Lifson will be sharing some social media tips and tricks in a separate blog in the near future. To learn more about Postling, visit http://www.postling.com/.

Remember this? Your car does.

Now that Memorial Day officially marks the beginning of summer and the temperature is creeping back up, it’s time to take care of that neglected car that battled the cold winter and the spring rains. Outside of work, a lot of fellow SLayers are into cars … Some show them off, others focus on making them faster. And given the fact that we are professionally obsessive about keeping our data centers clean and tidy, that obsessiveness is pretty evident in how hard we work to keep our cars clean.

Since today is a holiday in the US, I want to take a break from the down-and-dirty server stuff to give you a quick glimpse at what many SLayers are doing today: Cleaning their rides. Like a lot of the technical troubleshooting we do, it’s best to stick to a particular flow of steps to cover all the bases and get the best outcome. The following steps are the ones I take to bring back the showroom-floor shine. Since the typical car detail can run anywhere from $50-$300 this is a great way to save money every month … so you can order another server or upgrade the hardware on an existing one.

What You’ll Need

• Bucket
• Soap
• Sponge or Microfiber or Sheepskin Glove
• Clay Bar
• Wax and Foam Wax Applicator
• Quik Detailer
• Glass Cleaner
• Tire Shine – Optional
• Microfiber Towels – The more the merrier
• Beer (or beverage of choice) – Optional … also the more the merrier
• Bonus: Swirl Remover – If you’re using a rotary buffer
• Bonus: Finishing Polish

Note: In all steps where washing is involved, rinse first to get any loose dirt off then gently scrub and rinse off. Car should be parked in the shade to avoid water spots. All steps after clay barring MUST be done in the shade.

Step 1: Washing the Wheels
Make sure your brake rotors have cooled before hitting them with cold water, otherwise you could risk warping them. Because of the dirt and grime wheels get, I recommend using a separate bucket and sponge for this step.

Step 2: Washing the Rest of the Car / Drying
Always work from the top of the car to the bottom, and the best practice is to do one panel at a time.
Frequently rinse your sponge or glove to release the dirt it picks up.
When scrubbing the side panels, it’s better to go up and down instead of side to side or in circles.
Drying panels as soon as you’ve rinsed them helps prevent water spots.

Step 2.1: Tire Shine (Optional)
Try to keep Tire Shine on the tires only. If you get it on the wheel, it’ll just allow dirt and/or brake dust to attach to the wheel.
Don’t overdo this or it will just splash back onto your car when you start driving.

Step 3: Clay Bar
Spray Quik Detailer onto surface and gently rub the clay bar from side to side.
Fold the clay bar between sprays. This keeps the clay bar surface clean.
Dry leftover Quik Detailer with a microfiber towel.

Step 3.1: Swirl Remover then Finishing Polish (optional)
Best when used with a rotary buffer at high speed.
If doing by hand, using pressure, apply in small circular motions.
Remove with a microfiber towel.

Step 4: Wax
Using either a foam wax applicator or rotary buffer on low speed, apply wax as thinly as possible, otherwise it will be harder to remove.
When the surface looks hazy, remove with a microfiber towel.

Step 5: Quik Detailer & Glass Cleaner
Use Glass Cleaner on windows and mirrors.
Quik Detail the whole car again.
These steps clear off any leftover dust from waxing as well as remove any water spots from water that may have crept out after waxing.

Step 6: That’s All!
Crack open a beer and gaze at your beautiful car … *wipe drool off of face*.

The process can take as long as several hours to complete depending on how bad your car needs a cleaning. If this process has been completed recently, you can skip Steps 3 and 4, as clay barring is only needed ~2-3 times a year and waxing every 2-3 months.

If you’re like us and you love showing off your car, after it gets all dolled up, post a link to a picture of it here in the comments!

-Tommy

Look at any time period in mankind’s history, and you’ll come to the undeniable conclusion that technology changes the daily lives people in any society. With the evolution of technology, our lives have gotten so much easier. Consider all the little luxuries and conveniences available now to get tasks done in the workplace and home. Unfortunately, our rapid technological advancements aren’t necessarily exclusive to the “good guys” … The “bad guys” are benefiting from new technologies as well. Crime and theft have become more sophisticated, and as a result, more technological advancement has to be pursued in security, and it’s pretty remarkable to see some of the security measures and technologies put in place by companies like SoftLayer.

The day I started working here, I thought I was actually joining the CIA. I had to undergo several procedures to gain access to all the facilities: I had my photo taken and my fingerprints scanned before I registered for multiple key cards. The first job I had out of college only required its employees to have a single key card that allowed entrance through one door with access to all areas. Needless to say, it was a lot different to work in such a secure environment.

To give you an idea of what kinds of security we have at our data center, I’ll walk you through my daily experience. I step into our lobby and am usually greeted by multiple security guards behind what appears to be bullet-proof glass. I have to pass a fingerprint scanner and numerous secured door checkpoints to get into the office. Every move is under the scrutiny of video cameras recording every square inch of the building. Big Brother is always watching, and for SoftLayer customers, that should be reassuring.

The facility’s security reminds me of the movie Minority Report, and while those security measures may seem unnecessary or excessive, they’re actually just visible evidence of SoftLayer’s focus on the importance of security both online and in the physical realm.

Thinking about safety, I’ve also started considering heightening security at my home with a few security cameras. Some of my friends joke that this consideration is a sign of impending paranoia, but the “better safe than sorry” mantra should always be kept close to heart when it comes to protecting valuables. Apparently, I’m not alone in my home security research … A day after writing a good portion of this article, I came to work and in the morning a coworker told me he’d recently bought a security camera with night vision for personal use. I didn’t expect such a coincidence, and of course I enthusiastically replied to my coworker that I was thinking about making a similar purchase.

In closing, I’d like to ask you if you’ve entertained the idea of increasing security in your own home, and if so, do you have any suggestions about what equipment to purchase and features that prove useful? I doubt I’ll go as far as hiring security guards and installing fingerprint scanners, but you never know!

-Danny

In my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview with Kevin a few weeks ago, I touched on the Community Development groups goals as we work with startups, incubators and customers in our Technology Partners Marketplace, and last week I had the chance to visit a young, up-and-coming incubator in the Bay Area: Teens in Tech Labs. Among some of their other projects, Teens in Tech is launching the Teens in Tech Incubator – a program built on the idea that entrepreneurship doesn’t have a start age.

The incubator program lasts a little over eight weeks and is very hands on, in terms of mentor and adviser involvement. Each team invited to participate will be paired up with a group of mentors and advisers that will help during the process.

At the end of each week of the eight week program, the Teens in Tech staff will meet with each company to go over how their week went and what they think will help further build their business. Every other week, Teens in Tech will organize a dinner and have a guest speaker present to the teams … And it gives the teams a chance to interact with each other outside of building their product.

At the end of the eight weeks, the teams will present their startups to a group of Venture Capitalists, influencers, members of the press and others at an event called “Demo Day.”

Teens in Tech CEO Daniel Brusilovsky invited me to join him on a quick tour of their brand new office space in Mountain View, CA, and I made sure to grab my camera to capture the environment before the team and the incubator participants moved their stuff in:

We’re happy to support Teens in Tech, and we’re looking forward to seeing some of the amazing companies that’ll come from the best and brightest entrepreneurs under 18 years old!

-@Teknowlogist

In the first 7 episodes of the 3 Bars | 3 Questions series, you’ve had the chance to meet some interesting people who work for SoftLayer. In the last installment, Paul Ford chose “The Mitch” as the next participant, and that’s a bit of a curve ball. “The Mitch” isn’t exactly a SoftLayer employee, but he is a character born out of the Softlayer culture, so he qualifies for an interview:

Given our company culture and the time our team spends together in the office, these kinds of jokes are pretty common, and works is a lot more fun as a result. If you want to join the “tens” of fans referenced in the video, find “The Mitch” on Facebook and “Like” accordingly.

If you want to get your very own (extremely rare and valuable) personalized copy of “The Mitch,” mail your head shot to “The Mitch” c/o SoftLayer Technologies, 4849 Alpha Road, Dallas, TX 75244. And yes, employees who haven’t been lucky enough to receive a print are eligible to participate as well.

-@toddmitchell

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get to travel to Internet World in London for SoftLayer’s first exposition at a tradeshow in the UK. With a new data center opening soon in Amsterdam, I was really excited to get to share our story and our vision for the future with a new audience.

I expected a few differences as I approached conversations at the show – accents, verbiage, thoughts on what this cloud stuff actually means, etc. – but as long as I could speak my Texan version of the language, I’d be able to explain who SoftLayer is and what we do … With a few questions about what in the world a “switch ball” is and how it works. Here’s a quick demonstration from GDC in San Francisco this year:

It’s pretty funny to see the inventive ways conference attendees approach our giveaways … The switch balls are often confused as puzzles and our frisbees are thought of as hats. At every tradeshow, people are fascinated with our giveaways, but Internet World provided a unique fascination: the “Koozie.”

While the SoftLayer switch balls are always a huge hit (that we run out of at every show), what really seemed to intrigue the attendees in London were the SoftLayer Koozies – insulated can coolers. Most attendees thought the Koozies were cell phone holders initially, but once we explained that they are meant to keep your beer cold and your hand dry, they were surprisingly excited to have an opportunity to get a beer to test their Koozie out.

After coming across a few blank stares, giving some explanations and watching “Aha!” moments, I asked a few of the attendees why Koozies were not popular in Europe. The two most common responses: They drink their beer so fast it does not have time to get warm, and Europeans drink their beer warm. To me, drinking warm beer sounds really gross, but the next time I am in the UK, I will have to give it a fair shot … Maybe the fact that they drink their beer warm is a result of not having a Koozie to keep their hand dry and their beer cold, so we might have brought about a monumental shift in European alcohol consumption!

After demystifying the switch balls and Koozies, I think we did a great job sharing SoftLayer with our new audience, and I can tell that our space in Amsterdam won’t be empty for very long after we open the doors there. If you stopped by the booth, I hope you went out of your way to get a cold beverage to test the amazing Koozie technology.

-@SummerARivera

As Chief Scientist (or Chief Boffin, if you like), I spend a significant amount of time participating in industry, partner and customer events alike. This week is a great example, as I will be speaking at both All About the Cloud and the Citrix Synergy event in San Francisco. I will be covering similar ground on both occasions – the general idea is that the world does not revolve around “the cloud.” In fact, “the cloud” tends to be good for certain things and not so good for others. The challenge is that many customers seem to think that cloud is a panacea, solving all of their problems. Often, customers come to us with a blurred idea of why they want cloud, sometimes defaulting to, “the CEO says we need some cloud.”

My presentation at the All About the Cloud event is going to focus on the cloud question by trying to understand what each tool does well and so you can deploy accordingly to ensure needs are met. I’ll provide a backdrop market growth and then dive into dedicated, virtual and hybrid (cloud + dedicated) solutions with an eye to understanding each solution in broad terms … As an aside, I wanted to show up with a drill, a nail and a chunk of 2×4 to demonstrate this: I was going to pound the nail into the board with the drill, and then I was told this would be a bad idea. I may yet show up with some tools – all I need is a Home Depot close to the Palace Hotel!

The Citrix presentation is not quite so bold – well, it did not involve props in its initial incarnation. For the Synergy crowd, I’ll speak to a few case studies that leverage hybrid solutions to best meet their needs. Specifically, I will discuss companies that have deployed cloud + dedicated, SoftLayer dedicated + someone else’s cloud (the horror!) and an enterprise example with a mix of internal data center assets and SoftLayer assets.

The enterprise example is an interesting one and it is timely given what Citrix is up to. Part of the challenge with most enterprise customers is the fact that many have invested significant capital (both dollars and the human variety) in their own infrastructure. This often means that an additional level of complexity is introduced as the enterprise must consider how to bridge the gap between their own infrastructure and another, external (hopefully a SoftLayer) environment.

Citrix is about to launch Cloud Bridge which will help to manage through some of this – the offering enables customers to transparently connect their own data centers with an off premise cloud environment. SoftLayer can make this happen in two ways. Cloud Bridge will sit within Netscaler Platinum offering that we support and customers will have the ability to deploy themselves should they choose to.

I will follow up on this blog with some depth that covers both presentations, as I think this is a conversation worth continuing. In the meantime, I am off to find a Home Depot …

-Nathan

When IANA ran out of IPv4 blocks in February, the belts tightened yet another notch in the IPv4 world. Regional registries such as ARIN have changed how they are allocating additional IPv4 blocks to ISPs, including performing more stringent reviews to ensure efficient utilization of current allocations and reducing future allocation sizes to more fairly distribute the remaining addresses. In turn, ISPs such as SoftLayer have to more closely monitor how we assign our IPv4 space to ensure efficient utilization by our customers. In order to maximize this limited resource, we have to make changes to the way customers order and receive additional IPv4 IPs.

Being down the line from ARIN, SoftLayer’s networking department has to ensure we abide by all updated ARIN policies when we issue IPv4 addresses from our available pool in order to remain eligible to receive additional resource allocations. In addition to policy compliance, we are also focused on IPv4 conservation methods such as those referenced in RFC2050. Accordingly, we’ve made improvements to the way that we handle IPv4 requests to better streamline the process of collecting and reviewing usage and justification details.

Every SoftLayer server comes with one public IPv4 address, and until recently was assigned 4 additional IPs (/30) statically routed to that server. Our first step of IP conservation took place earlier this year, when we ceased the practice of automatically assigning the 4 additional IPs, and only issued them by customer request.

As we move forward, we’re trying to be as transparent with our customers about the IPv4 justification process as we can, so we’re letting you know that additional justification requirements have been imposed on all ISPs by ARIN, and the best way we can meet those requirements is to have our customers follow the same guidelines. Being SoftLayer, we’re doing what we can to automate and streamline the IPv4 justification process where possible, and are therefore implementing changes in the ordering system. Beginning on June 1, you will now be presented with a brief questionnaire whenever requesting additional IPv4 addresses. We must collect the requester’s contact details, number of IPs that are expected to be used immediately and within the next year, as well as a brief description of how the IPs will be used. What happens next depends on the information you have provided as well as the current IP usage on your account: either the request is automatically approved and fulfilled, or a ticket is spawned for additional manual review by one of the folks in our networking team.

When a ticket is spawned for our network folks, we will get back to you within one business day, and let you know whether we need additional details from you in order to consider the request. These manual reviews will take additional time, depending on the size and complexity of request, as well as the quality of information provided. Please be prepared that there will be some cases where we will not be able to approve a request, such as when name-based virtualization can be used for IP conservation, or when services such as SEO, email campaigns, or VPN termination are the intended use for the additional IPv4 addresses.

If you’re familiar with SoftLayer’s previous method of ordering additional IPv4 addresses, you might feel like we’re making you jump through hoops. These “hoops” are not intended to make the process arbitrarily more difficult. Rather, they’re being put in place specifically to make sure we’re in the best position possible to meet customer demands with our current IPv4 allocations, and get additional allocations from ARIN before they are completely depleted.

The ISPs that have no problems giving away IPv4 addresses right now without more stringent review are also going to be the providers that have the hardest time getting additional IPv4 blocks from ARIN, and therefore will have a hard time fulfilling future customer needs. At SoftLayer we are going by the philosophy that the more cautiously we approach IPv4 depletion by justifying our customers’ needs for each IPv4 address, the longer our IPv4 pool will last to meet those needs.

This is a good opportunity to mention IPv6 as the long-term solution for IPv4 address depletion. The sooner that the public Internet becomes fully IPv6-enabled, the better off the resource constraint will become. The SoftLayer network is enabled for IPv6, and you may place an order for 18.4 quintillion free IPv6 addresses for your server via our web portal today!

-Dani

The SoftLayer Mobile application allows customers to work with support tickets, examine and control servers, monitor bandwidth information and more. The application is available on two platform: Apple iOS – supporting iPhones and iPads, and the Google Android operating system – supporting mobile phones and devices from a variety of vendors.

The SoftLayer Mobile application is quickly approaching its first birthday. The application was first introduced to the world in June of 2010. Frequent visitors to this blog may remember when we introduced the iPhone application right here in the SoftLayer blog. We got back with you again when the Android application reached the milestone of 100 downloads. Our success with the application continues to this day with the both the iOS and Android versions sporting impressive download statistics which multiply those of a year ago many dozens of times over.

In the course of the past year, we’ve gotten some great suggestions for improvements from our customers. The first request was for the application to store account passwords a feature which we implemented quickly. From those humble beginnings we added some larger, more complex functionality based on your feedback like two-factor authentication using VeriSign Identity Protection, bandwidth charting, and the ability to check account balances and make one-time payments against those balances from your phone.

We’d love to continue that trend and hope to tap into the experience of the thousands of you who are working with the application. In the coming year, we hope to expand our existing functionality, include new features, and support both new operating systems and new devices. We’d love to hear about your ideas on how we can best improve the SoftLayer Mobile application to make it an even more valuable tool for you.

Would you like improved tracking of your bandwidth? Can we offer greater control over your server’s network ports? Do you need to monitor your server’s CPU usage even while you’re in line at the bank? Is there one particular task that compels you to visit the SoftLayer Customer Portal time and again? If so, and if it would be convenient for you to have that information on the phone in your pocket rather than on the computer at your desk, please let us know!

To offer your suggestions, please create a support ticket in your SoftLayer account detailing your needs. Alternatively, if you are already using the SoftLayer Mobile application, drop us a line through the feedback links built into the Support section.

If you haven’t been using the SoftLayer Mobile application, then we’d like to invite you to download it and explore its features. For more information, and for links and information about downloading and installing the application, visit our Mobile Application resource page.

Keep watching that page over the coming months as well. We have some exciting projects in the works and hope to share them with you very soon!

-Scott

SoftLayer isn’t a publicly traded company, but in the interest of transparency, we do our best to share as much information about the business as we can with our customers. Earlier this week, we released our revenue and operations growth for the first quarter of 2011, and while we’re happy to reach so many amazing milestones, we can’t take any time to rest on our laurels.

It’s no secret that we’ve gotten to where we are today because our 26,000+ customers trust us with their businesses. We can quantify success with revenue numbers and server counts, but at the end of the day, our business will be successful when we provide a platform for our customers to be successful. The growth of our customer base is a testament to the hard work the team has put in behind the scenes, and it also presents an interesting challenge: We need to continue to meet the needs of 26,000+ different businesses in 140+ countries around the world.

Given the amount of hair-pulling you might encounter by something as simple as setting up dinner with a group of friends, it’s a pretty daunting task to incorporate thousands of disparate perspectives in our road map as we move forward, but with that challenge comes great opportunity to build SoftLayer into an even better business. Whether the request is for something as straightforward as a hardware product or as complex as geographic expansion into specific international markets, the feedback we get from our customers shapes our internal conversations (and ultimately our long-term plans).

Understanding that need for constant feedback, we’re doing our best to listen to what our customers have to say. We’re listening to conversations on our forums, watching updates from our customers on various social media platforms, and monitoring our sales and support customer experiences to ensure we’re moving in the right direction. Recently, we incorporated a Get Satisfaction widget on our site to give our customers a platform to share their ideas, questions, problems and praises. Additionally, users can vote on existing suggestions to give us a sense of our customer base’s priorities.

To all of our customers, thank you for trusting SoftLayer with your business. In response to your past requests, we’ve opened a new data center in San Jose, christened new pods in Dallas and Washington, D.C., launched our managed hosting service and released servers powered by the latest and greatest Intel Xeon “Sandy Bridge” and “Westmere EX” processors … And all of those accomplishments have come since we closed the books on the success we shared from Q1.

As we continue to improve our feedback loops, you’re going to see even more impressive numbers from SoftLayer, and that success will fuel our ability to continue growing the business to meet more of our customers’ requests. Because we officially completed our integration with The Planet in Q1, we’re able to shift our focus completely to maintaining and growing the combined business. By the end of the year, you’ll see SoftLayer data centers in Europe and Asia, and as new products and technologies are released, you’ll see them first from SoftLayer.

What else can we do for you? (And no, that’s not a rhetorical question.)

-@gkdog

Following a long-time tradition inherited from The Planet, SoftLayer proudly participated this past weekend in the 2011 Dragon Boat, Kite and Lantern Festival in Irving, Texas. The festival, filled with colorful lanterns and kites, cultural performances, and great food, is centered on a water sport that originated in China over 2,000 years ago: Dragon boat racing.

Every year, organizations in the Dallas/Fort Worth area compete against each other by filling a boat with 20 rowers and one “drummer” to propel a 35-foot dragon boat for 250 meters across Lake Carolyn in Las Colinas.

Having this event in our own backyard, we thought it’d be a fantastic opportunity for SoftLayer’s “3 Bars BBQ” to show off its legendary culinary artistry. In addition to our group of private tents for employees to chill in by the lake, we set up a booth in the food vendor area with tons of delicious brisket, ribs, baked beans and potato salad. And since we’re pretty well known for our swag, some free cups and frisbees made their way to the event and ended up sprinkling SoftLayer’s logo all over the festival.

Under the “DragonSLayers” name, SoftLayer fielded two rowing teams that competed passionately to the chant of “Row, Row, Row!” Watching the races was a lot of fun, and it almost made me question my decision to stay ashore holding a four-pound camera. But hey, there would be no pictures if I hadn’t!

With a blazing fast best time of 1:15.7, the DragonSLayers took second place in the corporate division!

Counting families and pets, we had over 200 SLayers come out to support our paddlers and enjoy an afternoon filled with fun performances, great food, friendly competition … and lots of dragons.

We look forward to seeing you out there next year! Until then, we’ll be meeting in secret to train and hone our dragon boat paddling skills.

-Nick

P.S. If you want to see a few more pictures from the event, head over to our Flickr album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/softlayer/

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Jason Abate of Panopta, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in monitoring your servers and managing outages with tools and resources designed to help minimize the impact of outages to your online business. To learn more about Panopta, visit http://www.panopta.com/.

Server Monitoring Best Practices

Prior to starting Panopta, I was responsible for the technology and operations side of a major international hosting company and worked with a number of large online businesses. During this time, I saw my share of major disasters and near catastrophes and had a chance to study what works and what doesn’t when Murphy’s Law inevitably hits.

Monitoring is a key component of any serious online infrastructure, and there are a wide range of options when it comes to monitoring tools — from commercial and open-source software that you install and manage locally to monitoring services like Panopta. The best solution depends on a number of criteria, but there are five major factors to consider when making this decision.

1. Get the Most Accurate View of Your Infrastructure
Accuracy is a dual-edged sword when it comes to monitoring that can hurt you in two different ways. Check too infrequently and you’ll miss outages entirely, making you think that things are rosy when your customers or visitors are actually encountering problems. There are tools that check every 30 minutes or more, but these are useless to real production sites. You should make sure that you can perform a complete check of your systems every 60 seconds so that small problems aren’t overlooked.

I’ve seen many people setup this high-resolution monitoring only to be hit with a barrage of alerts for frequent short-lived problems which were previously never detected. It may hurt to find this, but at least with information about the problem you can fix it once and for all.

The flip side to accuracy is that your monitoring system needs to verify outages to ensure they are real in order to avoid sending out false alerts. There’s no faster way to train an operations team to ignore the monitoring system than with false alerts. You want your team to jump at alerts when they come in.

High-frequency checks that are confirmed from multiple physical locations will ensure you get the most accurate view of your infrastructure possible.

2. Monitor Every Component of Your Infrastructure
There are lots of components that make up a modern website or application, and any of them could break at any time. You need to make sure that you’re watching all of these pieces, whether they’re inside your firewall or outside. Lots of monitoring providers focus purely on remotely accessible network services, which are important but only one half of the picture. You also want an inside view of how your server’s resources are being consumed, and how internal-only network devices (such as backend database servers) are performing.

Completeness also means that it’s economically feasible to watch everything. If the pricing structure of your monitoring tool is setup in a way that makes it cost prohibitive to watch everything then the value of your monitoring setup is greatly diminished. The last thing you want to run into when troubleshooting a complex problem is to find that you don’t have data about one crucial server because you weren’t monitoring it.

Make sure your monitoring system is able to handle all of your server and network components and gives you a complete view of your infrastructure.

3.Notify the Right People at the Right Time
You know when the pager beeps or the phone rings about an outage, your heart beats a little faster. Of course, it’s usually in the middle of the night and you’re sleeping right?! As painful as it may be, you want your monitoring system to get you up when things are really hitting the fan – it’s still better than hearing from angry customers (and bosses!) the next morning.

However, not all outages are created equally and you may not want to be woken up when one of your clustered webservers briefly goes down and then corrects itself a few minutes later. The key to a successful monitoring solution is to have plenty of flexibility in your notification setup including being able to setup different notification types based on the criticality of the service.

You also want to be able to escalate a problem, bringing in additional resources for long-running problems. This way outages don’t go unnoticed for hours while the on-call admin who perpetually sleeps through pages gets more shut-eye.

Make sure that when it comes to notification, your monitoring system is able to work with your team’s preferred setup, not the other way around.

4. Don’t Just Detect Problems, Streamline Fixing Them
Sending out alerts about a problem is important, but it’s just the first step in getting things back to normal. Ideally after being alerted an admin can jump in and solve whatever the problem is and life goes on. All too often though, things don’t go this smoothly.

You’ve probably run into situations where an on-call admin is up most of the night with a problem. That’s great, but when the rest of the team comes in the next morning they have no idea what was done. What if the problem comes up again? Are there important updates that need to be deployed to other servers?

Or maybe you have a big problem that attracts interest from your call center and support staff (your monitoring system did alert you before they walked up, right?) Or management from other departments interrupt to get updates on the problem so they can head off a possible PR disaster.

These are important to the operation of your business, but they pull administrators away from actually solving the problem, which just makes things worse. There should be a better way to handle these situations. Given it’s central role in your infrastructure management, your monitoring system is in a great position to help streamline the problem solving process.

Make sure your monitoring system gives you tools to keep everyone on the same page by letting everyone easily communicate and log what was ultimately done to resolve the problem.

5. Demonstrate how Your Infrastructure is Performing
Your role as an administrator is to keep your infrastructure up and running. It’s unfortunately a tough spot to be in – do your job really well and no one notices. But mess up, and it’s clearly visible to everyone.

Solid reporting capabilities from your monitoring system give you a tool to help balance this situation. Be sure to get summary reports that can demonstrate how well things are running or make the argument for making changes and then following up to show progress. Availability reports also let you see a “big picture” view of how your infrastructure is performing that often gets lost in the chaos of day-to-day operations.

Detailed reporting gives you the data you need to accurately assess and promote the health of your infrastructure.

The Panopta Difference
There are quite a few options available for monitoring your servers, each of which come with trade offs. We’ve designed Panopta to focus on these five criteria, and having built on top of SoftLayer’s infrastructure from the very beginning are excited to be a part of the SoftLayer Technology Marketplace.

I would encourage you to try out Panopta and other solutions and see which is the best fit to the specific requirements for your infrastructure and your team – you’ll appreciate what a good night’s sleep feels like when you don’t have to worry about whether your infrastructure is up and running.

-Jason Abate, Panopta

On a normal day at home, the hum inside a personal computer would seem very inaudible. In contrast, if you find yourself inside a data center, you’re constantly surrounded by the inescapable whir of workhorse machines. This whir is the sound of thousands and thousands of fans pushing cold air and keeping everything in top working order.

Netwon’s Third Law of Motion states that “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” and the most common “reaction” to buzzing of these fans would normally be a gradual slip into madness after exposing human ears to the sound for an extended period of time. That same constant sound of enterprise cooling wreaks havoc on the ears of anyone working nearby due to its specific frequencies. As a result, ear protection is a must for any Server Build Technician.

Recently, a comrade with a special knack for ear protection reached a long overdue retirement from service.

My now-retired friend actually only began work in the SoftLayer Washington, D.C., data center two years ago, and this worker’s career was a shining tribute to workplace professionalism. Always silent and steadfast … You would rarely spend time at work without seeing him. Coworkers would often comment, “Does he ever sleep?” and, “Wow! You’re still here?” Despite all these implicit praises, this friend always remained humble and accepting, even during the rough times. I can’t remember how many times we may have thrown this poor coworker across the room or the amount of feet that he was dropped from (on a pretty large number of occasions). When abused, he just wrapped himself in duct tape or mended his broken body parts with zip-ties. This may seem an unusual fix for most things, but he never demanded more than that.

Anyone from the WDC location reading this article already knows the comrade I’m speaking of, but the rest of you might be a little lost (and shocked) as I mention the injuries that he suffered and possibly even very upset at how the treatment was handled afterwards. Luckily, the worker I have been describing to you is in fact not a person but an invaluable electronic device that has served me and essentially SoftLayer well through the years: To help combat the noise in our server rooms, I have always relied on this pair of headphones made by Koss to fill my ears with sweet music.

Any of our WDC staff will agree that I am rarely ever seen riding into battle (walking into our server room) without my partner at my side. As they say, you never fully appreciate the value of something until it is gone, so I was clearly reminded of this one day when I happened to misplace my headphones. I was overwhelmed with grief as I searched high and low until I found him dangling in one of our storage rooms and yelled out “TONTO!!” From personal experience, I can see clearly that the devices one picks for use are very important … Which might explain the careful process SoftLayer undergoes to ensure our customers are provided with the very best equipment.

-Jonathan

Two weeks ago, I inadvertently opened the floodgates to a wave of creativity from the SoftLayer Development/Technology organization. Lance came by my office and dropped off a server he was given, and while I would have taken it home, souped it up and done something cool with it in previous years (or decades) in my life, I find myself in more of a “just buy an iMac” camp now.

Rather than endanger the safety of our employees by sending out a “First one to grab the server from my office gets to keep it” email, I sent out more of a challenge: “Write a haiku or limerick stating why you want the server. If I get more than one submission, I’ll pick the best poem. Oh … And no Nantucket limericks.”

I expected one or two entries to come in, but to my surprise, I was greeted with dozens almost immediately:

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

There was a young man with a lance
Who had three kids to finance
Yes they look and they see
Asking for a PC
But their dad said no not a chance

Linux or Windows
Not up to how the wind blows
The penguin’s a go

When you’re whipping your verse into shape
And are caught in a verse-challenged scrape,
The delete key is handy.
Assisted by brandy,
And last, but not least, try escape.

Given the overwhelming initial response, we sweetened the deal a little by adding a second server to the mix (from George). When it came time to judge and announce the winners, I had to do so with my own poem … which killed me because I hadn’t written a poem in years.

My inbox laden
Server Poets bring me pride
Rewards were doubled

There once was a SLayer named Bradley
Whose poem was flattering badly
He said 3BFL
We said ‘Oh, What the Hell’
And gave him a server quite gladly

Among numerous entries we found
That nerdy rhymes and rhymers abound
And so many came forth
Our hand was quite forced
So to the contest more servers were bound

Thus also a Slayer named Hemsell
Was chosen to leave with a morsel
Wash the zeros away
Rip and store CDs today
Make this sad server sing loud and fell

With generous swagger Karidis did add
A prize sure to make the cable co mad
For Scott Thompson’s poem
Was moving and solemn
An Apple TV should not make him sad

And finally the team of Hannon and Chong
Grammar and spelling and format all wrong
But their desire so true
And coding poetry new
Request will be supported so strong

Translation:

Server Winner: Bradley Johnson

One, two, three bar life
Free drink, free shirt, free server
Movie files need home

Server Winner: David Hemsell

CDs sit offline
Once proud server is no more
Fill barren zeros

Apple TV Winner: Scott Thompson

Your free server will
fail to bring much joy to me
I use Macintosh

Additional Computer-Related Award of Some Kind: Chong and Harold

import com.softlayer.server;
public class freeAssetReserver{
   int count = 0;
   String you = “hero”;
   function void vmBoxOursObserver();
}

Congratulations to Bradley and David for winning the servers and to Scott Thompson for walking away with the unadvertised Apple TV! When we were going through the submissions, we couldn’t help but reward the submission from Chong and Harold – A coding limerick!

We’ll post more of the submissions in the comments on this post, so be sure to scroll down and add your own!

-Duke

On my first day on the job at SoftLayer, I was taught the core values of the company: Innovation, empowerment, automation and integration. Initially, I wasn’t sure if this was “marketing talk” or actually the actual driving force behind SoftLayer. Now, almost a year and a half later, I see how these core values really do power SoftLayer’s success every day.

In April, I was chatting with companies at Cloud Connections in Las Vegas, and I had the chance to give them some examples of how those core values make SoftLayer so much more than just another hosting provider:

Innovation
We’re constantly bringing products to market before others in the industry realize the need for them. One example of this is our early adoption of IPv6. SoftLayer was the very first hosting provider to offer our customers IPv6 and to make sure our entire data centers were IPv6-ready.

Empowerment
We give our customers full root access to their hardware so that they are able to configure their environment exactly how they want it. Beyond that, each server comes with free KVM over IP and out-of-band management network capabilities. We give complete control to our customers so that they can create their own virtual data center experience on demand.

Automation
We’ve completely automated the provisioning process, so we can deliver fully provisioned, customized dedicated servers in 1-4 hours and fully provisioned cloud instances in 5-25 minutes. Most of SoftLayer’s competitors take a few days (sometimes even weeks) to provision what we have online in hours.

Integration
We’re the only hosting provider that can offer a truly integrated solution for dedicated servers and cloud computing instances. We offer a single portal and API to manage both of these solutions. We also offer a private network that connects your dedicated servers and cloud computing instances and allows them to communicate without going out over the public network.

If you’re familiar with SoftLayer, you know that these core values permeate our business. By innovating, empowering, automating and integrating, we’re trying to stay ahead of the game. If you would like to experience a way-better-than-average hosting experience, I am sure SLales would love to hear from you!

3B4L!

-@SummerARivera

Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Gleb Arshinov of Acunote, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in online project management and Scrum software. To learn more about Acunote, visit Acunote.com.

Implementing Project Management in Your Business

Project management has a bit of a stigma for being a little boring. In its simplest form, project management involves monitoring and reporting progress on a given initiative, and while it sounds simple, it’s often an afterthought … if it’s ever a thought at all. Acunote is in the business of making project management easy and accessible for businesses of all sizes.

I’ve been in and around project management for years now, and while I could talk your ear off about Acunote, I’d rather share a few “Best Practices” for incorporating project management in your business. As you begin to understand how project management principles can be incorporated into your day-to-day activities, you’ll be in a better position to understand the value proposition of tools like Acunote.

Track Planning, Not Just Execution
One of the biggest mistakes many companies make as they begin to incorporate project management is the tendency to track the progress on the execution of a project. While that aspect of the project is certainly the most visible, by monitoring the behind-the-scenes planning, you have a fuller view of where the project came from, where it is now and where it is expected to go in the future. It’s difficult to estimate how long projects will take, and a lot of that difficulty comes from insufficient planning. By planning what will need to be done in what order, a bigger project becomes a series of smaller progress steps with planning and execution happening in tandem.

For many projects, especially for developers, it’s actually impossible to predict most of what needs to get done upfront. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a predictable aspect to a given project, though. Good processes and tools can capture how much of the work was planned upfront, how much was discovered during the project, and how the project evolved as a result. In addition to giving you direction as a project moves forward, documenting the planning and execution of a given project will also give you watermarks for how far the project has come (and why).

Use Tools and Resources Wisely
It’s important to note that complexity of coordinating everything in a company increases exponentially as the company grows. With fewer than ten employees working on a project in a single department, you can probably get by without being very intentional in project management, but as you start adding users and departments that don’t necessarily work together regularly, project management becomes more crucial to keep everyone on the same page.

The most effective project management tools are simple to implement and easy to use … If a project management tool is a hassle to use, no one’s going to use it. It should be sort of a “home base” for individual contributors to do their work efficiently. The more streamlined project management becomes in your operating practices, the more data it can generate and the more you (and your organization’s management team) can learn from it.

Make Your Distributed Team Thrive
More and more, companies are allowing employees to work remotely, and while that changes some of the operations dynamics, it doesn’t have to affect productivity. The best thing you can do to manage a thriving distributed team is to host daily status meetings to keep everyone on the same page. The more you communicate, the quicker you can adjust your plans if things move off-track, and with daily meetings, someone can only be a day behind their expectations before the project’s status is reevaluated. With many of the collaboration tools available, these daily meetings can be accompanied by daily progress reports and real-time updates.

Acunote is designed to serve as a simple support structure and a vehicle to help you track and meet your goals, whether they be in development, accounting or marketing. We’re always happy to help companies understand how project management can make their lives easier, so if you have any questions about what Acunote does or how it can be incorporated into your business, let us know: support@acunote.com

-Gleb Arshinov, Acunote

What do you call the day after you finish building a new data center server room and cabling the server racks in it? If you’re an employee at SoftLayer, you call it Truck Day.

Last week, a few of the folks from marketing were invited to celebrate in the Truck Day festivities for Pod 2 in DAL05 (SR02.DAL05), and I jumped at the opportunity. I don’t go anywhere without at least one camera on-hand to document and share what’s going on with the SoftLayer community, and Truck Day wasn’t an exception … In fact, I had three different cameras going at all times!

The truck arrived at around 7 a.m. with a few dozen pallets of servers, and about forty employees from all around the company immediately jumped into action. As the pallets moved from the loading dock to the inventory room, people were unboxing servers and piling them on carts. When a cart was full, it was whisked to the data center and unloaded. The data center techs plugged in each of the servers to confirm its configuration and stacked it with matching configurations in designated areas around the data center. By the time one cart got back to the inventory room, another was on its way to the data center, so very little time was lost.

Back in 2007, SamF did a great job of explaining the process, so I won’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, I’ll let you see the activities as they were captured by the three cameras I toted along:

To give you an idea of how fast all of this was done, each the time lapse cameras set up in the data center and in the inventory room captured images every five seconds. When the video was compiled, the frame rate was set to 20 frames per second, so each second of time lapse video is the equivalent of 100 seconds of work. In a matter of just a few hours, we received, inventoried, racked, cabled and started selling around 750 servers in a brand new data center pod. Competitors: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Pictures from DAL05 Pod 2 Truck Day have been posted on our Flickr Account: http://sftlyr.com/8g

In the past three weeks, we brought three different data center pods online in three different parts of the country: On April 25, it was our first server room in San Jose (SJC01); on May 2, the second server room in DAL05; and on May 10, our second server room in WDC01. As far as I know, we don’t have a new pod planned for next month, but given how quickly the operations team has been building data center space, I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call asking me to come in a little early to help unload servers in a new data center next week.

-@khazard

Music Credit: The background track in the video is “Your Coat” from SoftLayer’s very own Chris Interrante. Keep an eye out for his soon-to-be released EP: OVERDRAFT.