It’s been a long time since I put fingers to keyboard to write a blog, so I reckoned it was about time that I resurfaced on the interwebs. While this post won’t announce any huge news like my last post about SoftLayer going live in Amsterdam, it might provide an interesting insight into what it’s like to work for a dynamic, growing company.
My time at SoftLayer has been marked by change at rapid pace — more revolution than evolution, I suppose. This has been true both in terms of my professional development and the trajectory the company has taken in the past 18 months: I have gone through a merger that more than tripled the size of the company, watched the expansion of our footprint in the United States (a new data center in San Jose and new pods in Washington, D.C. and Dallas) and participated in our expansion overseas when I worked on the Amsterdam launch … And if that list wasn’t action-packed enough, I’ve been a part of some fantastic product launches (Flex Images and Object Storage being the two most recent examples).
When I joined SoftLayer, I kicked off fledgling analyst relations program, transitioned to corporate communications, and then seized the opportunity to serve as SoftLayer’s EMEA general manager (temporarily until I found Jonathan Wisler to run the ship). Today, I’m responsible for driving our international operations in Amsterdam and Singapore, and so far, the work has gone according to the plan. Both facilities are up and running, and we have in-region folks in place to run the data centers and drive the region’s business. As with every other DC under the SoftLayer hood, the Ops teams continue to knock it out of the park, and our business teams are just getting wound up.
Our early success in the new international markets speaks volumes about the support our customer base has given us as we’ve expanded, and now that we’ve got fully fledged dedicated teams to run in-region sales and marketing in Amsterdam and Singapore, we’re expecting the result to be akin to throwing gasoline on an already-roaring fire. Users in Europe and Asia can look forward to seeing a lot more from SoftLayer over the coming months as we ramp up our events schedule and start to push the SoftLayer message throughout both geographies.
Suffice it to say, I am very excited about what lies ahead … I suspect our competitors might not share the same enthusiasm.
As you may have read in one of my previous posts, SoftLayer partners with various startup accelerator programs around the world. This gives us the incredible opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the brightest entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Because SoftLayer grew out of a classic startup environment, we have a passion for helping new companies achieve their goals. From C-level execs all the way down the chain, we’re committed to finding the best innovators out there and mentoring them on their way to success.
We’re planning a pretty big public debut for the SoftLayer startup program in the coming months, but we want to start introducing you to some of the killer startup companies we already are working with. Today’s incredible business: Distil.
Here’s a quick insight into the company from a quick Q&A with the brains of the operation, Rami Essaid, Founder and CEO of Distil:
Q: Tell me a little bit about Distil and how you got started.
A: Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious bots from harvesting and stealing their data. We started after talking to online publishers about their security needs, and we quickly realized that digital publishers had no control over their content once they put it on the web. We started working to create the first platform aimed to help them protect and control their information.
Q: When was the moment you first recognized you had a big idea?
A: It happened after presenting our proof of concept to a couple digital publishers, the enthusiastic feedback we received made us instantly realize that this was it.
Q: How did you build your company?
A: The company started as an after-work hobby. As the platform picked up momentum, we slowly started leaving our jobs to devote all of our time to Distil. We quickly raised seed capital to help fuel our growth.
Q: What are the keys to your Distil’s success?
A: The team I have at Distil is absolutely the reason for our success. Each person’s hard work, energy, and dedication allow us to accomplish twice as much in half the time. This group of guys is the most intelligent and keen I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
Q: How would you describe the market for your product?
A: Distil is a technology solution to a problem that traditionally only relied on laws and litigation. Copyright infringement has been an issue on the web since the World Wide Web was started, but up until now most companies treated the data theft reactively. We are disrupting that way of thinking and creating a new market, protecting data and content proactively before it is ever stolen.
Q: How did you arrive at SoftLayer and how have we helped?
A: We were connected to SoftLayer through the TechStars Cloud Accelerator program. We were introduced to SoftLayer’s leadership team, and they worked with us to improve our platform performance and tweak our designs to utilize both dedicated and cloud servers. By using this hybrid solution, we’ve been able to gain the power and speed of dedicated servers while still having the flexibility to burst and scale on demand.
Q: What advice would you give to other startups?
A: The best advice I can give to any startup is to make sure they’re passionate about what they’re doing. Startup life is not easy. You work 16-20 hours a day, seven days a week, have very little money, and are always worried someone else will beat you to the prize. Passion is the only reason you get up in the morning.
In my short conversation with Rami, I could hear his passion. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in companies who join the SoftLayer startup program. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Distil.
If you enjoy reading about cool new startups, bookmark the Startups page here on the SoftLayer Blog or subscribe to the “Startups” RSS feed to meet some of the most badass startups in the world.
Calling All Startups!
Companies in our program receive mentoring, best practices advice, industry insight, and tangible resources including:
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
If you’re interested in joining our program and getting the help you deserve, shoot me an email, and we’ll help you start the application process.
I was working on my server the other night, and I found myself needing to get sound from my Windows 2008 box through an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) connection. Because we have a huge customer base with Windows 2008 installed now, I figured there may be someone else out there that would like to be able to hear sounds from their server on their local computer when connected, so I put together a quick walkthrough with how I got it to work:
Configuring Your Server
Open Windows Services (Start -> Run -> Services.msc)
Change the properties of the Windows Audio Endpoint Service and Windows Audio Service to “Automatic”. If the services are not already started, you can manually start them at this time.
Open Terminal Services ( Start -> Run -> tsconfig.msc)
Right-click on the RDP-TCP connection and bring up its properties. Go to the “Client Settings” and make sure that on “Redirection Audio” is not disabled.
Fully log out and log back into the RDP connection to the server. You will see a balloon error on your speaker icon that states “No Audio Output Device is installed.”
Making Registry Changes
You will now need to back up your registry and some registry changes.
I want to reiterate the instruction to back up your registry … As with most technical guides/walkthroughs, SoftLayer will not be held liable for any corruptions that may result from you attempting these changes. The next two steps will show how to quickly back up your registry.
Log into your server on an account with Administrator rights, and open regedit (Start -> Run -> regedit)
Export the current registry (from the “File” menu) and copy it to a location off of your server so you have it backed up.
Locate the following key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AudioEngine\AudioProcessingObjects. This will contain several subkeys all each named with a GUID.
Click on each subkey, then right-click and select “Permissions.” You will then click on the “Advanced” button and the “Owner” tab. The current owner should be listed as “TrustedInstaller.”
Select the Administrative account and/or group from the list and click “OK” to change the ownership.
Select the account you just chose and give it “Full Control,” then click “OK.”
In the “Detail” box of each subkey, double-click on the DWORD value “MinOutputConnections” and change it from 1 to 0, then click “OK.”
Once you have done this for each subkey in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AudioEngine\AudioProcessingObjects, you can close regedit and restart the Windows Audio and Windows Audio Endpoint services.
Configuring Your RDP Client
Now that you have everything ready on the server, you just need to make sure your RDP client recognizes the audio. Log off of the server so you can configure your RDP client. Open RDP, go to the “Options” menu, and under “Local Resources,” select “Configure Remote Audio Settings.” Select “Play on this Computer,” and hit “OK.” Voila! You now should be able to hear sound from your Windows 2008 RDP connection.
This is a guest blog from our featured Technology Partners Marketplace company, Cloudant. Cloudant enables you to build next-generation data-driven applications without having to worry about developing, managing, and scaling your data layer.
The recipe for big data app success: Start small. Iterate fast. Grow to epic proportions.
Unfortunately, most developers’ databases come up short when they try to simultaneously “iterate fast” and “grow to epic proportions” — those two steps are most often at odds. I know … I’ve been there. In a recent past life, I attacked petabyte-per-second data problems as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider together with my colleagues and Cloudant co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kocoloski. Here are some lessons we learned the hard way:
Scaling a database yourself is brutally hard (both application level sharding and the master-slave model). It is harder with SQL than it is with NoSQL databases, but either way, the “scale it yourself” approach is loaded with unknowns, complications and operational expense.
Horizontal scaling on commodity hardware is a must. We got very good at this and ended up embedding Apache CouchDB behind a horizontal scaling framework to scale arbitrarily and stay running 24×7 with a minimal operational load.
The data layer must scale. It should be something that applications grow into, not out of.
That last point inspired Alan, Adam and me to co-found Cloudant.
What is Cloudant?
Cloudant is a scalable data layer (as a service) for Big Data apps. Built on CouchDB, JSON, and MapReduce, it lets developers focus on new features instead of the drudgery of growing or migrating databases. The Cloudant Data Layer is already big: It collects, stores, analyzes and distributes application data across a global network of secure, high-performance data centers, delivering low-latency and non-stop data access to users no matter where they’re located. You get to focus on your code; we’ve got data scalability and availability covered for you.
Scaling Your App on Cloudant
Cloudant is designed to support fast app iteration by developers. It’s based on the CouchDB NoSQL database where data is encapsulated and transferred as JSON documents. You don’t need to design and redesign SQL data models or migrate databases in order to create new app features. You don’t need to write object-relational mapping code either. The database resides behind an HTTP layer and provides a rich permission model, so you can access, secure and share your data via a RESTful API.
Your app is a tenant within a multi-tenant data layer that is already big and scalable. You get a URL end point for your data layer, get data in and out of it via HTTP, and we scale and secure it around the globe. Global data distribution and intelligent routing minimizes latency between your users and the data, which can add 100s of milliseconds per request (we’ve measured!). Additionally, Cloudant has an advanced system for prioritizing requests so that apps aren’t affected by ‘noisy neighbors’ in a multi-tenant system. We also offer a single-tenant data layer to companies who want it — your very own white-labeled data cloud. As your data volume and IO requests rise (or fall), Cloudant scales automatically, and because your data is replicated to multiple locations, it’s always available. Start small and grow to epic proportions? Check.
Other Data Management Gymnastics
The Cloudant Data Layer also makes it easy to add advanced functionality to your apps:
Replicate data (all of it or sub-sets) to data centers, computers or even mobile devices for local processing (great for analytics) or off-line access (great for mobile users). Re-synching is automatic.
Perform advanced analytics with built-in MapReduce and full-text indexing and search.
Distribute your code with data — Cloudant can distribute and serve any kind of document, even HTML5 and other browser-based code, which makes it easy to scale your app and move processing from your back-end to the browser.
Why We Run on SoftLayer
Given the nature of our service, people always ask us where we have our infrastructure, and we’re quick to tell them we chose SoftLayer because we’re fanatical about performance. We measured latencies for different data centers run by other cloud providers, and it’s no contest: SoftLayer provides the lowest and most predictable latencies. Data centers that are thousands of miles apart perform almost as if they are on the same local area network. SoftLayer’s rapidly expanding global presence allows Cloudant to replicate data globally throughout North America, Europe and Asia (with plans to continue that expansion as quickly as SoftLayer can build new facilities).
The other major draw to SoftLayer was the transparency they provide about our infrastructure. If you run a data layer, IO matters! SoftLayer provisions dedicated hardware for us (rather than just virtual machines), and they actually tell us exactly what hardware we are running on, so we can tweak our systems to get the most bang for our buck.
Get Started with Cloudant for Free
If you’re interested to see what the Cloudant Data Layer could do for your app, sign up at cloudant.com to get your FREE global data presence created in an instant.
Since our inception in 2005, SoftLayer’s goal has been to provide an array of on-demand data center and hosting services that combine exceptional access, control, scalability and security with unparalleled network robustness and ease of use … That’s why we’re so excited to unveil SoftLayer Object Storage to our customers.
Based on OpenStack Object Storage (codenamed Swift) — open-source software that allows the creation of redundant, scalable object storage on clusters of standardized servers — SoftLayer Object Storage provides customers with new opportunities to leverage cost-effective cloud-based storage and to simultaneously realize significant capex-related cost savings.
OpenStack has been phenomenally successful thanks to a global software community comprised of developers and other technologists that has built and tweaked a standards-based, massively scalable open-source platform for public and private cloud computing. The simple goal of the OpenStack project is to deliver code that enables any organization to create and offer feature-rich cloud computing services from industry-standard hardware. The overarching OpenStack technology consists of several interrelated project components: One for compute, one for an image service, one for object storage, and a few more projects in development.
SoftLayer Object Storage
Like the OpenStack Swift system on which it is based, SoftLayer Object Storage is not a file system or real-time data-storage system, rather it’s a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged and updated when necessary. Typical applications for this type of storage can involve virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving.
One of the primary benefits of Object Storage is the role that it can play in automating and streamlining data storage in cloud computing environments. SoftLayer Object Storage offers rich metadata features and search capability that can be leveraged to automate the way unstructured data gets accessed. In this way, SoftLayer Object Storage will provide organizations with new capabilities for improving overall data management and storage efficiency.
File Storage v. Object Storage
To better understand the difference between file storage and object storage, let’s look at how file storage and object storage differ when it comes to metadata and search for a simple photo image. When a digital camera or camera-enabled phone snaps a photo, it embeds a series of metadata values in the image. If you save the image in a standard image file format, you can search for it by standard file properties like name, date and size. If you save the same image with additional metadata as an object, you can set object metadata values for the image (after reading them from the image file). This detail provides granular search capability based on the metadata keys and values, in addition to the standard object properties. Here is a sample comparison of an image’s metadata value in both systems:
File Metadata
Object Metadata
Name:img01.jpg
Name:img01.jpg
Date: 2012-02-13
Date:2012-02-13
Size:1.2MB
Size:1.2MB
Manufacturer:CASIO
Model:QV-4000
x-Resolution:72.00
y-Resolution:72.00
PixelXDimension:2240
PixelYDimension:1680
FNumber:f/4.0
Exposure Time:1/659 sec.
Using the rich metadata and search capability enabled by object storage, you would be able to search for all images with a dimension of 2240×1680 or a resolution of 72×72 in a quick/automated fashion. The object storage system “understands” more about what is being stored because it is able to differentiate files based on characteristics that you define.
What Makes SoftLayer Object Storage Different?
SoftLayer Object Storage features several unique features and ways for SoftLayer customers to upload, access and manage data:
Search — Quickly access information through user-defined metadata key-value pairs, file name or unique identifier
CDN — Serve your content globally over our high-performance content delivery network
Private Network — Free, secure private network traffic between all data centers and storage cluster nodes
API — Access to a full-feature OpenStack-compatible API with additional support for CDN and search integration
Portal — Web application integrated into the SoftLayer portal
Mobile — iPhone and Android mobile apps, with Windows Phone app coming soon
Language Bindings — Feature-complete bindings for Java, PHP, Python and Ruby*
*Language bindings, documentation, and guides are available on SLDN.
We think SoftLayer Object Storage will be attractive to a broad range of current and prospective customers, from web-centric businesses dependent on file sharing and content distribution to legal/medical/financial-services companies which possess large volumes of data that must be stored securely while remaining readily accessible.
SoftLayer Object Storage significantly extends our cloud-services portfolio while substantially enriching the storage capabilities that we bring to our customers. What are you waiting for? Go order yourself some object storage @ $0.12/GB!
The open-source model has significantly revolutionized not only the IT industry but the business world as well. In fact, it was one of the key “flatteners” Thomas Friedman covered in his tour de force on globalization — The World is Flat. The trend toward collaborating on online projects — including open-source software, blogs, and Wikipedia — remains one of “the most disruptive forces of all.”
The success of open-source projects like Linux, Ruby on Rails, and Android reveals the strength and diversity of having developers around the world contributing and providing feedback on code. The community becomes more than the sum of its parts, driving innovation and constant improvement. The case has been made for open source in and of itself, but a debate still rages over the developing case for businesses contributing to open source. Why would a business dedicate resources to the development of something it can’t sell?
The answer is simple and straightforward: Contributing to open source fosters a community that can inspire, create and fuel the innovation a business needs to keep providing its customers with even better products. It makes sense … Having hundreds of developers with different skills and perspectives working on a project can push that project further faster. The end result is a product that benefits the open-source community and the business world. The destiny of the community or the product cannot be defined by a single vendor or business; it’s the democratization of technology.
Open-Source Cloud Platforms
Today, there are several open-source cloud platforms vying for industry dominance. SoftLayer has always been a big proponent and supporter of open source, and we’ve been involved with the OpenStack project from the beginning. In fact, we just announced SoftLayer Object Storage, an offering based on OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift). We’ll provide code and support for Swift in hopes that it continues to grow and improve. The basic idea behind Swift Object Storage is to create redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data. I could go on and on about object storage, but I know Marc Jones has a blog specifically about SoftLayer Object Storage being published tomorrow, and I don’t want to steal too much of his thunder.
We have to acknowledge and embrace the heterogeneous nature of IT industry. Just as you might use multiple operating systems and hypervisors, we’re plan on working with a variety of open-source cloud platforms. Right now, we’re looking into supporting initiatives like Eucalyptus, and we have our ear to the street to listen to what our customers are asking for. Our overarching goal is to provide our customers with much-needed technologies that are advancing the hosting industry, and one of the best ways to get to that end is to serve the needs of the open-source community.
As I write this blog post, I can’t help but think of it in terms of a the Lord of Rings reference: “One ring to rule them all.” The idea that “one ring” is all we need to focus on as a hosting provider just doesn’t work when it comes to the open-source community … It all comes down to enabling choice and flexibility. We’ll keep investing in innovation wherever we can, and we’ll let the market decide which ring will rule where.
What open-source projects are you working on now? How can SoftLayer get involved?
After I spent a little time weaving together a story in response to SKinman’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” puzzle (which you can read in the comments section), I was reminded of another famous logic puzzle that I came across a few years ago. Because it was begging to be SoftLayer-ized, I freshened it up to challenge our community.
In 1962, Life International magazine published a logic puzzle that was said to be so difficult that it could only be solved by two percent of the world’s population. It’s been attributed to Einstein, and apparently Lewis Carroll is given a claim to it as well, but regardless of the original author, it’s a great brain workout.
If you haven’t tried a puzzle like this before, don’t get discouraged and go Googling for the answer. You’re given every detail you need to answer the question at the end … Take your time and think about how the components are interrelated. If you’ve solved this puzzle before, this iteration might only be light mental calisthenics, but with its new SoftLayer twist, it should still be fun:
Einstein’s SoftLayer Riddle
The Scenario: You’re in a SoftLayer data center. You walk up to a server rack and you see five servers in the top five slots on the rack. Each of the five servers has a distinct hard drive configuration, processor type, operating system, control panel (or absence thereof) and add-on storage. No two servers in this rack are the same in any of those aspects.
The CentOS6 operating system is being run on the Xeon 3230 server.
The Dual Xeon 5410 server is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server running the Red Hat 6 operating system.
The Dual Xeon 5610 server uses 50GB of CloudLayer Storage as its add-on storage.
The Quad Xeon 7550 server has no control panel.
The Cent OS 5 operating system is racked immediately below the server running the Red Hat 5 operating system.
The server using 80GB NAS add-on storage is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server with two 100GB SSD hard drives.
The server running the Red Hat 5 operating system uses Parallels Virtuozzo (3VPS) as a control panel.
The server running the Windows 2008 operating system has two 100GB SSD hard drives.
The server using Plesk 9 as a control panel is in the middle space in the five-server set in the rack.
The top server in the rack is the Dual Xeon 5410 server.
The Xeon 3450 server has two 147GB 10K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives.
The server using 20GB EVault as its add-on storage has one 250GB SATA II hard drive.
The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is next to (immediately above or below) the server using 100GB iSCSI SAN add-on storage.
The server using cPanel as a control panel has two 2TB SATA II hard drives.
The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server using Plesk 10 (Unlimited) as a control panel.
One server will use a brand new, soon-to-be-announced product offering as its add-on storage.
Question: What is the monthly cost of the server that will be using our super-secret new product offering for its add-on storage?
Use the SoftLayer Shopping Cart to come up with your answer. You can assume that the server has a base configuration (unless specifically noted in the clues above), that SoftLayer’s promotions are not used, and that the least expensive version of the control panel is being used for any control panel with several price points. You won’t be able to include the cost of the add-on storage (yet), so just provide the base configuration cost of that server in one of our US-based data centers with all of the specs you are given.
Bonus Question: If you ordered all five of those servers, how long would it take for them to be provisioned for you?
Submit your answers via comment, and we’ll publish the comments in about a week so other people have a chance to answer it without the risk of scrolling down and seeing spoilers.
SoftLayer data centers are designed in a “pod” concept: Every facility in every location is laid out similarly, and you’ll find the same network and server hardware connected to the same network. The idea behind it is that this design makes it easier for us to build out new locations quickly, we can have identical operational processes and procedures in each facility, and customers can expect the exact same hosting experience regardless of data center location. When you’ve got several data centers in one state, that uniformity is easy to execute. When you open facilities on opposite sides of the country, it seems a little more difficult. Open a facility in another country (and introduce the challenge of getting all of that uniformity across an ocean), and you’re looking at a pretty daunting task.
Last month, I hopped on a plane from Houston to London to attend Cloud Expo Europe. Because I was more or less “in the neighborhood” of our newest data center in Amsterdam, I was able to take a short flight to The Netherlands to do some investigatory journalism … err … “to visit the AMS01 team.”
Is AMS01 worthy of the SoftLayer name? … How does it differ from our US facilities? … Why is everything written in Dutch at the Amsterdam airport?
The answers to my hard-hitting questions were pretty clear: SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility is absolutely deserving of the SoftLayer name … The only noticeable differences between AMS01 and DAL05 are the cities they’re located in … Everything’s written in Dutch because the airport happens to be in The Netherlands, and people speak Dutch in The Netherlands (that last question didn’t get incorporated into the video, but I thought you might be curious).
Nearly every aspect of the data center mirrors what you see in WDC, SEA, HOU, SJC and DAL. The only differences I really noticed were what the PDUs looked like, what kind of power adapter was used on the crash carts, and what language was used on the AMS facility’s floor map. One of the most interesting observations: All of the servers and power strips on the racks used US power plugs … This characteristic was particularly impressive to me because every gadget I brought with me seemed to need its own power converter to recharge.
When you see us talking about the facilities being “the same,” that’s not a loosely used general term … We could pull a server from its rack in DAL05, buckle it into an airplane seat for a 10-hour flight, bring it to AMS01 (via any of the unique modes of Amsterdam transportation you saw at the beginning of the video), and slide it into a rack in Amsterdam where we could simply plug it in. It’d be back online and accessible over the public and private networks as though nothing changed … Though with Flex Images making it so easy to replicate cloud and dedicated instances in any facility, you’ll just have to take our word for it when it comes to the whole “send a server over to another data center on a plane” thing.
While I was visiting AMS01, Jonathan Wisler took a few minutes out of his day to give a full tour of the data center’s server room, and we’ve got video and pictures to share with more shots of our beautiful servers in their European home. If there’s anything in particular you want to see from AMS01, let us know, and we’ll do our best to share it!
P.S. Shout out to the SLayers in the Amsterdam office who offered their linguistic expertise to add a little flair to the start of the video … From the four employees who happened to be in the office when I was asking for help, we had six fluent-language contributions: English, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish and German!
**UPDATE** After posting this video, I learned that the “US” server power plugs I referred to are actually a worldwide computer standard called C13 (male) and C14 (female).
I was unbelievably busy last week, and surprisingly, the busyness I’m referencing did not even involve my official responsibilities in compliance. I was planning on writing a blog to share some of the fun/insane/ridiculous things that happened, and I thought of a way to mix it up a little and make a challenge out of it for our readers.
Have you ever seen those image-based logic puzzles where you’re given a series of images and challenged to put them in order to create a story? Here’s an example:
What story are those pictures trying to tell? A boy [6] grabs a fishing pole [4], and finds a fishing hole [5]. He baits his hook [3] and waits for the catfish to quit posing [2] and bite the hook! He takes his catch home, and his mom fries it up [1]. MMMM Good [7]!
You could probably interpret it a different way and “choose your own adventure” where the anthropomorphized fish deep fried the boy … Depends on how far outside the box you think. The answer the question was meant to have is the one above. Now that you see how it works, I have a logic puzzle for you to try and figure out about what happened during my week last week.
All ten of the pictures below were taken in the span of 56 hours … If you can come up with the correct story, I’ll send you a prize (detailed below). If you can come up with a creative story that isn’t correct, I can probably find something to send you as well. Without further ado, here are the pieces of the story [Click for Larger Version]:
If you’ve been to the SoftLayer Blog this week, you know that we have a “Kids Meal” kind of special going right now where for the next few months if you buy a server and email us, you can get an official SoftLayer Bobblehead! To piggyback on that giveaway, the first person who posts a comment with the correct order of the photos to answer the puzzle (or the funniest answer if no correct answers are posted), will get my personal FULL SET of official SLobbleheads. Yes, the full set! You won’t have to wait to place your server orders in the next month to complete your bobblehead collection (though I hope you still keep ordering servers).
This is a guest blog from our featured Technology Partners Marketplace company, Alertia. Alertia is a SaaS tool that provides a monitoring and alerting service that checks availability and response of servers, websites, and public cloud resources. Its distributed cloud-based network gives easy to understand data about server response and availability from different locations.
The web hosting market has changed in recent years. Website owners are now conscious of the advantages of cloud computing: its flexibility, its cost-cutting technology and its scalability … For these reasons, more and more web applications are being moved into cloud or hybrid environments.
This migration to the cloud creates the necessity for new tools that help users manage and centralize all of their resources, whether they are hosted in the cloud, in dedicated servers or shared hosting.
Internal vs External Monitoring
Internal monitoring tools like Nagios (a very popular tool for monitoring in data centers) can launch thousands of checks to servers hosted inside the data center and provide information on availability of common services. However, since the origin of these checks is the same internal network as the target servers, they lack an end user’s perspective.
We designed Alertia not only as a external monitoring service, but as a tool that gathers metrics and stores diagnosis results when a problem is detected. Alertia — with its distributed and highly available monitoring network located on strategic locations (like Brazil, West and East Coast USA, Spain, Singapore and Japan) — gives you a real perspective of your web application’s performance. External Monitoring services like Alertia can serve as the central monitoring tool or as the perfect companion to your current in-house network management applications, extending monitoring information by determining the source of global networking problems.
Alertia Monitoring is designed to give you the ability to manage availability and speed of all your assets from a centralized point of view.
SyncCheck Technology
Among all the external monitoring applications that we have been testing, we’ve found a common point of failure: The time of the checks is usually out of sync. What does this mean? It means that the monitoring application is sending multiple checks from different time frames … If we have multiple responses for our web application, they don’t line up to give us an all-encompassing view of our application’s performance. That’s why we developed SyncCheck.
With SyncCheck technology, we’ve created a fully synchronized monitoring network. Every check is done at the same second from different parts of the world, and the information is presented to you in a consolidated report with all the information you need.
If you’re interested in seeing how Alertia could work for you, we have a free version available that you can try out. If you try it out this month and decide you want to upgrade for even more functionality, we’d like to extend a special promo to our fellow SoftLayer customers: Use promo code ALESOFT before March 1, 2012, and you’ll get 35% off on an annual subscription!
En el correcto funcionamiento de una aplicación web pueden están implicados diferentes servicios, servidores y proveedores. Es posible que un aplicación e-commerce este usando un servidor MySQL en un proveedor de cloud como Softlayer y tenga un servidor web en Amazon.
Todos sabemos la importancia de conseguir una alta disponibilidad y rendimiento en servidores web que alojan aplicaciones críticas, y damos por sentado que la mayoría de estos sitios web disponen de herramientas avanzadas de monitorización, pero en muchos casos esto no siempre se cumple.
