One of SoftLayer’s driving principles is innovation — Our mantra is ‘Innovate or Die.’ We don’t focus on offering the lowest cost solutions; we strive to offer the most innovative solutions, which in turn brings customers the greatest value.

Take as an example SoftLayer Managed Hosting, a new service we’re launching this week.

A quick survey of the market tells us a number of key things about managed hosting in terms of the value proposition offered, as well as the challenges that it can present. The value proposition seems clear: Organizations that need their infrastructure managed and don’t have the internal resources to do so can either expand their IT capabilities or look externally to a service provider to take on the work. Many choose the second option because it is much faster and more cost effective than building an internal function. Elimination of infrastructure management responsibilities combined with a lower price would seem to deliver significant value.

So where’s the downside?

A typical managed services deal comes with a 3-5 year contract, often accompanied by an early termination fee. The end result: customer lock-in. If the service is not up to snuff, it is difficult to move to another provider.

This is great for the provider, but not so great for the customer. To make matters even less customer-centric, these deals tend to be “all or none” affairs. The service provider wants to add management fees to everything versus just those pieces that the customer wants managed. In addition to that, provisioning time can be horrendous. A managed environment typically takes anywhere from 10-15 business days before the customer can access the environment. That’s a painful length of time when you compare it with the five minutes it takes to provision a SoftLayer cloud instance and the 2-4 hours it takes to get a dedicated box online and ready for you.

Understanding the competitive landscape, we decided to take a different approach with our Managed Hosting: The innovative approach.

Instead of a 10-15 day provisioning window, we’ll have your managed environment up and running within one (1) business day of ordering.

From a contract perspective, we are confident enough in our service to offer a month-to-month terms. If you don’t like the service or if we can’t deliver, you should be free to find a provider that meets your needs — no penalties incurred. Isn’t it time to expect a provider to earn your business each month? This arrangement also makes managed hosting feasible for short-term needs and applications.

Additionally, SoftLayer Managed Hosting is not “all or none.” We’ll manage only the pieces of the solution that you want managed.

And to top everything off, it just so happens that we can deliver these solutions at a price point lower than anyone else in the market because of the platform’s flexibility.

In this case, innovation brings customers the greatest service value AND the best price!

CBNO

-Nathan

P.S. Neovise prepared a detailed report on our managed hosting offering: A New Breed of Managed Hosting for the Cloud Computing Age. If you like white papers (and who doesn’t?), it’ll be right up your alley.

I know you expected to see a video interview with Paul Ford the next time a 3 Bars | 3 Questions episode rolled across your desk, but I snuck past him for a chance in the spotlight this week. Kevin and I jumped on a quick video chat to talk about the Sales Engineering team, and because of our recent release of SoftLayer Managed Hosting, two of the three questions ended up being about that news:

You should be seeing a blog from Nathan in the next half hour or so with more detail about how we approached managed hosting, so you’ll have all the background you need to springboard into that post after you watch this video.

If you’ve heard everything you need to hear about managed hosting and want to start the process of adding it to servers on your account, visit http://www.softlayer.com/solutions/managed-hosting/ or chat with a sales rep, and they can help you get squared away. If you’re not sure whether it’s a good fit, ask for a sales engineer to consult … They’re a great group with a pretty awesome manager.

Paul, sorry for stealing your spot in the 3 Bars | 3 Questions rotation! I’m handing the baton back over to you to talk about TechWildcatters and the Technology Partners Marketplace in the next episode.

-Tam

Ever wonder what a SoftLayer data center looked like before it became a SoftLayer data center? Each one of our facilities is built from a “pod” concept: You can walk into any of our server rooms in any of our facilities around the country (soon to be “around the world”), and you’ll see same basic layout, control infrastructure and servers. By building our data center space in this way, we’re able to provide an unparalleled customer experience. Nearly every aspect of our business benefits from this practice, many in surprising ways.

From an operations perspective, our staff can work in any facility without having to be retrained and the data center construction process becomes a science that can be replicated quicker with each subsequent build-out. From a sales perspective, every product and technology can be made available from all of our locations. From a network perspective, the network architecture doesn’t deviate significantly from place to place. From a finance perspective, if we’re buying the same gear from the same vendors, we get better volume pricing. From a marketing perspective … I guess we have a lot of really pretty data center space to show off.

We try to keep our customers in the loop when it comes to our growth and expansion plans by posting pictures and updates as we build new pods, and with our newest facility in San Jose, CA, we’ve been snapping photos throughout the construction progress. If you’ve been patiently reading this part of the blog before scrolling down to the pictures, you get bonus points … If you looked at the pictures before coming back up to this content, you already know that I’ve included several snapshots that show some of the steps we take when outfitting new DC space.

The first look at our soon-to-be data center is not the flashiest, but it shows you how early we get involved in the build-out process. The San Jose facility is brand new, so we have a fresh canvas for our work of art. If I were to start talking your ear off about the specifics of the space, this post would probably go into next week, so I’ll just show you some of the most obvious steps in the evolution of the space.

The time gap between the first picture and the second picture is pretty evident, but the drastic change is pretty impressive. Raised floor, marked aisles, PDUs … But no racks.

Have no fear, the racks are being assembled.

They’re not going to do much good sitting in the facility’s office space, though. Something tells me the next picture will have them in a different setting.

Lucky guess, huh? You can see in this picture that the racks are installed in front of perforated tiles (on the cold aisle side) and on top of special tiles that allow for us to snake cabling from under the floor to the rack without leaving open space for the cold air to sneak out where it’s not needed.

The next step in the process requires five very expensive network switches in each rack. Two of the switches are for public network traffic, two are for private network traffic and one is for out-of-band management network traffic.

Those switches won’t do much good for the servers if the servers can’t be easily connected to them, so the next step is to attach and bind all of the network cable from the switches to where the servers will be. As you’ll see in the next pictures, the cabling and binding is done with extreme precision … If any of the bundles aren’t tightly wound, the zip ties are cut and the process has to be restarted.

While the cables are being installed, we also work to prepare our control row with servers, switches, routers and appliances that mirror the configurations we have in our other pods.

When the network cables are all installed, it’s a pretty amazing sight. When the cables are plugged into the servers, it’s even more impressive … Each cable is pre-measured and ready to be attached to its server with enough length to get it to the port but not too much to leave much slack.

One of the last steps before we actually get the servers installed is to install the server rails (which make installing the server a piece of cake).

The servers tend to need power, so the power strips are installed on each rack, and each power strip is fed from the row’s PDU.

Every network and power cable in the data center is labeled and positioned exactly where it needs to be. The numbers on the cables correspond with ports on our switches, spots in the rack and plugs on the power strip so we can immediately track down and replace any problem cables we find.

If you’ve hung around with me for this long, I want to introduce you to a few of the team members that have been working night and day to get this facility ready for you. While I’d like to say I could have done all of this stuff myself, that would be a tremendous lie, and without the tireless efforts of all of these amazing SoftLayer folks, this post would be a whole lot less interesting.

A funny realization you might come to is that in this entire “data center” post, there’s not a single picture of a customer server … Is it a data center if it doesn’t have data yet?

-SamF