{"id":39999,"date":"2011-10-02T15:52:11","date_gmt":"2011-10-02T15:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/learning-the-language-of-hosting\/"},"modified":"2011-10-02T15:52:11","modified_gmt":"2011-10-02T15:52:11","slug":"learning-the-language-of-hosting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/planetology\/learning-the-language-of-hosting.php","title":{"rendered":"Learning the Language of Hosting"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>

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:<\/p>

Pre-SoftLayer<\/strong><\/p>
Friend:<\/em><\/td>What does SoftLayer do?<\/td><\/tr>
Rachel:<\/em><\/td>They are a hosting provider.<\/td><\/tr>
Friend:<\/em><\/td>What is a hosting provider?<\/td><\/tr>
Rachel:<\/em><\/td>It’s sort of like an Internet landlord that rents data space to clients … I think.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>

Present Day<\/strong><\/p>
Friend:<\/em><\/td>What is it you do?<\/td><\/tr>
Rachel:<\/em><\/td>I’m the Social Media Coordinator for SoftLayer Technologies.<\/td><\/tr>
Friend:<\/em><\/td>What does SoftLayer do?<\/td><\/tr>
Rachel:<\/em><\/td>SoftLayer is a hosting provider, however that is a generalization. We have data centers around the country and are expanding worldwide. The company offers dedicated, cloud and hybrid environments that allow us to handle companies outsourced IT. We are infrastructure experts.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>

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.<\/p>

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. <\/p>

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):<\/p>

\"AHA<\/a><\/p>

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!<\/p>

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.<\/p>

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<\/a>, for taking the time to answer my questions. It felt like school again … especially since there was a whiteboard in use! <\/p>

Kevin, enjoy your empty piggy bank!<\/p>

-Rachel<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-planetology"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}