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

If you have not had a chance to visit a SoftLayer data center, you’re missing out. The number one response I get when I begin a tour through any of our facilities is, “I have been through several data centers before, and they’re pretty boring,” or my favorite, “We don’t have to go in, they all look the same.” Then they get a glimpse at the SoftLayer facility through the window in our lobby:

What makes a SoftLayer DC so different and unique?

We deploy data centers in a pod concept. A pod, or server room, is a designed to be an identical installation of balanced power, cooling and redundant best-in-class equipment in under 10,000 square feet. It will support just about 5,000 dedicated servers, and each pod is built to the same specifications as every other pod. We use the same hardware vendor for servers, the majority of our internal network is powered by Cisco gear and edge equipment is now powered by Juniper. Even the paint on the walls matches up from pod to pod, city to city and now country to country. That’s standardization!

That all sounds great, but what does that mean for you? How do all these things benefit you as the end user?

First of all, setting standards improves our efficiency in support and operations. We can pluck any of our technicians in DAL05 and drop him into SJC01, and he’ll feel right at home despite the outside world looking a bit different. No facility quirks, no learning curve. In fact, the Go Live Crews in Singapore and Amsterdam are all experienced SoftLayer technicians from our US facilities, so they help us make sure all of the details are exactly alike.

Beyond the support aspect, having data centers in multiple cities around the world is a benefit within itself: You have the option to host your solution as close or as far away from you as you wish. Taking that a step further, disaster recovery becomes much easier with our unique network-within-a-network topology.

The third biggest benefit customers get from SoftLayer’s data centers is the quality of the server chassis. Because we standardize our SuperMicro chassis in every facility, we’re able to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster when a customer contacts us. Let’s say the mainboard is having a problem, and your Linux server is in kernel panic. Instead of taking time to try and fix the part, I can hot-swap all the drives into an identical chassis and use the portal to automatically move all of your IP addresses and network configurations to a new location in the DC. The server boots right up and is back in service with minimal downtime.

Try to do that with “similar” hardware (not “identical”), and see where that gets you.

The last obvious customer benefit we’ll talk about here is the data center’s internal network performance. Powered by Cisco internal switches and Juniper routers on the edge, we can provide unmatched bandwidth capacity to our data centers as well as low latency links between servers. In one rack on the data center floor, you can see 80Gbps of bandwidth. Our automated, high-speed network allows us to provision a server anywhere in a pod and an additional server anywhere else in the same pod, and they will perform as if they are sitting right next to each other. That means you don’t need to reserve space in the same rack for a server that you think you’ll need in the future, so when your business grows, your infrastructure can grow seamlessly with you.

In the last installment of this little “SoftLayer Features and Benefits” series, we’ll talk about the global network and learn why no one in the industry can match it.

-Harold