Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with the goal of reaching the East Indies by traveling West. He fortuitously failed by stumbling across the New World and the discovery that the world was round – a globe. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman calls this discovery “Globalization 1.0,” or an era of “countries globalizing.” As transportation and technology grew and evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Globalization 2.0″ brought an era of “companies globalizing,” and around the year 2000, we moved into “Globalization 3.0″:

The dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 – the force that gives it its unique character – is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is what I call the flat-world platform.

Columbus discovered the world wasn’t flat, we learned how to traverse that round world, and we keep making that world more and more accessible. He found out that the world was a lot bigger than everyone thought, and since his discovery, the smartest people on the planet have worked to make that huge world smaller and smaller.

The most traditional measure of globalization is how far “out” political, economical and technological changes extend. Look at the ARPANET network infrastructure in 1971 and a map of the Internet as it is today.

With every step Columbus took away from the Old World, he was one step closer to the New World. If you look at the growth of the Internet through that lens, you see that every additional node and connection added to the Internet brings connectivity closer to end-users who haven’t had it before. Those users gain access to the rest of the Internet, and the rest of the Internet gains access to the information and innovation those users will provide.

Globalization in Hosting

As technology and high speed connectivity become more available to users around the world, the hosting industry has new markets to reach and serve. As Lance explained in a keynote session, “50% of the people in the world are not on the Internet today. They will be on the Internet in the next 5-10 years.”

Understanding this global shift, SoftLayer can choose from a few different courses of action. Today, more 40% of our customers reside outside the United States of America, and we reach those customers via more than 2,000 Gbps of network connectivity from transit and peering relationships with other networks around the world, and we’ve been successful. If the Internet is flattening the world, a USA-centric infrastructure may be limiting, though.

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and look at a map of the United States with a few important overlays:

The three orange circles show the rough equivalents of the areas around our data centers in Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C., that have less than 40 milliseconds of latency directly to that facility. The blue circle on the left shows the same 40ms ring around our new San Jose facility (in blue to help avoid a little confusion). If a customer can access their host’s data center directly with less than 40ms of latency, that customer will be pretty happy with their experience.

When you consider that each of the stars on the map represents a point of presence (PoP) on the SoftLayer private network, you can draw similar circles around those locations to represent the area within 40ms of the first on-ramp to our private network. While Winnipeg, Manitoba, isn’t in one of our data center’s 40ms rings, a user there would be covered by the Chicago PoP’s coverage, and once the user is on the SoftLayer network, he or she has a direct, dedicated path to all of our data centers, and we’re able to provide a stellar network experience.

If in the next 5-10 years, the half of the world that isn’t on the Internet joins the Internet, we can’t rely solely on our peering and transit providers to get those users to the SoftLayer network, so we will need to bring the SoftLayer network closer to them:

This map gives you an idea of what the first steps of SoftLayer’s international expansion will look like. As you’ve probably heard, we will have a data center location in Singapore and in Amsterdam by the end of the year, and those locations will be instrumental in helping us build our global network.

Each of the points of presence we add in Asia and Europe effectively wrap our 40ms ring around millions of users that may have previously relied on several hops on several providers to get to the SoftLayer network, and as a result, we’re able to power a faster and more consistent network experience for those users. As SoftLayer grows, our goal is to maintain the quality of service our customers expect while we extend the availability of that service quality to users around the globe.

If you’re not within 40ms of our network yet, don’t worry … We’re globalizing, and we’ll be in your neighborhood soon.

-@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 the guest blog from Shmuli Goldberg of ClickTale, an industry leader in customer experience analytics, providing businesses with revolutionary insights into their customers’ online behavior. To learn more about ClickTale, visit http://www.clicktale.com/.

Understanding the User Experience with In-Page Analytics

Since ClickTale’s start back in 2006, we understood that engaging visitors on a website is the first step to increase conversions. Although traditional web analytics are great for delivering general statistics such as number of visitors or pages per visit, they leave a big black hole when it comes to understanding what happens inside the pages themselves.

ClickTale’s In-Page Analytics feature set enables you to identify, observe, aggregate and analyze visitors’ actual interaction inside your site, so you know exactly what page elements work, what to optimize and how to increase visitor engagement.

Our wide range of web optimization tools include Mouse Tracking, Heatmap Suite and Conversion Analytics solutions, but was our Visitor Recordings feature that started it all. Giving you a front row seat to your visitors’ browsing sessions and delivering a thorough, in-depth view into what your visitors are focusing on and interacting with inside the pages themselves. All you need to do is grab the popcorn.

Our Heat maps are aggregated reports that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by your online visitors. See exactly what images, text and call to action buttons your visitors’ think are hot and what’s not!

Both these features allow you to instantly see how to go about optimizing your website instantly so you don’t have to guess.

As a fully hosted subscription service, ClickTale is quick and easy to set up. We believe our wide range of heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect way to round out your traditional web analytics suite. For more information, please visit http://www.clicktale.com.

- Shmuli Goldberg, ClickTale

A few month ago, IANA exhausted its unallocated IPv4 address pool when it gave the last /8‘s to regional registries around the world. That news got a fair amount of buzz. Last month, some of the biggest sites in the world participated in World IPv6 Day to a little fanfare as well. Following those larger flows of attention have been the inevitable ebbs as people go back to “business as usual.” As long as ARIN has space available (currently 4.93 /8s in aggregate), no one is losing sleep, but as that number continues decreasing, and the forced transition to incorporate IPv6 will creep closer and closer.

On July 14, I was honored to speak at IPv6 2011: The Time is Now! about how technology is speeding up IPv4 exhaustion and what the transition to IPv6 will mean for content providers. Since the session afforded me a great opportunity to share a high level overview of how I see the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition (along with how SoftLayer has prepared), it might be interesting to the folks out there in the blogosphere:

As time goes by, these kinds of discussions are going to get less theoretical and more practical. The problem with IPv4 is that the entire world is about to run out of free space. The answer IPv6 provides is an allocation pool that is not in danger of exhaustion. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 isn’t as much “glamorous” as it is “necessary,” and while the squeeze on IPv4 space may not affect you immediately, you need to be prepared for the inevitability that it will.

-@wcharnock

In the second episode of my self-made documentary series about the birth of a revolution in hosting, I explained how Lance and I mutually decided that a better course of action would be to build a data center for the future’s future, and I sketched out the basics of effective data centering. Lance sent the keys to the new non-traditional facility, and I jumped at the chance to give a tour of the amazing digs.

Because I wanted to make sure to document as much of the process as I could for this documentary film (I’m coming for you, The Social Network), you’re experiencing the tour as I explore the space for the first time, so I hope you find it as magical as I did. Note: I took the liberty of acquiring suitable transportation to give you the most professional “tour” experience.

You’ll note that the facility features several important characteristics of the best data center environments:

• Heightened Exterior Security
• Data Center Operations Area
• Weather Tracking Station
• Tech Support Center
• CEO Suite
• Redundant Bandwidth Providers
• Multi-phase Power
• Power Generator
• Built-in Cooling
• Crash Cart Station
• Vaulted Ceilings (for warm air circulation)

Now that I’ve got the lay of the land, it’s just a matter of drawing up some plans for server racks, plugging in some servers and getting some customers to experience the newest wave of hosting innovation!

-PHIL

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

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Troy Davis of Papertrail, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner that helps customers detect, resolve and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. To learn more about Papertrail, visit http://papertrailapp.com/.

Receive DB Slow Query Logs in Your Inbox

Want to wake up to important database and syslog messages with your bagel and coffee? Here’s how. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes.

Most of us run a database somewhere on our SoftLayer servers. Whether it’s MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or another relational or NoSQL sibling, a responsive data store is critical to happy users. That’s why databases send slow queries to a log file. It’s much better than no logging at all, but as an engineer, I’d wanted more. I wanted to:

• View all my query logs in one place, without SSHing to each server for tail and grep. My workload shouldn’t scale linearly as I add systems
• Share log visibility with employees who don’t have server access or command-line knowledge (and email links to specific log messages to my developers and DBAs)
• Receive log messages in my inbox – or send them to my team or monitoring service – when I know they need attention
• Examine logs for related HTTP requests, daemon output, API invocations, and other parts of our stack — I can troubleshoot faster with start-to-finish logs on a single screen.

That’s where Papertrail was born. We built Papertrail to make log aggregation and log management effortless and usable. It’s the hosted log management service that we wanted as developers, systems engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

We know the hesitation you might have when approaching this kind of service, so our goal was to enable users to have Papertrail deliver those SQL slow query logs – or any other logs – to your inbox every morning for free:

1. Register a Papertrail log Repository
Hit https://papertrailapp.com/plans and sign up. You’ll land on a welcome page. From there, click the “Add System” link, and on the form shown, type the IP of your DB server and its name (like “db1″).

Papertrail will display a remote syslog destination for your logs and easy instructions for sending app log files and syslog. The steps below are customized for MySQL’s slow query log.

2. Send MySQL logs
Install a log sender. To install a tiny standalone binary that sends log file contents to Papertrail as they occur without any other system-wide configuration changes, with Ruby you can run the “gem” binary: sudo gem install remote_syslog

Next, locate your MySQL or other database slow query log file. Usually these are in the directory /var/mysql/log/ or /var/log/mysql/, usually with a filename containing “slow”. An example slow query log path is: /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log

If you don’t see one, try running “locate mysql | grep slow.log” (or to configure a slow query log, head here).

Next, tell remote_syslog the path to that file. Edit /etc/log_files.yml and add a single line:
files: [/var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log]

Use the path to your slow query log (Example). Finally, run remote_syslog:
sudo remote_syslog

3. Set up Nightly Email
Now that you’ve completed those first two steps, you’re configured to send those slow query logs to Papertrail as soon as they happen. Hit Papertrail’s events viewer to watch them roll in. Because only slow queries are being logged, you may not see any events immediately.

To receive these messages in email, search Papertrail’s events viewer for ‘mysql’. Then click “Save Search” and give this search a name (like “MySQL slow queries”). Click the Dashboard link and you’ll see that search as a new choice. Click the Edit link next to it, and you’ll be prompted for the email address(es) which should receive these in email every night.

That’s it. Congrats! If you were hoping for more steps, I’d recommend that you get yourself a Doppelbock or porter as Step 4.

You have the ability to give co-workers access to these logs in Papertrail, and because Papertrail doesn’t charge a per-system fee, you can add other systems at will. With your SQL logs done, it only takes a few more minutes to aggregate Web server request logs and OS syslog results from your dedicated and CloudLayer systems (try “Add System” or “Quick Start”).

Enjoy!

- Troy Davis, Papertrail

Okay, so you’ve read the title and passed out already … but wait – this is good stuff! Well, maybe not “good,” but at least it’s relevant. The esteemed governor of Texas with the big Texas hair (and aspirations of taking his big hair out of Texas) recently signed House Bill 1841 (HB1841) into law, and that law is significant to many of SoftLayer’s customers.

Last year, the Texas Comptroller’s Office amended a regulation and stated that the use of a server in Texas was adequate to establish a nexus, so an e-commerce vendor who used a Texas web host was required to collect sales tax from their customers even if the vendor had no other presence in the state of Texas. This amendment immediately created issues for web hosts with data centers in Texas: Why would customers get servers from a host in Texas and have to worry about this tax obligation, when they could do business with another host outside of Texas and not have this obligation?

Well, the Comptroller’s Office started to realize the effect of this regulation and began to backpedal and say that they didn’t really mean what they said.

HB1841 puts the Texas hosting industry back where it was before the Comptroller made those changes: The use of a server located in Texas without any other presence is not considered a substantial nexus for collecting sales taxes. HB1841 specifically states that “A person whose only activity in this state is conducted as a user of Internet hosting is not engaged in business in this state.” Note: You may be wondering if this bill applies to Amazon in Texas, but HB1841 doesn’t cover Amazon because they had a physical presence in Texas (albeit one operating under a different affiliate with a different name), requiring them to pay sales taxes.

Our very own Brenk Johnson was involved in the effort to pass HB1841. He attended a couple of committee hearings, and he’ll tell you his mere presence got this out of committee and in front of our governor. He is quoted as saying, “I can sit in a meeting with the best of them.”

At the risk of making this blog sound like an Academy Awards reception speech, we would like to thank Jeff Clark and the crew over at TechAmerica for helping to get this bill passed. TechAmerica is a technology advocacy group that we recently joined, and they have a cracker-jack lobby group. Our CFO and I were on the verge of hiring a lobbyist for the 2009 Texas session, but we ended up not doing so. Two years later, we decided to go with this industry group, and the verdict is that TechAmerica has been a great investment … It was also through this group that Lance became a Cloud Commissioner! We also want to thank our competitors over at RackSpace, especially their General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum, for getting us involved and for leading and spearheading the passage of this bill … What was good for the goose was good for the gander on this one.

Because we are back to where we were a couple of years ago in the definition of nexus with relationship to hosts with data centers in Texas, this was not really a game-changing bill. It was important to clarify and undo the damage caused by the waffling that occurred in the State’s Comptroller’s Office, so in that sense this was a good bill for the industry. Next session we’re going to aim for the game-changer: Margin taxes!

-Suzy

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

Scroll down to read the guest blog about The Server Monitor from Otto Papp of Blue Panther. The Server Monitor is a featured service in the SoftLayer Tech Partner Marketplace that makes it easy for customers to get a deep view of what is happening on their servers. To learn more about The Server Monitor, visit http://theservermonitor.com/.

Know What’s Happening on Your Servers

The Server Monitor was born when we noticed a need in our company. We have been developing and maintaining online businesses for more than 6 years now, and in that time we encountered all kinds of problems. We know very well that any interruption of a service can have many negative effects, so to track and prevent service interruptions we needed a monitoring tool. We tried both commercial and open-source software, but none of them was suited for the job, so we set out to create a product that met six key requirements:

1. Simple Setup, Simple Configuration and Simple Maintenance
While we were searching for a monitoring tool, we many solutions. Most of them were really painful to install and even worse to configure. If you have a service that needs to be scaled and you need to upgrade servers or change your infrastructure, you don’t want to waste your time repeating a painful job over and over again. The same thing holds true if you simply have to manage more than a few servers.

In response to this need, The Server Monitor’s agent was built to be installed and configured under two minutes on every server. Unlike with some of the other tools out there, you don’t have to be an expert in administration and configuration thanks to the meticulous design of the application and its user interface. Even when this tool evolves and improves, it is easily upgraded via a powerful (and simple) built-in upgrade mechanism.

The tool helps you avoid using your server to store monitoring data and frees you from having to install and maintaining a dedicated monitoring data database. Using an agent also helps The Server Monitor consume less of your server’s computing power in the monitoring process.

2. Ease of Use
We wanted a tool that could be easily understood by our clients, so we built the user experience with very clear visuals like our customizable graphical reports. These reports can help non-technical people understand what’s happening on a given server, and they help seasoned systems administrators track down the root cause of any server problems to any component of their system as well. Unfortunately, some of the best solutions on the market were hard to understand and analyze, even for us, as a technical team. That’s why we focused a lot on clearly presenting only relevant data.

3. Accurate and Advanced Monitoring
Another big issue we ran into was the accuracy of the monitored data. Some solutions offered a 5, 10 or 30 minute reading which is not very helpful when you’re debugging a problem or detecting an outage. Others had second- or minute-based monitoring frequency but delivered inaccurate results.

We built The Server Monitor to provide a high level of accuracy by computing the average variation of the monitored data over one minute. We are developing dedicated monitors to all the major services usually used on servers, and by truly understanding these services, we can customize the readings to offer the best view of what’s happening with each service.

4. Early Warning for Potential Disasters
The most valuable aspect of good server monitoring tools is their ability to notified users of major events. If your monitoring tools are local on the server, if the server goes down, the monitoring system does too, so you didn’t get notified. On the other side, we noticed that the online solutions couldn’t provide very much in the way of detailed information.

This is one of the reasons why we opted for an agent-based solution which notifies you when things start to go wrong so you can take immediate action. The Server Monitor includes a powerful alert system with an unlimited number of configurable alerts that can be sent out in real time via SMS, Twitter or email.

5. A Centralized View
In order to speed up our customers’ routine administration checks, we built a unified interface where all the servers monitored can be seen quickly. That centralize view continues to evolve as we get feedback from customers, and we’ll keep tweaking it to make sure we convey the most relevant data on each server as simply as possible. With that goal in mind, we’ve also built a report-sharing system, that allows customers to check these reports in their own interfaces.

6. Flexibility for Developers
While The Server Monitor is an online service, we also develop highly sophisticated software engines (in our spare time). These programs are very different, so each would need a unique kind of monitoring tool, but creating specialized tools with limited scopes would be time consuming and inefficient. We couldn’t find any existing solution to solve this problem so we came up with our own! The idea is simple, your software collects and computes its specific metrics and gives them to the agent program which sends them to the central system. From there, you can then analyze, compare and follow their information.

Initially, our goal was to build a monitoring platform that worked for us, and in the process, we built a product that could be extremely useful to other developers in our position, so we began offering the service externally. We have a free version of the software that you’re welcome to try on your own servers, and if you want to take advantage of some of the additional features and functionality of the system, we have a 30 day trial to see if it fits your requirements.

-Otto Papp, The Server Monitor

Skinson’s 1634AR15 Competency Controlled Certification of Compliance
New Compliance structure makes a compliance officer’s life much easier.

Dallas — In a world where auditor to auditor reports are out of control and we have a mountain of complex compliances to worry about, one competent compliancy controlled certification of compliance finally comes forth (and not a minute too soon).

“This new groundbreaking idea will change the lives of many competing auditing firms, law firms, accounting firms and so on,” says Steve Kinman. “I spend countless hours reading controls for one report and different controls for another report, and the only difference is the verbiage and format.”

The new Skinson 1634AR15 Certification combines your SAS70, SSAE16, ROC, VOC, SOC, NIST, SARBOX, PCI, OMB, ACART, CFDA, HIPAA and SAFE HARBOR compliance into a single report using a set framework that automorphs based upon which auditor is touching the report or viewing it in the state of the art Skinson Portal.

“The Skinson portal is mind-blowing,” says Val Stinson. “The automorph feature is something straight out of the movies. It knows who is reading and can change the wording on the fly. This keeps auditors from scratching their heads when the words in the report don’t match the words their instruction book.”

The introductory price for full Skinson 1634AR15 Compliance Certification is $1,000,000 USD. This is all-inclusive and will sufficiently cover all of your compliance needs.

Contact:
Steve Kinman
skinman@softlayer.com

About Skinson
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Skinson is a fictional company that likes to poke fun at the difficult job of compliance in the world. While we find that it can be overwhelming at times, we understand that compliance is a necessary evil. We would like to note that something like we dream about above would be very nice and would save the world a ton of work and cut down on our carbon footprint considerably. If you are in a position of control and can make the above happen please help us!!

On a side note, SoftLayer will do everything we can to help you with any compliance you need. Just ask your local sales team for help, and they will find the right person and get you in contact.

-@skinman454

P.S. The actual reason for this blog post is that we just announced that the control procedures and compliance for our 11 data centers have been verified in a http://www.aicpa.org/interestareas/accountingandauditing/resources/soc/pages/sorhome.aspx (SOC 1) prepared under the terms of the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16 (SSAE 16) by independent auditing firm Weaver.

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

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Joe Pezzillo of Push IO, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner powering the mobile app explosion. To learn more about Push IO, visit http://push.io/.

One Day Soon, Everyone Will Have an App

It seems like only yesterday that Dan Burcaw and I were sitting at a diner sketching out our vision of the mobile app industry’s future.

In our vision, the mobile industry was poised to rocket through the next decade on a trajectory like the one the internet and web have been on since the 90s.

And the parallels don’t stop there.

Just like in web 1.0, the early days of mobile are characterized by custom development of the wild west variety, with everyone rolling their own solutions to a set of commonly recurring problems. Think back to the earliest days of the web and recall what it was like to add a shopping cart to your website. It was a team of developers and a year of time. Now, if you’re not careful to uncheck the box when buying a domain name, you end up getting a shopping cart added to your site for a couple bucks a month.

That same transformation from custom to commodity is also taking place in mobile right now.

And so, at that same diner table, we decided to create a company with the goal of providing the picks and shovels for the mobile gold rush that was already underway, with the idea that one day we’d help power a world where everyone had their own app.

Then, when Apple announced iOS 3.0 with features that required developers to provide servers, we knew we had an opening. Less than two weeks later, we founded Push IO.

Since Dan and I both have deep engineering backgrounds, we set out from day one to build the best possible software platform for getting data onto mobile devices in real-time, and we knew it would have to be designed to support the complex needs of large scale apps. We started with a completely virtual solution expecting that eventually we’d transition to a mix of virtual and physical servers. We didn’t know this transition would come so fast.

We were using a different provider when we started seeing a couple of apps for our sports broadcaster customers really taking off, all of which were demanding constant improvement in performance. So demanding, in fact, that we knew we had to shift to the hybrid-cloud system sooner rather than later, a technically involved move that was not yet being done by other providers in our space.

And that’s where SoftLayer comes in.

SoftLayer has been a key partner in our growth, supplying our hybrid-cloud infrastructure as we take on new customers and expand our platform from big sports broadcasters to multi-national businesses. SoftLayer gives us control of our own destiny, helping us avoid some of the high-profile problems that the multi-tenant virtual hosting providers have experienced, and providing us with the geographic redundancy and continuous availability we need to serve our demanding broadcast customers.

Proof of our platform’s success was revealed recently, during Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote announcement that they have shipped 100 Billion Push Notifications on iOS. From this we learned that Push IO has shipped 2%…2 Billion!!!…1 in 50 of those!

This summer Push IO made an exciting move: We acquired TapLynx (http://www.taplynx.com), a simple yet powerful platform that helps businesses, designers, publishers and even developers quickly create apps with no knowledge of Objective-C code required. All you need are RSS feeds and an idea of what content you want streaming into your app. Things like push notifications, In-App Purchase and user control over content updates help app creators to maximize their users’ engagement and monetize content.

Acquiring TapLynx is a huge step towards our vision, where “everyone has an app” becomes a reality. We know SoftLayer will continue to play an integral role in supporting Push IO during this exciting next step: scaling our industrial strength platform to the growing number of people who want their own mobile apps.

Many thanks to our friends at SoftLayer for making this possible and letting us share our story!

- Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder, Push IO

Last weekend I went to an outdoor concert where I saw a pretty decent Beatles tribute band that hails from the great state of Texas and goes by the name Me and My Monkey. The entire excursion from home to the venue and back again lasted just about six hours. I was pulling into my driveway engaged in a phone conversation with a friend about which fake Beatle was her favorite when my Android gave a strangled beep, cut us off and powered down.

At first I thought it was a glitch, but a quick attempt to turn it back on showed me otherwise. I was out of juice. My battery was drained beyond the point of no return — or at least no return without access to an electrical outlet. I wondered if I had forgotten to charge the phone the previous night. After all, I was outside with friends, food, and music all evening. My phone was snug in my pocket on standby … Or was it?

I was the first to arrive to the venue, so I made a call to let the my freinds know I had staked us out a shady spot. After that, I fired up go sms to coordinate getting the right number of chairs, and I used it again while searching the parking lot for my friend’s car to help her carry those chairs. During the Sgt. Pepper set in an attempt to settle an argument, I “Googled” which year the Beatles officially broke up (turns out it was 1970 but the break-up dragged out until 1975). Sometime between Strawberry Fields and Hello, Goodbye I got an email from the office, so I logged into my handy SoftLayer App to check on a support ticket.

During the intermission, a local radio station was piped through the sound system and someone asked me to Shazam what turned out to be a Florence and the Machine cover of a track off Abbey Road. Since my phone was at the ready, I was the point person to find out whether the chorus to I Am the Walrus really said goo goo g’joob. I didn’t have a lighter on me, but my Virtual Zippo did the trick nicely during Hey Jude. And did I mention I don’t wear a watch because if I just hit the power button on my spiffy smart phone … ta-da, I get the time!

It’s a funny feeling when you realize how something that didn’t really exist five years ago has managed to ingrain itself so deeply into your everyday life. That’s what I found myself thinking as I was drifting off to sleep Saturday night, me in my bed and my Android recharging on the night stand … Well, that and who are the eggmen? Goo goo g’joob.

-William

On August 8, the hosting world will converge on the San Diego Convention Center for HostingCon 2011. I’d say that SoftLayer will “be there with bells on,” but a better way to put it would be that we’ll “be there with megaphones.” There are times to blend in and participate, and there are times when you follow Winston Churchill’s advice:

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.”

This year, SoftLayer will be Bigger, Better and Badder in the conference sessions, on the expo hall floor and at the biggest HostingCon party ever.

Conference Sessions
We’re honored to have SoftLayer employees speaking in six different sessions at HostingCon 2011:

Over the next few weeks, you can keep an eye on the HostingCon Blog for more information about these sessions. To kick off the fun over there, they posted a preview to my session: “Setting Cloud Expectations Before Creating Cloud Strategy”

Expo
When you’re not learning from one of our SLayers in the conference sessions above, we hope you’ll swing by Booth #421 in the Expo Hall to chat with our team, get some SoftLayer swag and try your hand at the infamous Server Challenge. We’ll have live video coverage of all of the action at our booth, and given the geek credentials of HostingCon attendees, we’re expecting record-breaking times … so start studying and training now to give yourself the best possible chance to win the iPad 2 we’re bringing for the Server Challenge Champion!

HostingCon Party
Since you’ve read so attentively to this point about the ‘work’ side of HostingCon, it’s time for some ‘play.’ At 9pm on August 9, SoftLayer, cPanel and Resell.biz will hosting the biggest HostingCon Party in history. 1000 lucky attendees will come together at 4th & B for networking, food, drink and THE DAN BAND!

Attendance will be strictly limited, and you watch the tickets dwindle before the event sells out at http://hostingconparty.com. SoftLayer customers, leave a comment on this blog or contact us via Twitter (@SoftLayer) and we’ll hook you up with a promo code that comps your registration … But remember, even if you’re our best customer ever, you need a ticket to get in the door, so please register while you can!

Yes, Mr. Churchill, SoftLayer is bringing the pile driver to San Diego.

-@gkdog

There have been many books written about website design, and I am not about to take on the challenge of disputing any of them or trying to explain every facet of design. In this short blog, I want to explain what I have come to understand as the modern layout of websites. The term “layout” may have many different definitions, but for this article I am talking about the basic structure of your website, meaning separation of concerns, data transfer from host to client, how to handle changes in data, and when to change your page structure.

Separation of Concerns

It is important when sitting down for the first time to build a website to come up with an outline. Start by making a list of the parts of your website and the functions of those parts. I always start at the base of my web structure and work from there. HTML is always the foundation of a website; it defines the structure and outlines how you will display your data – plain and simple. It doesn’t have to include data or styles, nor does it need to be dynamic … At its essence, it’s a static file that browsers can cache.

Client-side scripting languages like JavaScript will take care of client-side animations and data dispersal, while cascading style sheets (CSS) take care of style and presentation, and server-side scripting languages like PHP or Perl can take care of data retrieval and formatting.

Data Transfer

Where is your data going to come from, and what format it will be in when the client receives it? Try to use a data format that is the most compatible with your scripting languages. I use JavaScript as my primary client side scripting program, so I try to use JSON as my data format, but that’s not always possible when dealing with APIs and transferring data from remote computers. JSON is quickly becoming a standard data format, but XML* is the most widely accepted format.

I prefer to use REST APIs as much as possible, because they sends the information directly on the client, rather than using the server as a proxy. However, if a REST API is not available or if there is a security risk involved, you get the advantage of being able to format the data on the server before pushing it to the client. Try to parse and format data as little as possible on the client side of things, the client should be concerned with placing data.

Changes in Data

In the past, websites were made from multiple HTML documents, each one containing different data. The structure of the pages were the same though, so the data changed, but the code was nearly identical. Later, using server side scripting programs, websites became more dynamic, displaying different data based on variables passed in the URL. Now, using AJAX or script injection, we can load new data into a static webpage without reloading. This means less redundant code, less load on the client, and better overall performance.

Page Structure

It is important when displaying data to understand when to change the structure of the page. I start by creating a structure for my home page – it needs to be very open and unrestricting so I can add pictures and text to build the site. Once the overall loose structure is established, I create a structure for displaying products (this will be more restrictive, containing tables and ordering tools). The idea is to have as few HTML structures as possible, but if you find that your data doesn’t fit or if you spend a lot of time positioning your data, then it might be time to create a new structure.

The Impact of a Modern Layout

Following these steps will lead to quicker, more efficient websites. This is (of course) not a new subject, and further understanding of web layout can be found in Model-View-Controller frameworks. If you find that you spend too much time writing code to interface with databases or place data, then frameworks are for you.

-Kevin

*If you have to deal with XML, make sure to include JavaScript libraries that make it easier to parse, like JQuery.

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

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Mike Genstil of Visualize ROI, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner providing a flexible platform for enabling sales and marketing professionals to place ROI models on the web in an engaging format. To learn more about Visualize ROI, visit http://www.visualize-roi.com/.

Don’t Tell Me … SHOW Me the Numbers

We are living in a new world of increased corporate accountability and frugality. Thanks to unpredictable markets and unscrupulous leaders, the stakes have been raised in corporate decision-making. We have entered an “ROI revolution,” where CFOs, CMOs, and CIOs are demanding detailed business cases before they will make a purchase. Questions asked of vendors by executives are, “What is the Return on Investment?” and, “What is my Total Cost of Ownership?”

Based on our research, less than 5% of companies that sell into B2B environments have an effective and efficient way of creating engaging, credible business cases for customers. Most companies that sell to businesses have developed some type of spreadsheet-based “ROI calculator” to help salespeople and customers understand the ROI. Best-in-class companies often have created multiple models – one for a “business case,” one for “a competitive comparison,” and one for “persona-based selling.” Unfortunately, these spreadsheets are not effective for several reasons:

• They are confusing and not easily modified
• They suffer from version control issues
• They don’t integrate with existing CRM and marketing automation systems
• They don’t easily enable the creation of scenario comparisons
• They can’t create professional looking reports

VisualizeROI solves these problems … and more. VisualizeROI is the first SAAS-based approach to business-case selling. We launch web-based Visualizers in days, integrate with existing systems and capture a rich set of prospect data that allows management to do analysis of customers and prospects that just isn’t possible today. Salesperson customization options are available, and salespeople can be notified when customers do their own analysis. It’s addictive.

To get an idea of the flexibility and functionality a “Visualizer” can provide, check out the Drive vs. Fly? Visualizer I mentioned in the video with Kevin. To see business examples, you can head to http://www.visualize-roi.com/examples/ to see a few of the Visualizers we created to feature the platform.

If you already have your ROI model and you want to make your own Visualizer, we’re ready for you: http://www.visualize-roi.com/create/!

-Mike Genstil, Visualize ROI

This SoftLayer Blog entry actually comes to us from Kate Moseley (Age 10), daughter of VP of Network Engineering Ric Moseley.

I think it is cool that my dad is a computer guy that works for SoftLayer because he is always able to fix our computers, TVs, and anything electronic. His job is to order and fix computer networks. He also likes messing with anything technical at home including iPods, iPhones, computers, TVs, etc.

My dad is always working so hard to earn money for our family. Sometimes he’s so busy emailing people at work that when you ask him a question, it’s like he can’t even hear you. I also think that it’s cool that he gets to travel to a different state almost every month it seems like. I love going to my dad’s office because I get to see what it’s like working in an office with so many people in such a busy place.

My dad goes to many meetings with his boss, Lance, and the rest of the staff. When he’s not at his office, he’s still working really hard at home! Sometimes he stays up till 4 o’clock in the morning to help fix things at his work. One time he got a call while we were on vacation saying that a router was down at the data center and he needed to come back ASAP! So he packed up his bags and headed back to Dallas! Sometimes we don’t even get to sit down and have an actual meal as a family because he always misses dinner and sometimes he’s on a conference call for more than 2 hours at a time.

My dad used to work at The Planet. He and 9 other people came up with the company called “SoftLayer.” SoftLayer recently merged with The Planet, and now they are one big company. His company is always getting bigger, so almost every year they have to move offices to a different location. My dad loves his job because he gets to interact with one of his favorite things: Technology. SoftLayer has given my family an opportunity to do many things in life that we would not ever have had the chance to do.

Someday I hope to be a part of SoftLayer just like my dad is today.

- Kate Moseley

If you share Kate’s hope to one day be a part of the SoftLayer team, visit the SoftLayer Careers page. We have more than 50 positions available in Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco and Amsterdam. As Kate explained, SoftLayer is growing like crazy, so whether your background is in Finance, Technical Support, Facilities, Human Resources, IT, Marketing, Sales or Development, we want you to join us!

When Lance opened the floor for SoftLayer employees to present their ideas for “innovative” approaches to the Internet, I put together a pretty ambitious proposal. As it turns out, the idea wasn’t as fully baked as I may have wanted it to be, but I came to the decision to change gears a little and take a different approach.

Completely unrelated to that personal decision to adjust the direction of the project, I had a nice little chat with Lance on the phone. We decided that the world was underready for a revolution and that a more traditional nontraditional approach was in order:

The Internet needs data centers to hold all of your pictures. SoftLayer does a great job at being a data center, but I feel like there’s still an opportunity for a revolution in data center design. I have a few ideas about how the world of web hosting can be completely redefined, and with the unique resources Lance has put at my disposal, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to create a stellar hosting platform with an unbeatable discount price structure. PHIL’s DC is the future of web hosting.

- PHIL

The hosting business is a really great place to be these days. It may morph rapidly, but some things ring consistently clear. The dedicated server is one of those things. In the brief 10 years or so of my Internet hosting career, the way dedicated servers are delivered to customers and the way they are managed has gone from prop-jet to auto-pilot.

I got started in the dedicated hosting business under Lance Crosby (our current CEO) in October of 2003. At that time we had less than 100 employees, and it may have been less than 50. “Auto-provisioning” consisted of Lance offering pizza and cash bonuses for each white-box PC that we’d ‘ghost’ with a boot floppy using a networked imaging server (in between our support tasks of answering calls and responding to tickets). We used a popular product made by Norton* in those days to deliver servers as quickly as possible to feed what seemed like an endless demand. As time has gone by, our systems have vastly improved, and true automation is the rule now; Manual intervention, the exception.

Today, SoftLayer has 600+ employees, 80,000+ dedicated servers, 26,000+ customers and is on the verge of launching our international presence. One of the biggest reasons SoftLayer has been so successful is because we offer customers maximum control.

When you need online computing power these days, you have hundreds of choices. Most of your options are still centered on the general idea of the dedicated server, but there are variations depending on what needs are being targeted. Physical dedicated servers are now complimented by Cloud Compute Instances and Virtualized Instances to provide a more flexible platform to tailor to specific use cases. Some providers do better than others at integrating those platforms, and when we began incoporating cloud and dedicated in an integrated environment, our goal was to enable customers to control all aspects of their environment via a single ‘pane of glass,’ our customer portal.

If you’ve heard us talk about the features and functionality in the customer portal but have never seen how easy it is to actually navigate the interface, today’s your lucky day:

In a nutshell, you get the kind of server control that used to require driving down to the data center, popping on your parka and performing some troubleshooting in the freezing cold cage. You may have been troubleshooting hardware cooling, wiring or other hardware issues, and you’d usually need direct console access to all the different types of servers and devices loaded on your rack.

Thankfully, those days are gone.

Now you can order a dedicated server and have it online in 2-4 hours (or a Cloud Computing Instance which can be online in 15 minutes). You can configure their private network so that they can talk to each other seamlessly; you can add firewalls, load balancing, backup services, monitoring instantly. For maintenance issues, you have the convenience of BIOS-level access via the standard KVM over IP card included in every server so you can see low-level hardware indicators like fan speeds and core temperatures and perform soft IPMI reboots. Firmware upgrades for your hard drive, motherboard, or RAID card that once required the ever-hated floppy disk can now be done with a few button clicks, and speaking of RAID cards, our systems will report back on any change to an ideal status for your disk subsystem. If that weren’t enough, you’ve got monitoring alerts and bandwidth graphs to give you plenty of easy to reference eye-candy.

No more messy wiring, no more beeping UPS units, no more driving, no more parkas.

-Chris

*As a rather humorous aside: My former manager, Tim, got a call one night from one of the newer NOC staff. He was a systems guy, many of the internal systems were under his SysAdmin wing. He was awakened by a tech with broken English who informed him that his name was on the escalation procedures to be called whenever this server went down:

Laughter ensued and this story was told many times over beers at the High Tech pub.

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

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Ev Kontsevoy of Mailgun, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner providing hosted email infrastructure and APIs for sending, receiving and hosting mail. To learn more about Mailgun, visit https://mailgun.net/.

The Story of Mailgun: A New Kind of ESP

Like most useful things, Mailgun was built out of necessity. We were sick of building email servers for apps, and we couldn’t find any services that offered fully-functional email servers with APIs. There were plenty of solutions for sending messages, but we needed more. We felt that applications needed to be proper mail servers themselves and wanted to use email as a way to expand the user interface of our software. So we decided to build it.

The first time I needed Mailgun was for Pikluk. Pikluk is a web browser and email client for kids. We spent some time looking for a 3rd party mail hosting company but only Google Apps was available for $50 per year per user. Pikluk was bootstrapped, so there wasn’t a lot of money for a solution like that. I ended up hacking the email functionality together and it worked well enough. However, it was very clear that developing email is a big pain point. I spent most of my development cycles just on building and maintaining email.

Our next startup, Dunegrass, was an enterprise application designed to be a bug tracker for business executives. Business executives do everything in Outlook, so tight email integration was essential, and this time we had more money, so I was going to stay clear of the email morass and purchase a SaaS email solution. One problem: It didn’t exist. Everything available either just sent email or was priced per mailbox, which wouldn’t scale for our users … So we ended up building a mini version of Mailgun again.

The last straw was when I was doing some contract work and they asked me if I would configure and integrate an email server. That was it. I decided I was going to do this the right way and build a service so developers wouldn’t have to worry about email.

When some developers first hear of Mailgun, they think, “Sending email’s easy. Just set up postfix, and you’re done.” Yes, sending email is fairly straightforward, but receiving it is not … That’s why you see a lot of solutions that focus just on delivering email. Sending is only half of email, though. Things start getting a lot more interesting when you can not only send but also receive, parse and store email. These functions weren’t being adequately addressed by any of the available solutions.

Receiving and parsing email is a lot more complicated. You have to deal with different encodings, office auto-replies, bounces and incoming spam. If a developer decides to let users email into an app, he’ll quickly find himself building an email server, and it’s not an easy feat. Email has been around longer than the web, yet there is a dearth of tools and industry expertise. Most programming languages in widespread use today don’t even have proper MIME parsing support!

All of these issues have hindered the amount of innovation in email, and that’s a shame because email is a very powerful tool. It’s the one universal method of communicating with users, yet few applications leverage it properly. Every Internet company wants to create more engagement with users, and then they send out emails that say ‘Do Not Reply.’ We think businesses need to think about email as an extension of their web interface.

You can’t force your users to go to your website, but they will always check their email, so you should be able to leverage that fact to push relevant and engaging information to your users. Unfortunately, most companies abuse this privilege and send out mindless spam. We hope Mailgun allows companies to think more creatively and develop solutions that foster a two way conversation to really engage users.

To host Mailgun, we chose to use Softlayer. They have an incredible network and a unique ability to mix and match VPS (cloud) with dedicated hardware. We needed to be on raw metal because our application requires a lot of I/O. Knowing our hardware allows us to predict performance and removes a lot of the uncertainty usually associated with building software on an abstract cloud. Running on SoftLayer infrastructure actually makes it cheaper for us to build software, and there are fewer corner cases to worry about.

So that’s the story of Mailgun. We think there is a lot of room for innovation using email, and we hope Mailgun is the spark driving that innovation.

- Ev Kontsevoy, Mailgun

IPv4 addresses are 32-bit while IPv6 addresses are 128-bit. Customers can get a /64 allocation of IPv6 addresses provisioned to every one of their SoftLayer servers. A /64 block of IPv6 addresses contains 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 distinct addresses. The entire IPv4 address space is 4,294,967,296 distinct addresses.

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers when you start talking about IPv4 and IPv6 address space. With the exhaustion of IPv4 address space and the big push toward IPv6, everyone’s talking about address blocks, usage justification and dual stack compatibility, but all of those conversations presuppose a certain understanding of why IP addresses are the way they are. Someone can say, “The IPv6 pool is exponentially larger than the IPv4 pool,” but that statement needs a little context when you hear that providers like SoftLayer are provisioning a free /64 IPv6 allocation of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses to a single server. If the entire IPv4 pool on the Internet is 4,294,967,296 addresses and we’re giving away that many IPv6 addresses to a single server, a simple question logically follows:

Are the Internet authorities being irresponsible when they’re allowing such huge numbers of IPv6 addresses to be assigned to individual servers without a demonstrated need for that many addresses? Will this “wastefulness” lead to another IP address pool depletion in our lifetime? These questions are completely legitimate, and they’re much easier to explain in a visualized format than they are if we answered them line-by-line in text:

The video duration might seem intimidating, especially if you consider that all 15 minutes are spent talking about IP addresses (Woohoo!), but there’s a lot of information, and we did our best to break it down to simple pieces that logically follow each other to help you get the full picture of the world of IP addresses. We explain what CIDR Slash (/) Notation (where you see IP address blocks written as “192.0.2.0/24″), and we offer a simple trick to calculate the number of distinct addresses available in a given IPv4 block. There’s a fair amount of witty (and not-witty) banter and at least one use of the word “ridonkulous,” so if you enjoyed the DC Construction video commentary, you’ll get a kick out of this one too.

Toward the end of the video, we speak directly to why SoftLayer is able to give a /64 of IPv6 addresses to every server and what that means for the future of the IPv6 space.

Fun Fact: SoftLayer IP Address Space*

• IPv4: 872,448 Addresses
• IPv6 (/32): 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 Addresses

*Does not include IP space assigned to The Planet

Did the video help you wrap your mind around the differences between IPv4 and IPv6? Do you have any more questions about the differences between the two or how SoftLayer is approaching them?

-@khazard

Some of the best ideas come from people who think “outside of the box.” SoftLayer was born in a living room six years ago when we decided to look at the staid hosting industry from a new perspective. We said, “We don’t want to build a company to meet customers’ current needs. We want to build a company to meet the needs our customers don’t even know they have yet,” and that’s one of the biggest reasons the SoftLayer platform has IPv6, KVM over IP, private network, out-of-band management and standardized pod-based data centers.

Only people with a certain level of “crazy” can recognize opportunities for innovation, and because SoftLayer’s motto is “Innovate or Die,” to incubate innovation, we have to create an environment that enables employees to take their “crazy” and run with it. Speaking of “crazy,” meet Phil.

Phil plays guitar, tests software in non-standard ways, and has a bobble-head of himself. Some would say he marches to the beat of a different drummer – a drummer that may or may not be overdosing on caffeine.

Phil was tasked with a 12-week project: If SoftLayer is built for what our customers are going to need tomorrow, figure out what customers will need after “tomorrow.” He’d have access to people and resources up and down the organization to build his idea, and the experiment is set up to incubate his innovation:

1. Because there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, anyone helping Phil should do so without questioning the logic or “sanity” of what he asking for help with.
2. Phil can spend up to 20% of his work hours building his idea.
3. Anyone who helps Phil can spend up to 10% of his/her work hours to build his idea.
4. Phil can have space in H2 to build his idea.
5. Regardless of apparent success or failure, the project will conclude at the end of 12 weeks. From there, we’ll evaluate the “good” and “not as good” ideas from the experiment.

It’d be impossible to guarantee the success of any kind of project like this because it’s a little like catching lightning in a bottle, but I was interested to see what kinds of operational changes he came up with over the course of the three months. We might see the evolution of the next brilliant idea in hosting, or we’d see a lot of hilariously terrible ideas.

Then I saw his first installment:

By the time I got to “circumstantiate,” I had the phone in my hand to call off the project. What I didn’t expect was Phil’s tearful pleading to take the idea down a different path. They say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and despite the fact that this first impression was pretty awful, I decided to give him another shot (with a much more limited scope):

1. Apparently there are bad ideas in brainstorming, but anyone who helps Phil on his “new path” should try to be supportive.
2. Phil can spend up to 5% of his work hours building his idea.
3. Phil can’t take anyone else from SoftLayer away from their jobs during work hours.
4. Phil can have space in the Houston office to build his idea.
5. The project is scheduled to run for 12 weeks. There’s no guarantee that it’ll make it through next week.

If you have ideas for Phil, feel free to contribute. He’d probably appreciate the help.

-@lavosby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Sarah