When I was interviewed for a job as Server Build Technician (SBT) in Dallas, I was a little concerned that I was getting in over my head. I let my potential manager know that I had very little experience with Linux but that I was willing to learn. I tried to show that I’d be a quick study, and the interview must have gone well because by the end of the day, I was offered the job. I was really excited to know that SoftLayer was willing to take give me an opportunity to finally start pursuing a career path in technology (which is what I was looking for out of school).

As it turns out, I was the only female SBT in SoftLayer’s Dallas-area data centers, so I felt a good amount of pressure to prove myself and step up my game. Luckily, my training took away a lot of those nerves, and it was also comforting to see that no matter where I was working (data center or office), I was welcomed by my coworkers. It didn’t hurt that I met some really cool people in the process, too. From day one, I realized that I’d been given an amazing opportunity to learn from some really smart folks who know their stuff when it comes to everything related to technology.

I have been here for around six months, and I can’t believe how much tech knowledge I’ve absorbed. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in Linux or a MySQL guru (yet), but if my experience here is any indication, it won’t be too long before I know everything there is to know about every technology living in our data centers. When I run into a problem or a question I don’t have the answer for, I can rely on my coworkers to have the solutions and break them down into terms I can understand if they’re overly complex.

Would I recommend this job to others? Most definitely! This has been one of the best jobs that I’ve ever had. I’ve been able to take what I learned in school and actually apply it to my daily work life while continuing my real-world on-the-job education. If you have a server in DAL02 and need someone to check out the hardware or add some RAM, I might be the one jumping to get your request fulfilled quickly.

I’m proof that SoftLayer invests in its employees, so if you’re interested in an amazing job for a company who values you, I want you to be a coworker! We have positions in all departments available in Dallas, Houston, Singapore, Amsterdam, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, D.C. (and probably more location in the near future), so keep an eye on the SoftLayer Careers page for the perfect opportunity to join our team.

-Rochelle

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the IT industry. It is forever changing the way technology is delivered and consumed. The pay-as-you-go model for everything you need in IT is shattering the old computing paradigms, from software licensing models and hardware refresh cycles to budgeting operating costs. This change is bringing about more control and transparency to users while accelerating the commoditization of IT by making it easily available through a new model.

This new model comes in three major “flavors”: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. We incorporate and enable all three by offering a unified, fully automated platform to enable greater customer control over their IT environments. The key tenants of this emerging model for SoftLayer are innovation, empowerment, automation and integration. Here’s how we deliver against these four key tenants.

Innovation: We want to lead the industry by offering best of breed and proprietary cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions, based on our own intellectual property. Currently, we have more than 252,000 hours invested and 2.6 million lines of code developed around these solutions. Customers can take charge of every aspect of their IT operations (servers, storage, networking & services) through our fully automated platform. Our Customer Portal and fully featured APIs give customer more control by providing direct access to more than 100 back-end systems and activities — every aspect of IT operations can be managed.

Empowerment: We turn IT operations into a predictable fixed cost. Customers can stay focused on achieving their business goals, not managing IT infrastructure. We offer expert planning and support from a certified, 24/7 support staff. Customers can deploy and scale when they want with one-day and on-demand automated provisioning. They can keep it as long (or short) as needed, with monthly contracts. In addition, customers can choose what they want to manage and what they don’t, with the ability to have hybrid IT self-managed and managed environments. This speaks to the flexibility of our platform!

Automation: This is an area that makes SoftLayer stand out from the pack. We automate deployment and management of all services, accelerating provisioning time, streamlining administrative tasks, and making it all on-demand, every day and night. With automation that mitigates the risk for human error, comprehensive security practices and options, and a 24/7 team of certified engineers, we provide greater stability, a 100% Uptime Guarantee, and around the clock support for any issues or service.

Integration: This is the final ingredient to making it ALL work. We seamlessly integrate hardware, software, and networking into a unified service, all conveniently controlled through our easy-to-use Customer Portal and robust APIs. We provide full information, full-time through our Customer Portal and APIs, for every service we provide; there is no data about a system that we keep from our customers, from usage statistics to network performance and beyond. We have complete transparency.

These four key tenets are what set us apart. When SoftLayer started back in 2005, the team’s goal was not to be Go Daddy on steroids. We set our sights on being the de facto platform for mainstream businesses to run all their IT operations. This means the complete gamut of applications and workloads with no compromise of performance, security, reliability and access. We are entering into a new IT era, where “connected everything” is the norm. It reminds me of the old phrase “the network is the computer” from Sun Microsystems’ slogan. We have the foundation in place, which will make for an unforgettable journey. Let us know what you think.

-@gkdog

This post is somewhat of a continuation of a post I made here a little over three years ago: What It’s Like to be a Data Center Technician. My career at SoftLayer has been a great journey. We have gone from four thousand customers at the time of my last post to over twenty five thousand, and it’s funny to look back at my previous post where I mentioned how SoftLayer Data Center Technicians can perform the job of three different departments in any given ticket … Well I managed to find another department where I have to include all of the previous jobs plus one!

Recently I took on a new position on the Development Support team. My job is to make sure our customers’ and employees’ interaction with development is a good one. As my previous post stated, working at SoftLayer in general can be pretty crazy, and the development team is no exception. We work on and release code frequently to keep up with our customers’ and employees’ demands, and that is where my team comes in.

We schedule and coordinate all of our portal code updates and perform front-line support for any development issues that can be addressed without the necessity for code changes. Our team will jump on and fix everything from the layout of your portal to why your bandwidth graphs aren’t showing.

Our largest project as of late is completely new portal (https://beta.softlayer.com/) for our customers. It is the culmination of everything our customers have requested in their management interface, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten in our forums, tickets and when we’ve met customers in person. If you haven’t taken the portal beta for a spin yet, take a few minutes to check it out!

The transition from exclusively providing customer support to supporting both customers and employees has been phenomenal. I’ve been able to address a lot of the issues I came across when I was a CSA, and the results have been everything I have expected and more. SoftLayer is a well-oiled machine now, and with our global expansion, solid procedures and execution is absolutely necessary. Our customers expect flawless performance, and we strive to deliver it on a daily basis.

One of the old funny tag lines we used was, “Do it faster, Do it better, Do it in Private,” and with our latest developments, we’d be remiss if we didn’t add, “Do it Worldwide,” in there somewhere. If there’s anything I can do to help make your customer experience better from a dev standpoint, please let me know!

-Romeo

Some of the most innovative developments on the Internet are coming from online game developers looking to push the boundaries of realism and interactivity. Developing an online gaming platform that can support a wide range of applications, including private chat, avatar chats, turn-based multiplayer games, first-person shooters, and MMORPGs, is no small feat.

Our high speed, global network significantly minimizes reliability, access, latency, lag and bandwidth issues that commonly challenge online gaming. Once users begin to experience issues of latency, reliability, they are gone and likely never to return. Our cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions enable game developers to rapidly test, deploy and manage rich interactive media on a secure platform.

Consider the success of one of our partners — Electrotank Inc. They’ve been able to support as many as 6,500 concurrent users on just ONE server in a realistic simulation of a first-person shooter game, and up to 330,000 concurrent users for a turn-based multiplayer game. Talk about server density.

This is just scratching the surface because we’re continuing to build our global footprint to reduce latency for users around the world. This means no awkward pauses, jumping around, but rather a smooth, seamless, interactive online gaming experience. The combined efforts of SoftLayer’s infrastructure and Electrotank’s performant software have produced a high-performance networking platform that delivers a highly scalable, low latency user experience to both gamers and game developers.

You can read more about how Electrotank is leveraging SoftLayer’s unique network platform in today’s press release or in the fantastic white paper they published with details about their load testing methodology and results.

We always like to hear our customers opinions so let us know what you think.

-@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 ICC Global Hosting’s Mark Moeller. ICC’s Hosted Virtual Desktop delivers full-featured Windows desktop computing environments, including Microsoft Office, anti-virus, and data storage to any device, anywhere, anytime.

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

Accessing Desktop Apps Anytime, Anywhere, from Any Device

The computing world is changing rapidly – driven by the consumerization of applications, the demands for employees to be in an “always on” mode, and the revolution of mobile computing. End users have become App savvy and with the advent of the “there’s an app for that” generation applications that have become very easy for end users to install and run on their own. The computing platforms they use have become self-service in nature and new applications are now easy to find and no longer require IT to research, purchase, install, and manage. In fact, IT departments have lost control over what applications run on these devices posing a huge support problem and security threat.

In today’s economy organizations demand their employees to do more with smaller staffs forcing employees to be “always on” with e-mail and other work data now delivered to their desktops, smart phones, tablets, and home computers. People on average now access work data and applications from three devices with new choices of mobile devices available almost daily.

VDI Sticker Shock – With all of these changes many IT departments have considered virtual desktops as a solution to provide access to multiple platforms, remote access, and secured network stored data. Consultants and vendors have been trying to sell organizations virtual desktops as VDI, but most organizations suffer from sticker shock facing huge start-up costs and little or no economies of scale. Most organizations fail to see any potential ROI with VDI solutions and end up tabling the decision for next year’s budget.

Hosted Virtual Desktops – Hosted virtual desktops are cloud desktop services provided in the cloud by a service provider. Unlike typical VDI deployments, with these cloud desktop services, all of the infrastructure is provided by the service provider, and the client organization can purchase virtual desktops as they need them and are not subject to uncontrolled costs or continually expanding infrastructure.

Hosted virtual desktops are purchased from the service provider as a simple operations expense that can be budgeted as a per user per month cost and can even reduce their overall costs of Microsoft licensing and data storage compared to more expensive VDI solutions. Beyond the infrastructure cost benefits, the cloud desktop services provider centrally manages these virtual desktops – including mundane tasks like Windows and anti-virus updates. With the expertise of managing thousands of virtual desktops for many clients, a cloud desktop service provider delivers a consistent end user experience and a very high quality of service. These cloud desktop services are then accessed anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Outsourced desktop management is also a considerable cost savings to organizations that varies based on their internal support structure.

Bring your Own Device, BYOD/BYOC – Many organizations have considered “bring your own device/computer” programs as an employee benefit. BYO programs allow employees to select their own computing device or bring their own computer to work while accessing their employer’s supported desktop environment, applications and data through use of a virtual desktop.

Some of these programs have been driven from the top by executives who want to access corporate resources from their iPad or other personal device. Other BYO programs have been developed to attract and retain technically astute employees by giving these employees a choice of computing platforms as an employee benefit for hiring the brightest and most qualified and sought after job candidates. And some BYO programs exist to essentially create a controlled, secured, and legitimate way to allow employees to connect to their corporate resources without having employees’ rogue devices accessing the network.

Just as with any virtual desktop solution, hosted virtual desktops are often a better approach than VDI. ICC Global Hosting has worked with Citrix to provide a Hosted BYO program which specifically provides a service for quick BYOD proof of concepts or smaller scale BYOD deployments. These cloud desktop services are then delivered to virtually any device including PCs, Macs, thin clients, iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and phones, and other mobile devices.

Virtual Desktops on SoftLayer’s CloudLayer Platform – SoftLayer recently announced the availability of cloud desktop services managed by ICC Global Hosting. This partnership combines the scalability and security of SoftLayer’s CloudLayer Platform with ICC Global Hosting’s hosted virtual desktop expertise.

SoftLayer clients benefit from the enhanced performance and security of applications running along with hosted virtual desktops on the CloudLayer Platform. This solution lets clients obtain the all the features and benefits of VDI without the overhead and headaches of VDI. Organizations may now access cloud desktop services Anytime, Anywhere, and from Any Device with ICC and SoftLayer.

-Mark Moeller, ICC Global Hosting

One of the coolest things that we get to do as a company is support the growing and thriving community of technology entrepreneurs.

Programs like TechStars provide us with the perfect opportunity to directly plug into some of the best and brightest tech talent anywhere in the world. As the number one startup accelerator in the world, TechStars receives applications from thousands of companies each year, and they only select the best of the best to be members of the program. Member companies receive perks like top-notch mentorship, free hosting, funding and the chance to present their products to venture capitalists and angel investors at the end of the program.

Several SoftLayer executives serve as mentors for TechStars, which allows us to share some of the knowledge (and some of the mistakes) we’ve gathered along the way. In fact, the inaugural class of the new TechStars Cloud in San Antonio will have access to SoftLayer’s CSO George Karidis, our CTO Duke Skarda and me as Mentors. Not too long ago, SoftLayer was a startup, too — just a bunch of guys with a great vision, a few credit cards, and not much more. We understand how important it is to get good help and advice from others who have traveled the road before.

That’s why we created the SoftLayer Startup Program. Companies in our program receive more than just advice, best practices and industry insight from us; we also provide tangible resources. Every selected company gets a free year of hosting with SoftLayer. This includes:

• A $1,000 per month credit for dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, or any kind of hybrid hosting setup
• Advanced infrastructure help and advice
• A dedicated Senior Account Representative
• Marketing support

The selection process for the SoftLayer Startup Program is pretty competitive as well, but because Tech Stars member companies had to beat the odds to get into that program, they are granted automatic admission to our program. Several of the companies who’ve gone through TechStars and through the SoftLayer Startup Program have become loyal customers, and you can see many of them in our Technology Partners Marketplace, where we spotlight innovative ways members of the SoftLayer community are building their businesses on our platform.

Calling All Startups!

If you’re involved in a startup right now, and you’re looking to get the help you deserve, email me, and I’ll help you get your application submitted for the SoftLayer Startup Program. If you’re focused on Cloud Infrastructure or Cloud Tools development, you have an even bigger opportunity: Priority-consideration applications for the inaugural class of TechStars Cloud are due October 21. The first class will run in San Antonio Texas from January through April of 2012. If you need just a bit more time to apply, the final application deadline is November 2. Head over to TechStars Cloud to get more information and to apply to join the latest, greatest edition of TechStars … And you get guaranteed admission into our program where you’ll enjoy all of the SoftLayer-specific benefits above!

-@Teknowlogist

P.S. If you want some insight into what it’s like to work in a technology incubator, we recommend the TechStars series on BloombergTV that has documented the ups and downs of a few of the participants in TechStars New York.

SoftLayer is on the “bleeding edge” of technology, and that’s right where I’m comfortable. I love being a part of something new and relevant. I also love science fiction and find that it’s mixing together with reality more and more these days. Yay for me and my nerdyness! Beam me up Luke Skywalker! (I wonder how many nerds cringed at that statement!)

In a recent post from New Scientist, a test showed neutrino particles being clocked faster than the speed of light, and a dimension-hop might be the reason. Rather than go into the nerdy parts of the article that I’m sure you read before continuing to this sentence, I want to compare how SoftLayer would use this to our (and more importantly our customers’) advantage: A neutrino network! We could have the fastest network in the world, and we could use the technology for faster motherboards and components too. Because that’s how we roll.

Enter science fiction. Let’s say neutrinos were indeed using another dimension to travel. Like, say, the 8th dimension as referred to in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.” This dimension also happens to be a prison used by the Lectroids of Planet 10 to store criminals. Go figure, right? Obstacles always come up, so if our neutrino network was targeted by those Lectroids, Dody Lira and the abuse team would have no problems taking them down … After all, Lectroid’s fiddling with data can be bad for business (Not to mention the possibility of Lectroid’s using our network to come back to this dimension, wreak havoc, and eat all our junk food). Dody would have to upgrade some of the tools his team uses, like a Jet Car with an “Oscillation Overthruster” (which looks eerily similar to the Flux Capacitor) to travel in and out of the 8th dimension to hunt down those pesky Lectroids that won’t comply.

Then, after Dody and crew wrangle the Lectroids (as I’m sure they would), we could offer the Lectroids email and Internet service. Bam! More customers on top of a supernatural network!

Coming back to reality (a bit), we have an interesting world ahead of us. Technologies we have only seen in movies and some we haven’t even imagined yet are becoming reality! If they fall into the usable realm of SoftLayer, you can bet we’ll be one of the first to share them with the world. But not before we get all the bugs (and Lectroids) out.

-Brad

Over the course of about a month, you were able to follow the build-out progress of SoftLayer’s Singapore data center facility. Todd book-ended his coverage of the process with an early look on September 2 and the official “LIVE” announcement on October 3, and given the fantastic response from customers to those updates, we’re going to keep them going from Amsterdam.

If you follow SoftLayer on Twitter or keep an eye on our Flickr account, the last time you saw the Amsterdam facility, it looked pretty empty. You might assume that with all the attention on Singapore, Amsterdam wasn’t getting much attention, but you’d be wrong … Folks have been working non-stop in Europe as well, and the facility looks beautiful:

It’s pretty obvious with the racks you see pictured that our go-live team has been on the ground and working hard in the new facility. We shipped loads of gear across a different ocean to get it to Amsterdam, but things will probably look pretty familiar.

When Singapore went live on Monday, customers were ecstatic. We’ve already provisioned a few hundred servers in the new facility, and the chorus of users anxious about our European expansion has gotten louder as a result. As you can see, Amsterdam is coming along nicely, so you’ll have a SoftLayer server in Amsterdam before you know it.

SoftLayer’s growth internationally has been fueled by customer demand, so while we’re working on Amsterdam, we’d love to hear where you’d like to see us next. Leave a comment with the country/region you think could best benefit from a local SoftLayer facility … And if you agree with any of the ideas, be sure to post your agreement as well so we get an even clearer picture of customer demand.

More to come!

-@quigleymar

In March of 2000, Apple was set to launch the first version of Mac OS X. At the time, I was working for a company called Macromedia (creators of Flash, subsequently purchased by Adobe) on a professional illustration program called FreeHand. Part of the Mac OS X transition was a system that reimplemented the programming interfaces from Mac OS 9 on the operating system kernel of Mac OS X. That system was called Carbon and was key to the strategy that let Mac OS 9 application transition to the Mac OS X platform. We had worked very hard with Apple and FreeHand was one of the first applications to run under the new system. I was invited to demo FreeHand running on Mac OS X at the Mac OS X launch event.

The launch was held on the Apple Campus in the “Town Hall,” the same venue that recently hosted the launch of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4s. Members of The Press were across the hallway in an adjacent room while those of us who were going to present were reviewing our parts, being fitted with microphones, and anxiously milling about. At one point an Apple employee stuck her head into the room and announced that Steve Jobs would be arriving in a few minutes. Most people took the announcement in stride and continued about their business.

At some point in this process, two of the representatives from Apple’s Developer Relations team that I had been working with seated themselves about halfway up the auditorium; they were innocently waiting for the event to start.

When Steve walked into the room, he did so through a side door that was just to the left of my seat. I was standing in front of the seat, and Steve came to stop right in front of me. The moment he walked into the room, all conversation died out. The entire room held it’s breath for a few heart beats while Steve stretched and commented aloud about being “ready to do this thing.”

As the conversations around the room came back on-line, Steve turned to me, pointed at the Developer Relations folk halfway up the auditorium and forcefully asked “Who are those people?” Naturally I fumbled to find a reply and was explaining that they worked for Developer Relations. Thankfully the VP of Developer Relations was nearby. He tapped Steve on the shoulder and told him “Those are my people, Steve.” I often tell folks at that point that “The Eye of Sauron turned” as Steve went off to review his presentation.

This was my first encounter with Steve Jobs. I’ve had a couple more over the years, minor interactions that I have no doubt he would never have remembered. Still, I have been working on Apple products since I was very young. Over the years my specialization in the field of Apple development has allowed me to care for myself and my family. Apple’s products continue to be an important part of my life.

Shortly the official press event announcing Mac OS X, I was invited to the cafeteria at Apple, Caffe Macs, and heard Steve talk about how Mac OS X was going to change everything. Over 10 years later, and that operating system now powers not only the Macintosh computer, but the host of iOS devices as well. A decade away I’m now working at SoftLayer to bring some of that innovation, and excellence to our mobile products.

I am one of millions whose lives have been touched by Steve Jobs. I know that while he was here he seized life with an intensity that inspires many of us. I hope that where he has gone he will have time to relax, reflect, and rest for a time.

That is, I have no doubt, before he starts “One More Thing…”

Rest in Peace, Steve.

-Scott

SoftLayer is having a contest between all departments to see who can raise the most money for the American Heart Association. Each department (some departments were combined depending on the amount of employees in the group) was asked to think of a fundraiser, event or just some way the team could raise money for a great cause. Whoever raises the most money wins the grand prize of bragging rights around the office.

The Teams

• Accounting/Finance
• Marketing/Strategy
• Administration/HR/Legal
• Networking
• CSA/Managed Services
• Sales
• CST
• SBT/Infrastructure/Implementation
• Executives (Officers and SVP’ s)
• Systems – Windows/Linux
• Facilities
• Technology
• Inventory

Most departments have done very well, but given my affiliation with the Marketing team, I want to talk about how amazingly we performed. The Marketing and Strategy team kicked off our fundraising efforts with a BBQ event that consisted of ribs, brisket and potato salad, an auction with some great prizes like Rangers tickets, Calloway Golf polo shirts and FC Dallas Tickets, and T-shirts for sale that read, “DEDICATED and we don’t just mean our servers” sponsored by SuperMicro:

And here are a few snapshots from the BBQ Event:

It’s pretty clear that 3 Bars BBQ is a pretty big draw in the SoftLayer office.

Needless to say this event was a great success! The Marketing team didn’t stop there, though. We had FOUR more auctions … And we pulled out the big guns (two 600GB SSD hard drives and two 16GB iPad 2s). In my biased opinion, the Marketing team worked the hardest for our donations with sweat and tears … mainly sweat – you know how hot it is outside in the middle of June in Texas.

To date, our team has raised a little over $7,500 in donations for the American Heart Association. You may say, “Wow that’s a lot of cash!” but one of the coolest ways we were able to raise so much money was that we didn’t need to take cash: we got a mobile credit card device so the “I don’t have cash on me” excuse was rendered useless! Yeah I know … we are the smartest team ALIVE! After a few events, every department asked us to use our device for their fundraising efforts.

I am so proud of all the work the Marketing and Strategy teams have put into this fundraiser, and I’m especially proud to be a part of an organization that goes to such lengths to help out a charity.

Go Team SoftLayer!

-Natalie

I write this message while overlooking the International Business Park in Singapore. The desk I sit at faces east; the sun is now on the opposite side of the building and our new Singapore office is starting to cool off, but it’s eerily quiet here on the 6th floor.

Our new Singapore General Manager Michael Ong is in Dallas meeting the rest of the SoftLayer team, our new Server Build Technicians (SBTs) are on the data center floor assisting the Go Live Crew (GLC) and the inventory team is indexing and organizing of the mountains of gear we have in the Large Parts Room (LPR).

Thinking back just 30 days, we were getting early access to our two data center suites. Our four ocean containers were unloaded and waiting for us in the LPR, and the members of the GLC from Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. had their steel toe boots on, hard hats in place and dragging a little from the 14 hour time change. The GLC has worked tirelessly to get this data center online.

Our success on the ground was far from a standalone feat, though. The steadfast support, backing and encouragement from everyone back home enabled our successful launch. Many departments and individuals spent tireless nights on the phone and on email helping us through issues. I can’t overstate the importance of their support and willingness to step up to get things done. Without their help, the data center certainly wouldn’t look like this:

Our first international data center and office are worth celebrating, but it’s important to realize that our work doesn’t stop today. It’s critical that we continue to support the Singapore office like we do our other offices and data centers around the U.S. We are depending on the local team to run the daily operations, and they’re depending on us to provide them with the necessary guidance to keep the gears in motion. This is not a fire and forget mission — we are now truly a global company.

While we sweep up the imaginary confetti from the floor in SNG01 (since we’d never let real confetti in the DC), we know that the GLC in Amsterdam is on the ground getting our first European facility ready. The ocean containers have been delivered and racks are being built. It’s time to get some rest and sleep fast … We’ve got another data center coming online soon.

To all our new Singaporean team members: Welcome to SoftLayer. We’re excited and proud to have you join our team. To everyone that supported us: Thank you again from the very bottom of our hearts. To our customers: Enjoy your new SoftLayer servers in Singapore. And to our competition: This is just the start.

3BFL.

-@toddmitchell

I recently had the opportunity to get re-acquainted with Redis while evaluating solutions for a project on the Product Innovation team here at SoftLayer. I’d actually played with it a couple of times before, but this time it “clicked.” Or my brain broke. Either way, I see a lot of potential for Redis now.

No one product is a perfect fit for all of your data storage needs, of course. There are such fundamental tradeoffs to be made in designing storage architectures that you should be immediately suspicious of any product that claims to fit every need.

The best solutions tend to be products that actually embrace these tradeoffs. Redis, for instance, has sacrificed a small amount of data durability in exchange for being awesome.

What is it?

Redis is a key/value store, but describing it that way is sort of like calling a helicopter a “vehicle.” It’s a technically correct description, but it leaves out some important stuff.

You can think of it like a sophisticated older brother of Memcached. It presents a flat keyspace, and you can set those keys to string values. Another feature of Memcached is the ability to perform remote atomic operations, like “incr” and “append.” These are really handy, because you have the ability to modify remote data without fetching, and you have an assurance that you’re the only one performing that operation at that instant.

Redis takes this concept of remote commands on data and goes completely nuts with it. The database is aware of data structures like hashes, lists and sets in addition to simple string values. You can sort, union, intersect, slice and dice to your heart’s content without fetching any data. Redis is a data structure server. You can treat it like remote memory, and this has an awesome immediate benefit for a programmer: your code and brain are already optimized for these data types.

But it’s not just about making storage simpler. It’s fast, too. Crazy fast. If you make intelligent use of its data structures, it’s possible to serve a lot of traffic from relatively modest hardware. Redis 2.4 can easily handle ~50k list appends a second on my notebook. With batching, it can append 2 million items to a list on a remote host in about 1.28 seconds.

It allows the remote, atomic and performant manipulation of data structures. It took me a little while to realize exactly how useful that is.

What’s wrong with it?

Nothing. Move along.

OK, it’s a little short on durability. Redis uses memory as its primary store and periodically flushes to disk. A common configuration is to do so every second.

That sounds pretty reasonable. If a server goes down, you could lose a second of data. Keep in mind, however, how many operations Redis can perform in a second. If you’re in a high-volume environment, that could be a lot of data. It’s not for your financial transactions.

It also supports relatively limited availability options. Currently, it only supports master/slave replication. Clustering support is planned for an upcoming release. It’s looking pretty powerful, but it will take some real-world testing to know its performance impact.

These challenges should be taken into consideration, and it’s probably clear if you’re in a situation where the current tradeoffs aren’t a good fit.

In my experience, a lot of developers seriously overestimate the consequences of their application losing small amounts of data. Also consider whether or not the chance of losing a second (or less) of data genuinely represents a bigger threat to your application than any other compromises you might have made.

More Information
You can check out the slightly aging docs or browse the impressively simple source. There are probably already bindings for your language of choice as well.

-Tim

We’ve always set our sights globally at SoftLayer and this week we’ve certainly achieved some key milestones. With our data center in Singapore going LIVE, we now have a “digital gateway” for providing our unique cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions to the Asia-Pacific region.

What is even more remarkable is the speed at which we are deploying our new international data centers. In only a few months, all the meticulous planning, logistics and execution were done and customers could place orders. And we’re not slowing down. The trajectory path we’re on has us expanding faster and farther than we ever thought possible.

Next month we’re opening a new data center in Amsterdam, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt. Each of these facilities is built and maintained by SoftLayer, and that organic growth is a huge differentiator. We didn’t go out and acquire a company to expand our capabilities, and because we’re doing the work on the ground, we’re able to guarantee the most consistent, best possible service. Every data center – whether it’s Singapore or San Jose – is exactly the same. Because of that consistency, our customers don’t have to worry about whether the services in the new facilities meet their expectations, and based on the phenomenal provisioning statistics we saw on day one in Singapore, they aren’t hesitating to order more.

International Expansion: Currency

Because our global expansion enables us to perform even better for the SoftLayer customers located outside of North America, we wanted to make it easier for those customers to do business with us. As of 8:01 a.m. Central Time today, we support and accept payment in 60+ currencies! This currency support allows our customers to price SoftLayer services in their native currency, and it lets them avoid those pesky exchange fees from their credit card.

Our BYOC (Cloud) and Dedicated Server order forms have been updated with a currency selection on their first page, so once you select a currency, your order form will reload with all pricing displayed in that currency. Existing customers are also able to pay for their existing servers with one-time or recurring payments in our customer portal.

Currencies Supported

It’s amazing to say that we are truly a global company operating on three continents. Our success and future growth are tied to these new international capabilities. We will move aggressively and open more data centers, so stay tuned. With our global aspirations taking flight, I’m reminded of the saying that, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

Speaking of flights, I’ve got to get to the airport … My flight to Amsterdam is leaving in a few hours.

-@gkdog

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 Citrusleaf’s Brian Bulkowski. Citrusleaf is a database technology company. They offers a new type of NoSQL database based on the best practices of proven database and distributed technology. The company’s NoSQL database platform, Citrusleaf 2.0, solves a key problem that challenges today’s most data intensive, mission-critical businesses: how to optimally store and access terabytes of schema free data in real-time, with high throughput, ACID compliance, and 24×7 uptime.

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

Citrusleaf and SoftLayer: Taking NoSQL to the Next Level

Citrusleaf is the NoSQL OLTP (transaction-oriented) database behind some of the world’s largest advertising platforms. Our record of reliability and performance is the reason our customers choose us over any other database. We specialize in low-latency transactions on terabyte sized, billion-object databases. We fit well with analytics systems such as Hadoop or SQL-based “ETL” analytics architectures. Since Citrusleaf is fully reliable like a traditional database and has the speed of a cache, complexity is greatly reduced which leads to higher reliability and substantial cost savings.

Customers store actionable data for their internet applications on our platform. A typical use case is a server-side user data store. The advertising industry has moved to server-based user information storage as end users have become concerned about “tracking cookies” and other browser-side storage. Sophisticated advertising platforms are capable of associating users even after cookies have been cleared – through logins at partner sites, IP addresses and browser fingerprints. In the case where the user has elected not to be “tracked,” session management techniques allow “frequency capping” to limit the repetition of ads.

Citrusleaf’s clear strengths in the high-volume advertising use case can also be applied to other scenarios like online social gaming and internet scale applications. Our interface is simple: primary key lookups, an extension of the memcache interface with sophisticated eviction, document orientation, and database scanning. The result of the interface’s simplicity is that powerful applications can be written and maintained quickly and easily.

One of the keys to our technology is the rapid adoption of fast transactional storage. With a database that is capable of millions of transactions per second – 300,000 per node, and linearly scalable – configurations with SSD storage are the most cost efficient. Since SSDs can’t be provisioned on a minute-by-minute basis like traditional cloud infrastructure (the disks can take over 20 minutes to clear), SSDs fit well with a dedicated or managed hosting approach. SoftLayer has aggressively rolled out SSD capabilities in their data centers, and we work closely with them to source the most appropriate SSD models and vendors.

SoftLayer’s mixture of managed hosting, dedicated and cloud infrastructure in the same data center allows the rapid provisioning of database machines alongside the flexibility of a cloud system. That kind of flexibility and power is what we absolutely need to be successful, and we’re happy to have found it at SoftLayer.

If you’ve ever been interested to learn a little more about NoSQL and how it might reinvent the way you look at databases, visit http://citrusleaf.com to learn a little and let us know if you have any questions.

-Brian Bulkowski, Citrusleaf

So much of our life has been moved to digital devices these days. Smart phones are one of many devices that have made an impression on our lives. Smart phones these days have become a must for most, whether it is for business or personal use, almost everyone has one.

On the plus side, smart phones enable users to conduct business from just about anywhere in the world. Access to email accounts, VPNs and other tools that make business move on a daily basis have become accessible from the palm of your hand. You can even administer your web server from your smart phone with the right application setup.

You’re carrying a small computer around in your pocket. It’ll be interesting to see what new devices will emerge in the market in the next few years. Tablets are becoming wildly popular, and mainstream consumers are starting to keep an eye on the newest innovations, joining the “tech geeks” in the “early adopter” line.

There are several players in this market with Google, RIM and Apple leading the pack, and dedicated fans rally behind each. With smart phones becoming so increasingly common, I’ve started wondering if it’s really for the best. Do we really need to check our e-mail every 10 minutes? If we’re not on Twitter, Facebook or one of our other social networks, will they be there when we get to our computer?

Being digitally connected all the time give us a false sense of “socializing” in the old school face-to-face sense, and that pull us away from those IRL (in real life) encounters. Numerous crashes have been caused by people texting or updating their statuses while driving, and there have been cases of people walking into a busy street while being distracted by their phones.

When it comes to technology like smart phones, how do you keep those devices from becoming a dependency? How do you keep yourself from letting them take the place of direct human contact rather? It’s something to think about as technology continues to evolve and permeate our lives.

-James

Are you familiar with the “slow clap” phenomenon?

It’s basically a crescendo of applause in a crowd that starts with a single hand clap. A few seconds after that first clap, you hear the second. A slow rhythm takes shape. A few people join in. The rhythm is contagious, and it starts to spread through the crowd. As more people join in, the natural tendency is for the pace to speed up as the volume increases, and within about a minute, a single hand clap becomes a huge roar of applause. In the movie Rudy, one character starts a “slow clap” on the sideline of a football game, and the cheer ends up filling the entire stadium … And that’s the visual that comes to mind when I think about the upcoming “go live” date for our Singapore data center.

Start a slow clap in your mind and think of each successive milestone getting faster and exponentially louder applause:

• In July, George Karidis posted a high-level overview of SoftLayer’s international growth.
• About a month later, I blogged with details about our network expansion into Japan.
• Three days after that post, you got your first glimpse at the Singapore data center build-out process.
• A week later, you saw updated pictures of the data center and office space.
• Last week, racks were installed and wired up by the time a press release hit the wire announcing the launch of our Asia-Pacific operations.
• From that press release, you learned that SoftLayer’s Singapore data center will go live on October 3, 2011.

If you imagined correctly, the applause in your mind should be borderline deafening … And I didn’t even mention the fact that we enabled pre-orders on select servers in Singapore last week with a Triple Double special exclusively for servers in the new SNG01 facility.

AND I haven’t said anything about the progress of our first European data center in Amsterdam. We already have a team of people there working to get that facility ready, and it’s coming together just as quickly. Don’t be surprised to see a few sneak peeks at the build-out process there in the next few weeks.

It’s almost unfathomable that we’re so close to the launch of our first facility outside the United States, and when you consider how quickly Amsterdam will come online after Singapore, you probably think you’re taking crazy pills … Or that we are. I don’t want to take any of the wind out of the sales of our launch day, so I’m just going to share a few more glimpses into the data center.

On Monday, you can light your first server at the end of this Singaporean hallway:

All of the racks are powered:

The server rails are installed:

And we thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and install a few servers:

Now all we need to do is flip the switch … Are you ready?

-@toddmitchell

SoftLayer loves startups. The culture, the energy, the potential … It’s all good stuff. As you may remember from my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview and our Teens in Tech profile, one of the ways we support startups is through an incubator program that provides a phenomenal hosting credit and a lot of technology know-how to participating organizations.

In San Francisco, one of the flagship programs we’re excited to be a part of is called PeopleBrowsr Labs, a startup accelerator geared toward technology companies in the area. As you sit in the PeopleBrowsr office, the brilliance in the air is almost palpable … Young companies doing innovative things with everything they need to be successful at their disposal. One of the fringe benefits for participants in PeopleBrowsr Labs is that they’re actually rubbing elbows with the PeopleBrowsr team as well … Which is almost worth the price of admission.

In addition to the Labs sponsorship, SoftLayer is also the infrastructure provider for PeopleBrowsr and its unbelievable data mine of information. They’ve got every tweet that’s been tweeted since early 2008, and they’ve been able to take that content and make sense of it in unique and interesting ways … And that’s why we stopped by for a visit this week. Last night, PeopleBrowsr officially launched Kred, a dynamic and innovative social influence measurement platform, to a LOT of fanfare (see: TechCrunch).

In the midst of the launch-day craziness, we grabbed Scott Milener, PeopleBrowsr SVP of business development, to have him explain a little about Kred, what differentiates it from the other social influence measurements and what it means for users interested in engaging more effectively with their social networks. Check it out:

With the clear success of the announcement, we want to send a shout out of congratulations to the PeopleBrowsr team. It looks like a phenomenal leap forward in understanding social engagement, and we know it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’ll see coming out of the PeopleBrowsr office in the near future.

If you feel a little jaded by the social influence measurements you’ve seen, Kred’s transparency and community-centricity should be refreshing: http://kred.ly

-@Teknowlogist

As SLayers, our goal is always to bring creativity in every aspect of work we do at SoftLayer. It was not too long ago when the Interface Development team was presented with a new and exciting challenge: To develop a Windows Phone 7 Series app. Like me, many questioned whether we should tap into the market of Windows Phone OS … What was the scope of this OS? What is the future of Windows Phone OS smartphones? The business relationship that NOKIA and Microsoft signed to produce smartphones with Windows Phone 7 OS will provide consumers with a new interface and unique features, so smartphone users are paying attention … And we are too.

The SoftLayer Mobile world had already made huge strides with iPhone and Android based apps, so our work was cut out for us as we entered the Windows Phone 7 world. We put together a small, energetic and skilled group of SLayers who wanted to make SoftLayer proud, and I am proud to be a member of that team!

Our focus was to design and develop an application that would not only provide the portal functionality on mobile phone but also incorporate the awesome features of Windows Phone 7. Keeping all that in consideration, the choice of using an enterprise quality framework was essential. After a lot of research, we put our finger on the Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices-backed Prism Framework for Windows Phone 7. The Prism Framework is a well-known and recognized name among Silverlight and Windows Presentation Framework developers, and since Windows Phone 7 is built upon the Silverlight and XNA Framework, our choice was clearly justified.

After selecting the framework, we wanted to make the whole asynchronous experience smooth while talking to SoftLayer’s mobile API. That’ where we met the cool kid on the block: Reactive Extensions for .NET (also known as Rx). The Rx is a library used to compose asynchronous and event-based programs. The learning curve was pretty intense for the team, but we operate under the mantra of CBNO (Challenging-But-Not-Overwhelming), so it was learning we knew would bear fruits.

The team’s plan was to create an app that had the most frequently used features from the portal. The features to be showcased in the first release were to be basic but at the same time essential. The features we pinpointed were ticket management, hardware management, bandwidth and account management. Bringing these features to the phone posed a challenge, though … How do we add a little more spice to what cold be a rather plain and basic app?

Windows Phone 7 controls came to our rescue and we utilized the Pivot and Panorama controls to design the Ticket Lists and Ticket Details. The pivot control works like a tabbed-style control that is viewable by sliding left or right. This lets us put the ticket-based-categories in a single view so users don’t have to navigate back-and-forth to see different types of tickets. It also provides context-menu style navigation by holding onto the ticket item, giving an option to view or edit ticket with one tap. Here is a screen shot of pivot control in use to view tickets by categories and device list:

Another achievement was made by using the panorama control. The control works like a long page with different relevant sections of similar content. This control was used to show a snap shot of a ticket, and the view displays basic ticket details, updates, attachments and any hardware attached to a ticket. This makes editing a ticket as easy as a tap! This is a screenshot of panorama control in use to view ticket detail:

The device list view will help people see the dedicated and virtual devices in a pivot control giving a visual distinction. The list can be searched by tapping on the filter icon at the application bar. The filtering is search-as-you-type style and can be turned off by tapping the icon again. This screenshot shows the device list with a filtering option:

To perform further hardware operations like pinging, rebooting and power cycling the server, you can use the hardware detail view as well. The bandwidth view may not be as flashy, but it’s a very useful representation of a server’s bandwidth information. Charting is not available with this release but will be available in the upcoming releases.

If you own a Windows Phone 7 device, go ahead and download “SoftLayer Mobile” and send us the feedback on what features you would like to see next and most importantly whether you love this app or not. We have and will always strive for excellence, and we know there’s always room to improve!

-Imran

It’s been a little over a month since I started at SoftLayer … And what a difference a month makes. In the course of applying for the Social Media Coordinator position I now hold, I was asked to write a few sample blogs. One was supposed to be about what SoftLayer does, and I answered it to the best of my abilities at the time. Looking back on my answer, I must admit I had no idea what I was getting into.

On the plus side, comparing what I know now with what I thought I knew then shows how much a person with zero background in hosting can learn in a short period of time. To give you an idea of where I came from, let’s look at a few theoretical conversations:

Pre-SoftLayer

Present Day

That would be a little bit of a cookie cutter explanation, but it gives a lot more context to the business, and it would probably soar above the head of my non-technical inquisitive friend.

During my first week on the job, I visited one of SoftLayer’s data centers … And that “data center” term turned out to be a little tricky for me to remember. For some reason, I always wanted to call the data center a “database center.” It got to the point where Kevin challenged me to a piggy bank deal.

SoftLayer is raising money for the American Heart Association, and everyone has a little piggy bank at their desk. One of the piggy banks essentially became a “swear jar” … except not for swearing. Every time I said “database center,” I had to put a dollar in the piggy bank. The deal was extended when I was trying to remember that 1 byte (big B) = 8 bits (little b):

With money on the line, I’m happy to say that I haven’t confused “database centers” or bits and bytes again … And the piggy bank on the left-hand side of the picture above proves it!

Back to the DC (data center!) tour: I learned about how CRAC units are used to pull air underneath the floor and cool the “cold aisles” in the DC. I learned about the racks and how our network architecture provides private, public, and out–of–band management networks on the back end to customers in a way unique to SoftLayer. Most importantly, I learned the difference between managed, dedicated, cloud and hosting environments that incorporate all of those different kinds of hosting. This is a far cry from focusing on getting the terminology correct.

I’m still not an expert on all things SoftLayer, and I’m pretty sure I’ll end up with my very own acronym dictionary, but I must admit that I absorbed more information in the past month than I thought possible. I have to thank my ninja sensei, Kevin, for taking the time to answer my questions. It felt like school again … especially since there was a whiteboard in use!

Kevin, enjoy your empty piggy bank!

-Rachel

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 StillSecure CTO James Brown. Today, StillSecure is announcing the launch of Cloud Security Monitoring Service (SMS), a free Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that provides security services, monitoring and reporting for cloud or physical servers via a lightweight agent and easy-to-use UI.

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

Don’t Expose Your Data with B.C.E. (Before Cloud Era) Security

Securing a cloud application is harder than securing a physically hosted app. Why? It’s elastic, it spreads your assets over the face of the planet, and you probably have some physical servers in the mix, too. Isn’t it amazing that so many security vendors simply add “cloud” to their product marketing and pass them off as though you can actually be successful with them? It’s as if adding “cloud” to the data sheet magically transforms an existing product into an offering that meets the needs of the cloud.

Fortunately, StillSecure‘s Cloud Security Monitoring System (Cloud SMS) helps address all those needs: it’s platform independent (built from the ground up for cloud, hybrid, and physical deployments), it tracks all security policy changes, and it provides summary- and detail-level visibility into your security configuration.

SoftLayer challenged us to create an offering that would support not only their cloud customers, but their hybrid and purely physical customers as well … And not only support them, but manage them seamlessly, with no arbitrary borders to harm usability. What we came up with fits that bill:

No cloud solution would be complete without being elastic: when you clone a VM, your security policy must go with it, and then that policy must continue to be applied to all like VMs when you make changes later. Cloud SMS does that. Got a one off? No problem, it handles that, too. Clone your one off? The clone tracks the one off.

Cloud SMS makes it easy to secure your servers, whether they’re in Dallas, Singapore or anywhere in between. With its executive level dashboard functionality, you can see the security state of all your servers, and understand usage over time. You can also slice and dice the data to understand usage patterns over any given time period.

Designed to be auditable, auditing functionality is part the genetic makeup of Cloud SMS. It tracks all configuration changes made by any user, on any server, and provides time-based reporting that can be handed directly to an auditor.

The StillSecure Cloud SMS SaaS offering provides detailed firewall control for your physical or cloud-based servers, deep auditing, dashboard via an extremely lightweight and easy to install agent. Don’t get left in the cold with B.C.E. (Before Cloud Era) offerings that can’t handle today’s cloud requirements.

- James Brown, StillSecure