At conferences and tradeshows, I have the opportunity to meet hundreds of people. While a good number of attendees at technical conferences will come up to our booth and tell me they’re already customers, we still come across a few people who glance at our collateral and our graphics with a puzzled look on their face before they say, “What’s Soft … Layer?” This is where I spring into action!

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

Inspired by Robert’s NFL rival blog, I thought I’d contribute my own football-related post. Before I go any further, I should probably say, “PONY UP!” As a proud alumna of Southern Methodist University (SMU), I’m always happy to share where I sent to college, but when the SMU Mustangs take down our biggest rivals in football, you can bet that I’ll talk about it. For the past century or so, SMU has battled the TCU Horned Frogs for “The Iron Skillet,” and this season, that skillet headed back to Dallas (where it belongs).

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

Within days of signing on to join the SoftLayer team in Amsterdam, I was on a plane to Dallas. With our facility coming online November 7, the onboarding process had to be accelerated, and the trip to our global headquarters provided an excellent crash course in SoftLayer’s strategy and vision for the future. The trip also provided Kevin an opportunity to record a “3 Bars 3 Questions” interview with me after he talked to Michael Ong, the SoftLayer’s APAC general manager.

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

Where has the time gone? We still have confetti in our hair from the party celebrating the Singapore data center going online, and all of a sudden, we’re announcing that SoftLayer servers are available in Amsterdam for presale.

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

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 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

When we last talked, I broke down the differences between features and benefits. To recap: a feature is something prominent about a person, place or thing, while a benefit is a feature that is useful to you. In that blog, I discussed our customer portal and the automation within, so with this next installment, let’s move into my favorite place: the data center … Our pride and joy!

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

It’s been a few months since the last 3 Bars 3 Questions with “The Mitch,” and between then and now, a lot has changed in the SoftLayer world. The biggest difference: Our technicians have traveled around the world to build out data centers in Singapore and Amsterdam. I joined SoftLayer as general manager of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, and when I took a trip to Dallas to meet the rest of the team, Kevin was able to convince me to answer a few questions on video about what’s been going on in Singapore:

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

Almost a year ago, Eris – the, uh, most massive known dwarf planet -- passed directly in front of an otherwise anonymous star, momentarily causing the star to disappear, as seen from the earth. By carefully measuring the length of time that the star disappeared, astronomers made a very precise measurement of the size of Eris. I care about the size of Eris for many different reasons, but the most

How many times have you heard that making a good first impression is everything? This is so true in many circumstances – from a blind date to a job interview to meeting the future in-laws. The first few moments are critical. There are a few things that help when making that first contact:

• 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

When I attend conferences, I always try to make sure that I communicate what we do the best way I can. With our new data centers opening up in Singapore and Amsterdam, I was curious to see what a SoftLayer message would look like in the two countries’ most prominent languages. With the gracious help from local representatives, we have our English message translated into Mandarin, Malay and Dutch.

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
??????????????????????????25000????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????API???????????????????????????????????

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

Cheering for the hometown team has always been interesting at SoftLayer. With U.S. data centers in Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Seattle and San Jose, the “home team” varies throughout the organization. It’s always fun to talk about games with fans when I’m not invested in the outcome of a game outside my favorite team’s division … And when it comes to the NBA (which no longer has a team in Seattle), it’s easy to cheer for the teams that other SLayers are cheering for. When the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA Championships, our Dallas techs were going crazy, and their enthusiasm was pretty contagious.

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

Dealing with jet lag, unfamiliar surroundings, foreign currencies and different languages just begins to describe my hectic life over the past two months. We’ve been in overdrive, building out SoftLayer’s Singapore and Amsterdam data centers in weeks (rather than months).

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

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed an interesting trend:”The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

Think back to your first computer. How much storage capacity did it have? You were excited to be counting in bytes and kilobytes … “Look at all this space!” A few years later, you heard about people at NASA using “gigabytes” of space, and you were dumbfounded. Fastforward a few more years, and you wonder how long your 32GB flash drive will last before you need to upgrade the capacity.

As manufacturers have found ways to build bigger and faster drives, users have found ways to fill them up. As a result of this behavior, we generally go from “being able to use” a certain capacity to “needing to use” that capacity. From a hosting provider perspective, we’ve seen the same trend from our customers … We’ll introduce new high-capacity hard drives, and within weeks, we’re getting calls about when we can double it. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to incorporate product offerings that meet and (at least temporarily) exceed our customers’ needs.

Today, we announced Quantastor Storage Servers, dedicated mass storage appliances with exceptional cost-effectiveness, control and scalability. Built on SoftLayer Mass Storage dedicated servers with the OS NEXUS QuantaStor Storage Appliance OS, the solution supports up to 48TB of data with the perfect combination of performance economics, scalability and manageability. To give you a frame of reference, this is 48TB worth of hard drives:

If you’ve been looking for a fantastic, high-capacity storage solution, you should give our QuantaStor offering a spin. The SAN (iSCSI) + NAS (NFS) storage system delivers advanced storage features including, thin-provisioning, and remote-replication. These capabilities make it ideally suited for a broad set of applications including VM application deployments, virtual desktops, as well as web and application servers. From what I’ve seen, it’s at the top of the game right now, and it looks like it’s a perfect option for long-term reliability and scalability.

-@nday91

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 a guest blog from Native Rank. Native Rank provides an effective solution for improving your visibility across search engines, social networks and web maps. They are a full-service search and advertising solution for small to large businesses both on a local and national level.

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

Ranking Well != Being Well Ranked

There is a common misconception in Search Engine Optimization: That if Company A was just on the first page for some random keyword, the sky would open up and leads would fall from the heavens. This is not always the case, and a better place to start the process of deciding what Key Words will be most effective for a client to rank for can be assessed in 3 easy steps:

1. In depth keyword analysis for terms that your customers actually use to find a business like yours. If you specialize in DUI law, keywords structured around your area of expertise will lead to a higher quality of lead than the search term, “Denver Attorney.”
2. Be realistic about who your competitors are and find where they are ranking organically. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. This will give you a good road map for what your competitors are doing and they are creating success.
3. If you have a physical location make sure your local maps listings for Google, Yahoo and Bing are optimized and Owner Verified. The Search Engines want to show your business to Searchers that are in your Geographic area..Please let them!

Once you have gone through those three easy steps, make sure that the SEO company you are working with has the same expectations that you have for your business. Targeted success metrics and milestones need to be at the core of your SEO strategy. Ranking for 50 Keywords that bounce at 90% will not result in more customers through your door. It is very important that the SEO firm you use has your business objectives in mind. If not you may find yourselves three or six months down the road having a very uncomfortable conversation about what success is.

If you’ve never made a concerted effort into SEO and SEM strategy, we’d be happy to share some of the tools we’ve developed to get you ranking well whether you consider yourself a local business or a national one. Head over to http://nativerank.com/ to see a few of our products in action and learn a little more about our service.

-Winston Cook, Native Rank

Is it possible to be in 3 places at once?? For SoftLayer it is! Last week was an extremely busy one for the SoftLayer team. SLayers from the marketing and sales teams were dispersed to cover three different trade shows in two separate cities where we’d meet a few thousand soon-to-be SoftLayer customers.

I attended Web 2.0 Expo in NYC – a great event where I was able to once again demystify the SoftLayer Switch Ball and explain the awesomeness of SoftLayer. Nothing too crazy to report from the expo floor, but we did have one interesting experience outside of the event where we witnessed a man sleep while standing up. We don’t know how he was able to sleep for over two hours without falling over, but his execution was impressive:

While I was in New York City, cPanel Bootcamp was happening closer to home in Austin, Texas. From what I hear, a second annual rocket war broke out, and our booth was rushed by attendees looking to stock up on ammo.

Just down the street from the cPanel conference, GDC Online was up and running in the Austin Convention Center. This was another awesome event for SoftLayer and once again the Server Challenge was a huge hit:

Congrats to Anthony Pecorella for winning with a time of 1:00.84! We know you’ll enjoy your new iPad.

After both show floors closed, attendees from both cPanel Bootcamp and GDC Online joined us for some drinks, food and retro games at Maggie Mae’s on Sixth Street. Notable attendees included Mario, Princess Peach and our very own Jeff Reinis who happens to be a 1983 Pac-Man record holder!

If you didn’t have a chance to join SoftLayer, CoreSite and TeliaSonera at the Time Warp Retro Gaming Party, you can live vicariously via Flickr:

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make sure these three events went off without a hitch, and thanks to all of you who stopped by and said hi! We hope to see you all soon at one of our upcoming events: http://www.softlayer.com/Media/event-schedule

-Summer

I started my career with SoftLayer in March 2011 as a Server Build Technician, and after a few short months, I can safely say that coming here was one of the best moves I have ever made in my life. I have worked in a number of different jobs ranging from retail to shipping, but in my heart, I always knew I wanted a career in computer technology. SoftLayer made that dream come true.

When I started, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the amount of information I had to learn all at once. That feeling quickly subsided during the first week as I realized how the work environment and culture is built on employees who take great pride both what they do and the knowledge they are able to pass on to newcomers. I knew I was in good hands. I felt like I was a part of an elite group of intelligent, inspiring, funny, energetic and down to earth people.

Through the interactions I’ve had with my direct coworkers, my knowledge has grown tremendously, and I feel more confident in meeting and exceeding the expectations and responsibilities in front of me. The original SoftLayer culture is alive and well thanks to the efforts and example of the management team, and it doesn’t take long to notice that this company has a passion for customer service, and we strive to be the very best we can be. Because of the encouragement and optimism I have been given, I see a bright future for me here.

As our operations expand, I can’t help but get excited for the success in store for the business, our team and our customers. We’re ready to embrace new challenges, and though the tasks seem daunting, I know our team can handle them easily. I take great pride in my work, and I’m quick to tell the SoftLayer story to anyone who will listen. The company motto is, “Innovate or Die,” and every employee – from Dallas to Amsterdam to San Jose to Singapore – lives and breathes that motto daily. We’re pushing the limits of what a “hosting company” can do, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it.

I feel honored to say that I am a part of the SoftLayer family, and if you’re in the market for a new job for an awesome employer, you should head to SoftLayer Careers to find which of the 50+ positions you’d fit so you can join us in Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapore, Amsterdam or Washington, D.C.

We are SoftLayer!

-Anthony

At the beginning of the baseball season, we gave away tickets for a lucky customer to see a Texas Rangers game, and as a result of that generosity, the Rangers thought it fitting to make it to the World Series. Well … our little giveaway may not have had anything to do with their success, but we like to think our support helped a little.

Understanding that we have customers and employees who are die-hard St. Louis Cardinals fans, I don’t want to turn anyone off with this blog post, but with all of the buzz in the air about the World Series coming back to Arlington this year, I started thinking about the Top 10 Ways SoftLayer is Like the Texas Rangers:

1. Secret handshakes / fist bumps.
2. Have a no “I” in “Team” mentality … In fact, there are no I’s in “Texas Rangers” or “SoftLayer.”
3. Teams’ leaders (i.e. coach and the CEO) are … um … charismatic (to say the least).
4. Come ready to play on any day that ends in “y.”
5. Strong lineups all the way through.
6. Texas is home, but both teams do amazing jobs “on the road.”
7. Both have Michaels who like pink.*
8. Both have Louisville Slugger bats … The Rangers’ bats do great things, while SoftLayer’s bats are given to recognize employees that have done great things.
9. Support is awesome from the customers (fans) to the back office to the team on the field making plays.
10. Champions of the World, baby!!**

* Apologies to Michael Young, as this statement may not be true as applied to him. Each of my blogs to date has a veiled (or obvious) reference to our CFO, and it was very difficult to think of how to incorporate this reference in a blog dealing with the Texas Rangers, so I may have taken undue liberties for which I apologize.

** The aspirations associated with that last comparison may have strayed me from an unbiased comparison.

-@badvizsla

SoftLayer attends 60+ tradeshows a year. That may not sound like much too some people, but when it means you’re only home for six days in a given month, it’s pretty daunting. Some think that going to a tradeshow is a “free” min-vacation, but in reality it’s exhausting work. You’ll get lucky at a few shows where the booth time is only 4-6 hours, but most of the time, you’re on the hook for 8 or 9 hours. You never know how much you use your leg muscles by just standing until you do it for nine straight hours. After being on your feet for that long, the first thing you want to do when the show closes is go to dinner just so you can sit down. Now think about doing this for three or four days in a row, and it doesn’t sound like a vacation anymore.

Before I turn you off tradeshows altogether, I should admit that they are actually quite fun if you’re a people person. I love getting to meet new people and show them what SoftLayer has to offer. It’s a rewarding experience to see that light in someone’s eyes who has never heard of SoftLayer and then finds out how we can make their business better. I can’t help but think to myself, “Yeah, we are kind of a big deal.”

Given my extensive experience in the conference and tradeshow realm, here are a few key pieces of advice for the non-experienced SoftLayer tradeshow traveler (adjust for your brand as necessary):

Attire

• Guys should wear black slacks with a polo or button down. For the more casual shows, nice jeans (no rips, tears or holes) and any kind of SoftLayer shirt is fine.
• Girls should wear black slacks or a black skirt with a polo or button down … And now you have the option of a SoftLayer dress.
• It’s always a good idea to wear slacks the first day to “test the waters” of the attire for the show. After that, you can plan your next day’s attire accordingly.
• Always wear black shoes. Girls do NOT wear high heels … You will regret it 30 minutes into the first day. An great alternative for the ladies are black flats, these will look great with pants, a skirt, or a SoftLayer dress.
• Sometimes it gets extremely cold in the conference hall, so I suggest bringing a jacket – even if it’s 110 degrees outside. When wearing a jacket over your attire, make it one of the branded SoftLayer jackets – a SoftLayer logo should be visible at all times so attendees know you’re not a random stranger in the SoftLayer booth.

Behavior

• I know how easy it can be to get carried away when other attendees get a little wild, but that is NO excuse to be late, completely absent or operating at less than 100% when you get to the booth the next day.
• You should always have a smile on your face when talking with attendees. You’re talking about great stuff when you’re talking about SoftLayer, so you should be happy to share it with the next potential SoftLayer customer.
• This should go without saying, but there should be NO cursing, yelling or arguing with anyone at the booth.

Last but not Least
The number ONE rule for the non-experienced traveler: ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS know your stuff before going to a tradeshow. Nothing is more embarrassing for your colleagues (or SoftLayer in general) when you are asked a simple question about what SoftLayer does and you do not know. If you do not know something, ask a colleague or simply look on our website. We have plenty of information there and numerous datasheets that explain in detail the products and services SoftLayer offers.

-Natalie

As a video gaming and movie addict, I’ve always followed the latest trends and news in these two areas. Because there always seems to be some “breaking news” every day due to technology advancing so rapidly, sometimes it’s tough to keep up.

In gaming, I remember it all started for me back when my parents decided to buy me the first Nintendo console. Pointing that light sensor gun at unsuspecting ducks and watching them fall was all the rage … It marked a big step in the evolution of home gaming. What initially seemed like a good investment to keep me out of trouble soon turned into a headache for my parents. I frequently begged for more games, and they were not cheap. Look at how much new video games cost these days, and you’ll see that not much has changed in that regard. The fire to play all the latest games was never extinguished, so a chunk of my income was always earmarked for the next amazing game I needed.

As for movies, I also found myself collecting as many as possible to rewatch whenever I choose. While each individual movie didn’t cost as much as a video game, the aggregate costs definitely built up over time. My family and friends warned me that my “extravagant lifestyle” is reserved for the rich and would only lead me to financial ruin.

Fast forward to today, and I can say that I’ve learned a lot and found ways to sustainably feed my addiction without driving myself to financial ruin. How is it possible that I am able to live like a king without breaking the bank? It’s all thanks to content streaming, made possible by the Internet. I no longer have to buy every single game to have the ability to play whenever I feel like it with services like OnLive that actually streams numerous games to my TV (and a few other supported devices). Beyond the fact that I save money by not buying the game, I don’t even need the latest computer hardware to play the more graphics-intensive games like Crysis:

You might not be familiar with OnLive just yet, but most people know about content steaming from companies like Netflix and Amazon. You can stream countless movies to your devices to watch movies on demand for a monthly fee or on a per-movie basis. With these services readily available, it’s possible for just about anyone have the “kid in the candy store” experience of pulling up essentially any content whenever we want to watch or play.

If either form of entertainment appeals to you, you can agree that our quality of life has improved over time significantly. The streaming services provided by companies like Netflix and OnLive have really taken advantage of the technological capabilities offered by high speed Internet, which also reminds us of the significance of web hosting. To offer customers complete satisfaction, deciding which web hosting company to go with for a business is often a very difficult decision, especially since there are so many out there. It would make complete business sense to find an extremely reliable company to ensure the success of such services and having worked in the industry, and I can assure you with much pride that SoftLayer certainly shines in this area.

As an employee, I see how we’re building our network to provide the best experience around the world, and if there’s ever a problem, we treat all outages with extreme urgency. Customers get better turnaround times, and they can provide better service for their customers. If some content streaming were to become unavailable, it wouldn’t be long before it became available again.

It’s pretty safe to say that the Internet has spoiled me … Now all I need is a crown.

-Danny

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word “incubator” is my middle school science class. I can’t remember if we did a project or just read about it, but I am positive it was a point of focus for way too long. We learn about incubators as containers in which environmental conditions may be controlled and maintained to provide a suitable place for growth. In my middle school science class, incubators helped eggs embryos grow, develop and eventually hatch. When I heard the term getting thrown around in our offices, I was pretty confused.

As it turns out, incubators programs like Tech Wildcatters and TechStars do the same thing … only with startups (and fewer egg shells).

As Paul mentioned in Fueling Startups with TechStars, TechStars has a series on Bloomberg TV that follows a few startups in TechStars New York from the application stage through their 3 month program and Demo Day. While I understood the basic premise of the incubator programs, seeing the way they documented it was like a crash course … So much so that when I talk about it with family and friends (and see their confused faces), I just pull up the first episode:

Just like a science class incubator that provides an egg with light, movement and an environment to mimic conditions required for growth, startup incubators give young businesses seed money, opportunities to pitch businesses to investors, and access to mentors and sponsors who are all there to provide support. In the short program term, the companies get exposure, guidance about funding and access to every other service a they could need to succeed. Piecing together that experience outside of the dedicated incubator environment would require a lot more time, effort and capital.

These incubator organizations are also referred to as startup accelerators, and they’re like a golden ticket to entrepreneurial success … And that’s why it’s so difficult for a startup to get accepted to participate in one of them. The value a startup brings to the table is not just in the idea; it’s also in the people behind the idea.

Recently, I attended the kick-off party for the new class of Tech Wildcatters startups, and I got a chance to meet some of these passionate startup owners. Their energy is contagious. My first-hand experience immediately reinforced to my why SoftLayer is so interested in helping foster companies that could redefine and reinvent the future.

All of these comparisons between about incubators and eggs have made me pretty hungry … If you need me, I’ll be down the street getting an omelet.

-Rachel