As a bit of an introduction, I began my career as a GSP and hosted LAMP sites with WHM for SMBs … NBD. If you’re not fluent in “Tech Geek Acronym,” that sentence may as well be written in Greek. If I were to de-acronym it, I’d say, “I began my career as a Game Service Provider” and hosted Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP sites with Web Host Managed for Small- and Medium-sized Businesses … no big deal.” For many, the humble acronym is a cornerstone of what it means to be a true techie. Stringing together dozens of three-letter abbreviations (TLAs) to compose semi-coherent sentences would seem to demonstrate your mastery of technology … The problem is that if the reader of that sentence doesn’t have the context you have, it’s not very easy to easily get up to speed.

Every profession has their collection of acronyms. The little expressions serve as a verbal and written short hand for people who toil daily with the topics of their trade. I’m proud to confess that I’ve been using these minute medleys of letters for over twelve years. Given that I work on the Internet, I’ve been exposed to hundreds of acronyms in the fields of technology, business and management, and in my experience, I’ve had to break through several acronym “barriers” to get in the know. Because I happen to interact with customers every day as the manager of SoftLayer’s technical support department, I’ve encountered a few “Can you tell means?” responses, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post to clarify some of the common acronyms you may see in the SoftLayer vernacular.

Within support we have our CSTs (customer support technicians) and CSAs (customer support admins) who, with the help of SBTs (server build technicians), manage our massive fleet of servers. SBTs are the hands and eyes of our data centers, working closely with the hardware to ensure your server is online and operating in peak condition. The CSTs and CSAs are focused on the software and services that power your websites and applications.

Beyond employee title acronyms, you’ll probably see a collection of terms that describe the products and services that we manage. In support, we receive questions about accessing servers or CCIs (cloud computing instances) using KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) or IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) through our VPN (Virtual Private Network). Once connected to our back-end network through a SSL (Secure Socket Layer), PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunnel Protocol) or IPSEC (Internet Protocol Security) VPN, you have access to services such as DNS (Domain Name Service), NAS (Network Attached Storage) or iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Finally, while discussing our network, I often refer to http://www.softlayer.com/diagrams/pod-network-diagram/dal05 to show the difference between a VER (VPN Edge Router) and a BCS (Back-end Customer Switch).

If you run across an acronym you don’t understand in a ticket, please let us know so we can share its full meaning … By using these shortened terms, our team can provider faster service (and you can read their responses quicker). I know that seeing all the bold TLAs above may seem a little off-putting initially, but as you have a chance to read them in the context of some of the other acronyms you already know, I hope you have an “Aha!” moment … Like finding the Rosetta Stone or the Code of Hammurabi. Given the quick glance at the terms above, if you want to learn more about one of the TLAs in particular, leave a comment below, and we’ll respond in another comment with details.

CBNO

-Chris

Last year, we announced that we would be the first provider to offer the Intel E7-4800 series server. This bad boy has record-breaking compute power, tons of room for RAM and some pretty amazing performance numbers, and as of right now, it’s one of the most powerful servers on the market.

Reading about the server and seeing it at the bottom of the “Quad Processor Multi-core Servers” list on our dedicated servers page is pretty interesting, but the real geeks want to see the nuts and bolts that make up such an amazing machine. I took a stroll down to the inventory room in our DAL05 data center in hopes that they had one of our E7-4850s available for a quick photo shoot to share with customers, and I was in luck.

The only way to truly admire a server is to put it through its paces in production, but getting to see a few pictures of the server might be a distance second.

When you see the 2U face of the server in a rack, it’s a little unassuming. You can load it up with six of our 3TB SATA hard drives for a total of 18TB of storage if you’re looking for a ton of space, and if you’re focused on phenomenal disk IO to go along with your unbelievable compute power, you can opt for SSDs. If you still need more space,can order a 4U version fill ten drive bays!

The real stars of the show when it comes to the E7-4850 server are nestled right underneath these heatsinks. Each of the four processors has TEN cores @ 2.00GHz, so in this single box, you have a total of forty cores! I’m not sure how Moore’s Law is going to keep up if this is the next step to jump from.

With the abundance of CPU power, you’ll probably want an abundance of RAM. Not coincidentally, we can install up to 512GB of RAM in this baby. It’s pretty unbelievable to read the specs available in the decked-out version of this server, and it’s even crazier to think that our servers going to get more and more powerful.

With all of the processing power and RAM in this box, the case fans had to get a bit of an upgrade as well. To keep enough air circulating through the server, these three case fans pull air from the cold aisle in our data center, cool the running components and exhaust the air into the data center’s “hot aisle.”

Because this machine could be used to find the last digit of pi or crunch numbers to find the cure for cancer, it’s important to have redundancy … In the picture above, you see the redundant power supplies that safeguard against a single point of failure when it comes to server power. In each of our data centers, we have N+1 power redundancy, so adding N+1 power redundancy into the server isn’t very redundant at all … It’s almost expected!

If your next project requires a ton of processing power, a lot of room for RAM, and redundant power, this server is up for the challenge! Configure your own quad-proc ten-core beast of a machine in our shopping cart or contact our SLales team for a customized quote on one: sales@softlayer.com

When you get done benchmarking it against your old infrastructure, let us know what you think!

-Summer

The Internet community’s rallying cry has been heard by the United States Congress and Senate. Last week, we reported that SOPA was temporarily being put on the shelf, but now Congressman Lamar Smith has pulled the bill altogether, stating that “until there is wider agreement on a solution,” the bill will not be reintroduced.

On the Protect IP Act (PIPA) front, Senator Harry Reid also announced late last week that he’s postponed the schedule vote on the legislation that was originally slated for today. In a statement released on Friday, Senator Reid went on to say:

“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.”

As a hosting provider, we wholeheartedly agree that counterfeiting and piracy are a primary focus, and our opposition to the bills drafted to protect copyright holders and intellectual property owners is in response to the verbiage in the legislation and the potential dangers in the proposed means of enforcement. Having SOPA pulled and PIPA put on the shelf is an important step, but it’s not exactly a time to celebrate. The Internet community needs to remain vigilant and engaged with Congress to help create legislation that reinforces the freedom of the Internet and protects the rights of intellectual property owners.

These bills have not been forgotten by the members who introduced them for consideration and vote, and they will likely evolve into new proposals with the same intent.

Our legal team and management team will maintain our steadfast opposition to these two bills in their current form, and as similar legislation is proposed, we will fill you in on what’s being considered. In the meantime, take a few minutes to visit http://savehosting.org/ and TechAmerica to learn more about what our industry is concerned about.

-@toddmitchell

It was a cold winter day, a little over two years ago I was a nervous wreck walking into SoftLayer’s headquarters for my first day of work. I didn’t know what to suspect. I was immediately put on apparel, in other words known as “swag” distribution. Not soon after I became the “go to” girl for any and all “swag” items.

As employee number 173 I have seen this company grow in so many ways. The transformation that applies more to me would be SoftLayer’s apparel. When I started it was merely a polo handed to me out of a closet, can’t complain, but now we have a whole store dedicated to SL branded clothing and accessories. That’s right an online store where employees can purchase all kinds of SoftLayer branded items from jackets to back packs, we even have items for kids.

Employees get so excited about the apparel most come to me on their first day asking for their new hire bag. What’s a new hire bag you say? This bag contains all kinds of goodies to get new employees started on their adventure with SoftLayer. Take a look:

New Hire Gear
Look at those goodies! You’ve got a polo, a “blackout T-shirt,” a mug, a lanyard, and a notebook all tucked in to a SoftLayer branded bag.

Twice a year SoftLayer opens it apparel catalogue to employees, spring and fall. Employees get so anxious waiting for the next apparel order.

SoftLayer loves to see all employees geared up so we offer all employees at $50 credit! Take a look at a few of the featured pieces this season on SoftLayer’s runway:

SoftLayer Women’s Vest (aka. 80′s come back)
Vanishing back in the 80′s along with jeans jackets and cut off shorts SoftLayer has brought back the puffer vest. This stylish piece of clothing helps keep you warm in the winter and looks great with a long sleeve t-shirt and a scarf. Stay warm and look stylish, I’ll take it!

SoftLayer Coverall (aka. Adult Onesie)
Who says onesies are only for infants? NOT SoftLayer! This make shift onesie is great for working in the data center. With multiple pockets and a loop, you most definitely have enough room for all your server-fixing gear.

SoftLayer Dress
There is nothing wrong with looking cute while you work. This American Apparel leisure dress is perfect for any work occasion and wears perfectly at tradeshows, along with a SoftLayer cardigan of course.

SoftLayer Men’s Bowling Shirt (aka. The Charlie Sheen)
Leave it to SoftLayer to bring Two and Half Men‘s famous character to life. Now we don’t mean the actual character more less the attire. This bowling shirt will definitely attract customers, in a good way of course.

SoftLayer Women’s Burnout shirt (aka. The Double Take)
This burnout shirt has been put through an extensive process to reveal years of weathering. Each bit of pilling and striation in this sheer garment captures a true vintage worn-in feel. Yes we said “sheer,” so ladies wear a tank top underneath.

And these are just a few of the items SoftLayer offers … Just watch a few of our videos, and you’re bound to see some other fashionable choices. Kevin seems to wear a different SoftLayer shirt for every one of his Tech Partner Marketplace interviews … I wonder how many SoftLayer shirts he has.

-Natalie

This is a guest blog from Librato about Silverline. Silverline gives detailed information, presented in graphical form, on the actual usage of processor, memory and storage and network bandwidth at the application level. It also provides reliable estimates of application resource “demand,” which allows you to identify resource constraints as a potential source of performance issues and helps with capacity planning.

The Missing Link in Managing Cloud-Hosted Applications

Would you agree that one of the factors impacting the Quality of Service delivered by your applications is the availability of resources required for their execution? If you do, then you may wonder – as I do – why there aren’t more tools available to help you monitor and manage application resource consumption.

DevOps and operations teams use Cloud Resource Monitoring to keep track of the health and utilization of cloud resources, Real User Monitoring to ensure that their users experience the Quality of Service they expect, and Application Performance Management to find and fix performance issues in their applications.

What’s often missing is the ability to:

• Monitor and manage the use of resources at application level
• Ensure availability of resources
• Help in root cause analysis
• Improve resource utilization
• Do better capacity planning

Our Silverline Application Resource Management service fills this void by providing you detailed, application level data on the consumption of server resources (processor, memory, disk I/O and network I/O) and on the “demand” for these resources (i.e. how much of each resource an application would use if not restricted by resource availability). You can use this information to detect sudden changes and unusual patterns in resource consumption, identify situations in which applications are starved for resources, and to do capacity planning.

Silverline also allows you to guarantee availability of resources for individual applications or groups of applications, by setting resource quota. It guarantees that an application always receives resources up to its quota if it needs them but lets other applications use resources while it doesn’t need them. This makes it possible to run multiple applications on a server instance and guarantee that they will not interfere with each other, while at the same time improving the utilization of resources. It also allows you to make sure that critical applications (e.g. for collecting diagnostic data) are never starved for resources.

As a special case, you can use quota to let background workloads “harvest” spare resources: Simply set their resource quota to zero and they will only use resources not required by higher priority applications.

Silverline’s event handling feature allows you to set thresholds on resource consumption that can be used to send alarms or initiate automated actions. This allows you to receive early indications of problems like when an application’s resource consumption is exceeding normal levels or there is a significant gap between its resource use and resource demand. You can also take automated actions like killing rogue applications that consume too many resources.

If you’re looking for ways to improve the performance and availability of your SaaS or PaaS solution or to improve the utilization of your Softlayer cloud resources, give Silverline a try.

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

On Tuesday, the Internet Society announced “World IPv6 Launch Day”, a huge step in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Scheduled for June 6, 2012, this “launch day” comes almost one year after the similarly noteworthy World IPv6 Day, during which many prominent Internet businesses enabled IPv6 AAAA record resolution for their primary websites for a 24-hour period.

With IPv6 Day serving as a “test run,” we confirmed a lot of what we know about IPv6 compatibility and interoperability with deployed systems throughout the Internet, and we even learned about a few areas that needed a little additional attention. Access troubles for end-users was measured in fractions of a percentage, and while some sites left IPv6 running, many of them ended up disabling the AAAA IPv6 records at the end of the event, resuming their legacy IPv4-only configuration.

We’re past the “testing” phase now. Many of the IPv6-related issues observed in desktop operating systems (think: your PCs, phones, and tablets) and consumer network equipment (think: your home router) have been resolved. In response – and in an effort to kick IPv6 deployment in the butt – the same businesses which ran the 24-hour field test last year have committed to turning on IPv6 for their content and keeping it on as of 6/6/2012.

But that’s not all, folks!

In the past, IPv6 availability would have simply impacted customers connecting to the Internet from a few universities, international providers and smaller technology-forward ISPs. What’s great about this event is that a significant number of major broadband ISPs (think: your home and business Internet connection) have committed to enabling IPv6 to their subscribers. June 6, 2012, marks a day where at least 1% of the participating ISPs’ downstream customers will be receiving IPv6 addresses.

While 1% may not seem all that impressive at first, in order to survive the change, these ISPs must slowly roll out IPv6 availability to ensure that they can handle the potential volume of resulting customer support issues. There will be new training and technical challenges that I suspect all of these ISPs will face, and this type of approach is a good way to ensure success. Again, we must appreciate that the ISPs are turning it on for good now.

What does this mean for SoftLayer customers? Well the good news is that our network is already IPv6-enabled … In fact, it has been so for a few years now. Those of you who have taken advantage of running a dual-stack of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses may have noticed surprisingly low IPv6 traffic volume. When 6/6/2012 comes around, you should see that volume rise (and continue to rise consistently from there). For those of you without IPv6 addresses, now’s the time to get started and get your feet wet. You need to be prepared for the day when new “eyeballs” are coming online with IPv6-only addresses. If you don’t know where to start, go back through this article and click on a few of the hyperlinks, and if you want more information, ARIN has a great informational IPv6 wiki that has been enjoying community input for a couple years now.

The long term benefit of this June 6th milestone is that with some of the “big guys” playing in this space, the visibility of IPv6 should improve. This will help motivate the “little guys” who otherwise couldn’t get motivated – or more often couldn’t justify the budgetary requirements – to start implementing IPv6 throughout their organizations. The Internet is growing rapidly, and as our collective attentions are focused on how current legislation (SOPA/PIPA) could impede that growth, we should be intentional about fortifying the Internet’s underlying architecture.

-Dani

The Internet is unnervingly quiet today. In response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, some of the most popular sites on the web have gone dark today – demonstrating the danger (and the potential unchecked power) of these two bills.

Late Friday afternoon, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced that the DNS-blocking provisions would be removed from SOPA, and on Saturday, The White House responded to in opposition to the the bills as they stand today. Shortly thereafter, SOPA was “shelved.”

The Internet was abuzz … but the Champagne wasn’t getting popped yet. After digging into the details, it was revealed that SOPA being “shelved” just meant that it is being temporarily put to sleep. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith stood explained:

“To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.

Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.”

I only mention this because it’s important not to forget that SOPA isn’t dead, and it’s still very dangerous. If you visit sites like reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla and Boing Boing today (January 18, 2012), you experience the potential impact of the legislation.

The Internet’s outrage against SOPA has brought about real change in our nation’s capital: The House is reconsidering the bill, and they’ll hopefully dismiss it. With our collective momentum, we need to look at the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA, or Senate Bill 968) – a similar bill with similarly harmful implications that’s been sneaking around in SOPA’s shadow.

As it is defined today, PIPA has a stated goal of providing the US Government and copyright holders an additional arsenal of tools to aide in taking down ‘rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods.’ The Senate bill details that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.” In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site.”

Our opposition to PIPA is nearly identical to our opposition to SOPA. Both require a form of essentially breaking a core aspect of how the Internet functions – whether that breakage happens in DNS (as detailed in my last blog post) or in the required rearchitecture of the way any site that accepts user-generated content has to respond to PIPA-related complaints.

PIPA is scheduled for Senate vote on January 24, 2012. It is important that you voice your opinion with your government representatives and let them know about your opposition to both SOPA and PIPA. We want to help you get started down that path. Find your local representatives’ contact information:

[SOPA Concerns]: Contact your congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives
[PIPA Concerns]: Contact your Senator in the U.S. Senate

Keep spreading the word, and make sure your voice is heard.

-@toddmitchell

All but gone are the days of plain, static webpages flowered with horrible repeating neon backgrounds and covered with nauseating animated GIFs created by amateur designers that would make your mother cry and induce seizures in your grandpa. Needless to say, we have come a long way since Al Gore first “created the intarwebs” in the early ’90′s. For those of you born in this century, that’s the 1990′s … Yes, the World Wide Web is still very new. Luckily for the seven billion people on this lovely planet, many advancements have been introduced into our web browsers that make our lives as designers and developers just a little bit more tolerable.

Welcome to the third installment in Web Development series. If you’re just joining us, the first posts in the series covered Javascript Optimization and HTML5 Custom Data Attributes … If you haven’t read those yet, take a few minutes to catch up and head back to this blog where we’ll be looking at how custom web fonts can add a little spice to your already-fantastic website.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably used the same three or four fonts on most sites you’ve designed in the past: Arial, Courier New, Trebuchet MS and Verdana. You know that pretty much all browsers will have support for these “core” fonts, so you never ventured beyond them because you wanted the experience to remain the same for everyone, no matter what browser a user was using to surf. If you were adventurous and wanted to throw in a little typographical deviation, you might have created a custom image of the text in whatever font Photoshop would allow, but those days are in the past (or at least they should be).

Why is using an image instead of plain text unfriendly?

1. Lack of Flexibility – Creating an image is time-consuming. Even if you have really fast fingers and know your way around Photoshop, it will never be as fast as simply typing that text into your favorite editor. Also, you can’t change the styles (font-size, color, text-decoration, etc.) of an image using CSS like you can with text.
2. Lack of Accessibility – Not everyone is alike. Some of your readers or clients may have impairments that require screen readers or a really large font. Using an image – especially one that doesn’t contain a good long description – prevents those users from getting the full experience. Also, some people use text-only browsers that don’t display any images. Think about your whole audience!
3. More to Download – Plain text doesn’t require the same number of bytes as an image of that same text. By not having another image, you are saving on the amount of time it takes to load your page.

Now that we’re on the same page about the downsides of the “old way” of doing things, let’s look at some cool HTML5-powered methods for displaying custom fonts. Before we get started, we need to have some custom fonts to use. Google has a nice interface for downloading custom fonts (http://www.google.com/webfonts), and there are plenty of other sites that provide free and non-free fonts that can suit your taste/needs. You can pick and choose which ones you’d like to use (remembering to always follow copyright guidelines), and once you’ve created and downloaded your collection of fonts, you’ll need to setup your CSS to read them.

For simplicity, my file structure will be setup with the HTML and CSS files in the same root directory. I will have a fonts directory where I will keep all my custom fonts.

/fonts.html
/fonts.css
/styles.css
/fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Regular.ttf
/fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Bold.ttf
/fonts/...

My fonts.html file will include the two CSS files in the head section. The order in which you include the CSS files does not matter.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="fonts.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />

The fonts.css file will include the definitions for all of our custom fonts. The styles.css file will be our main CSS file for our website. Defining our custom fonts (in fonts.css) is really simple:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'MyCustomFont';
    src: url('fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Regular.ttf') format('truetype');
}

It’s almost too easy thanks to HTML5!

Let’s break this down into its components to better understand what’s going on here. The @font-face declaration will be ignored by older browsers that don’t understand it, so this standards-compliant definition degrades nicely. The font-family descriptor is the name that you’ll use to reference this font family in your other CSS file(s). The src descriptor contains the location of where your font is stored and the format of the font.

There are several things to note here. The quotes around MyCustomFont in the font-family descriptor are optional. If it were My Custom Font instead (in fonts.css and styles.css), it would still be successfully read. The quotes around the url portion are also optional. However, the quotes around the format portion are not optional. To keep things consistent, I have a habit of adding quotes around all of these items.

An alternative way to define the same font would be to leave off the format portion of the src descriptor. Browsers don’t need the format portion if it’s a standard font format (described below).

@font-face {
    font-family: 'MyCustomFont';
    src: url('fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Regular.ttf');
}

Like standard url inclusions in other CSS definitions, the URL item is relative to the location of the definition file (fonts.css). The URL may also be an absolute location or point to a different website altogether. If using the Google web fonts site mentioned earlier (or similar site), you may simply point the URL to the location suggested instead of downloading the actual font.

If you’ve dealt with web fonts before, you may already be familiar with the multiple formats: WOFF (Web Open Font Format, .woff), TrueType (.ttf), OpenType (.ttf, .otf), Embedded Open Type (.eot) and SVG Font (.svg, .svgz). I won’t go into great detail here about these, but if you’re interested in learning more, Google and W3C are great resources.

It should be noted that all browsers are not alike (no shock there) and some may not render some font formats correctly or at all. You can get around this by including multiple src descriptors in your @font-face declaration to try and support all the browsers.

@font-face {
    font-family: 'MyCustomFont';
    src: url('fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Regular.eot'); /* Old IE */
    src: url('fonts/MyCustomFont/MyCustomFont-Regular.ttf'); /* Cool browsers */
}

Now that we have our font definition setup, we have to include our new custom font in our styles.css. You’ve done this plenty of times:

h1, p {
    font-family: MyCustomFont, Arial;
}

There you go! For some reason if MyCustomFont is not understood, the browser will default to Arial. This degrades gracefully and is really simple to use. One thing to note is that even though your fonts.css file may define twenty custom fonts, only the fonts that are included and used in your styles.css file will be downloaded. This is very smart of the browser – it only downloads what it’s going to use.

So now you have one more tool to add to your development box. As more users adopt newer, standards-compliant browsers, it’s easier to give your site some spice without the headaches of creating unnecessary images. Go forth and impress your friends with your new web font knowledge!

Happy Coding!

-Philip

P.S. As a bonus, you can check out the in-line style declaration in the source of this post to see how “Happy Coding!” is coded to use the Monofett font family.

What does it take to be a good leader? What kind of leader do you want to follow? Throughout my life, I’ve gravitated toward leadership positions. Even when I was young, I tended to take charge of a group to achieve a goal or accomplish a mission … though most of the “missions” in my younger days happened to be some sort of mischief. Having participated in the Boy Scouts and JROTC, I joined the Marine Corps where I served for seven years, and throughout my life, I’ve been fortunate to have more than my fair share of incredible mentors.

When my service in the Marine Corps concluded, I “enlisted” at SoftLayer as a data center technician. My primary responsibilities included building severs to order and installing software for our customers in four hours or less, and it was all pretty foreign to me. I had a lot to learn about the technical side of operating a data center, but based on my impression of the company, I was confident that I’d be in good hands.

Because I always find myself asking for more challenges and additional responsibility, I transitioned into a Customer Systems Administrator role. The CSA position required a lot more learning (at a breakneck pace), and in addition to the technical aspect of the job, I found myself learning just as much about the ‘soft skills’ required to provide the great customer service. Equipped with that knowledge (and a bit more experience), I pursued a leadership role on the team, and I made it my goal to use what I’d learned in the data center and in support to lead my team. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a challenge, but I’ve never backed down from one before.

I don’t mean to make this post all about me … my goal in sharing a little of my background is to give a little context for what I’ve learned about leadership. It goes without saying that I’ve been fortunate, both in the Marine Corps as well as with SoftLayer, to have some of the most intelligent, talented and sometimes downright enigmatic leaders. I’ve managed to pick up advice, tips and tricks for handling all of the curveballs that are thrown on a daily basis, and over my years as a leader, I’ve developed a few philosophies (an amalgam of some of the key points I absorbed from all of those who have led me in the past) that I try to abide by daily:

Lead by Example.

I make it a point to never ask someone to do something that I’ve never done or something that I’d never be willing to do. This is the keen avoidance of the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality. Failing to do this hands-down one of the easiest ways to lose your team.

Employ Your Team to Their Abilities. Empower Them to do Their Best Work.

It’s very important to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses and use those to make everyone better. Using the strengths of one team member, I can push another outside of his or her comfort zone to improve his or her overall skill set. I’ve also seen amazing results from providing freedom for my teams to make decisions. Not only does that freedom build trust, it also gives some real “ownership” to every person, and with that sense of ownership, each team member does better work. I’ve been a little surprised to notice this empowerment coming from the coffee juggernaut Starbucks: Starbucks baristas and store employees are encouraged to make real-time decisions in the interest of taking care of their customers.¹

Keep Learning.

Leading a team requires that you stay on top of what they’re doing. Always ask questions. Continue to research so you can be a resource for your team. Find opportunities to learn and take advantage of every one of them.

Most Importantly: Learn how to Have Fun.
I see this cliché often, so when you see, “Have Fun,” I wouldn’t be surprised if you just rolled your eyes. I’d be lying if I said that things were great all of the time … Realistically in any business, there’s going to be a time or two when the *&#@ is going to hit the fan. It’s important to find opportunities to cut loose and relax a bit. Cooking steaks for the group during a long overnight shift, grabbing a bite after work or a providing a happy hour once in a while builds a great deal of cohesion outside the office walls. Providing a relaxed environment does not prevent your team from doing stressful work … It actually builds camaraderie, and it will help the team get through those tough times. The brutal honesty is that if people aren’t enjoying where they’re at, they’ll look elsewhere – leaders have to help foster an environment that enables success.

At the end of the day, these tips may not work for everyone. There are a plethora of studies out there pertaining to the different leadership styles, the different types of leaders and how they influence teams. What’s important is that leaders need to be intentional about bettering their teams (and ultimately bettering their businesses).

Along the lines of continuous education, I’d love to hear the leadership philosophies you’ve learned in your experience as a leader. Leave a comment on this article to share what you think has made you successful.

-Matthew

¹This comes from both observation and talking to current and past employees. I’ve never worked for Starbucks, so I can’t cite a specific company policy to back this up, but that evident organic culture is probably worth more than a million company policies that would try to create that culture.

Last week, Cracked.com ran an article about “9 Quirky Things Every ‘Cool’ Workplace Is Required to Have.” The post points out several seemingly trite characteristics of “trendy” and “fun” companies, and SoftLayer was one of the companies the author used to illustrate her point about quirky conference room names. The “obscure inside jokes” we chose as the naming convention for our conference rooms in our Dallas headquarters inspired this fantastic analogy:

I’m sure visiting vendors and consultants enjoy as much as adults enjoy hearing a gaggle of teenage girls joke about which one of them is the craaaziest.

The post’s mock homage to “fun company culture” as seen by outsiders got me thinking … Why do I think SoftLayer is such a cool place to work, and how could I talk about that in a way that didn’t seem hokey or insincere? Given the cynicism of the Internet in general, it may be impossible to execute, so I realize that all I can do is give my honest take on why I enjoy coming to work every day:

SoftLayer’s culture is defined authentically and organically by our people, traditions and stories.

I agree that red walls, orange couches and scooters in an office do not create a cool workplace, and I don’t think our “obscure inside joke” conference room names make us cool either. When we moved to our new headquarters in Dallas, every employee at the company was encouraged to submit ideas for what we should name the rooms, and after voting on dozens of great ideas, the “inside joke” submission from SoftLayer General Council Suzy Fulton ended up winning (and Suzy was awarded an iPad for submitting the winning idea). The reason her naming convention won is what makes SoftLayer a great place to work: Each name gives a different piece of the overall story that explains, “This is who we are, what we do and where we come from.”

Take our conference room named Muenster for example. Muenster is a small town in Texas where the annual GermanFest is held. The 3 Bars BBQ team breaks out their secret recipes to compete with other BBQ teams from around the state, and the coworkers that don’t don aprons get to kick back and eat some awesome BBQ, enjoy a drink (or two… or three…) and have a great time. The event has been such a fun tradition that we wanted to incorporate it into our new office for the days we’re not eating brisket fresh off the grill. It means something to SoftLayer as a company, and if vendors/consultants coming into the office don’t appreciate it in the same way, we’re pretty sure we’ll survive. Naming conference rooms to the least common denominator would sure be functional, but in practice, it would be (ironically) “outside the box” for SoftLayer.

We’re just group of people (with a few inside jokes) working together to create the best hosting experience in the business. We value both customers and employees. We like startups (because we were a startup a few short years ago), innovation, automation and BBQ. We have fun together, and as a result, we have plenty of stories to tell (and more obscure inside jokes to use for our next conference rooms).

Oh, and we’re also “guilty” of having a few red accent walls, employees riding around on scooters (and Segways), Nerf guns, foam rockets, and foosball tables in our offices. If that means getting mentioned in the same (mocking) breath as Facebook, Yahoo!, Zappos and Twitter, we’re in a pretty good spot.

-Summer