Author Archive: Kevin Hazard

In the past few weeks, we’ve fielded a few questions from our Twitter followers about temperatures in our data center and how CRAC units work. John mentioned in the “Building a Data Center” series that his next post would be about keeping the data center cool, so I’ll try not to steal too much thunder from him by posting a basic CRAC unit explanation to answer those questions.

To record this video, we made the long walk (~2 minutes) downstairs to Pod 1 of SoftLayer’s DAL05 facility to give you a first-hand look at the star of the show: the DC Computer Room Air Conditioning Unit. Because this was recorded on a “Truck Day” at SoftLayer, the pod was bustling with activity, so we found a “quiet” open area in a section of the pod that will soon be filled with new servers to record the video.

Due to the ambient noise in the data center, my explanation had to be “yelled,” so please forgive the volume.

What else do you want to see/learn about in SoftLayer’s data centers?

-@khazard

As I was walking through the halls of our Dallas office, I happened to pass an door that seemed like an open portal into another dimension. Where you’d expect to finding boxes of cables and keyboards on metal racks, there were a few old wooden trunks lining the walls of the dimly lit space. Naturally, I had to investigate.

As I carefully opened the trunks, to my amazement, I came across loads of books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the apothecary books and alchemy texts, I made an amazing discovery: a few pages of Shakespearean literature that seem to have been written anachronistically about SoftLayer Alpha headquarters:

‘Tis but thy name that is my mystery;
Thou art thyself, though not a meeting room.
What’s a meeting room? It is not hand nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a conference room
By any other name would be as productive;
So Sharkbyte would, were it not called Sharkbyte call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which it owes
Without that title. Sharkbyte, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Host productive meetings.

Now I’m not suggesting that Bill Shakespeare set out to write an epic play about our facility that just wound up being Romeo and Juliet, but since the date in the corner of one of the pages was “1593,” I wouldn’t be surprised. In a flash of clairvoyance, he saw into the future and puzzled over the curious names outside each of our conference rooms … Only to come to the conclusion that while the names didn’t define the rooms, those rooms would still be phenomenally productive.

Switch a few words in that original text, and you’ve got yourself one of the most famous scenes in Romeo and Juliet. No big deal.

What were these curious names? See for yourself:

SLayer, SLacker, Unicorn, 3 Bars, 204A, Funky Truck … The narrative wasn’t clear to him at the time, but they all have a special meaning and fit into a bigger plan. Here is a full list of the Alpha conference room names:

• SLales
• CBNO
• Geneous
• Unicorn
• Automation
• Innovation
• 204A
• SLacker
• Pink
• 3 Bars
• SLayer
• Funky Truck
• 05-05-05
• Muenster
• Midway
• Sharkbyte

Flex your own ESP muscles and post a comment with what you think each of the names means.

We’ll reward the most creative responses (and the most accurate responses) with SoftLayer swag of your choice, and in a few days, SKinman will post the real reasons behind all of the names.

-@khazard

THE SKY IS FALLING! EVERYBODY MOOOOOOVVVVEEEE! WWWHHHYYY??!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!

Are those your reactions to the depletion of IPv4 space? Probably not. If you haven’t seen the IPv4 Exhaustion Rate countdown in the sidebar of SoftLayer.com, head over there and check it out … At the current rate, there will be ZERO unallocated IPv4 blocks by the middle of February 2011, and that’s not a good thing for the Internet as we know it.

Will you need to move your servers into a bomb shelter to protect your now-even-more-valuable IP addresses? Will Google stop Googling? Will there be riots in the streets as over-caffeinated sysadmins flip cars and topple dilapidated buildings in pursuit of lost 32-bit addresses? What does it really mean for you as a hosting customer and web surfer?

The sky won’t fall. Your servers are safe in their data centers. Google will still Google. Sysadmins will still be working hard at their desks. But the belt is going to start tightening, and after a while, it might get pretty uncomfortable.

What’s Really Happening

All of these IPv4 Exhaustion Rate counters are loosely tracking the IPv4 space that hasn’t been allocated by the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to a Regional Internet Registry. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are ARIN (USA and Canada), LACNIC (Latin America, South America and Caribbean), RIPE NCC (Predominantly Europe and Russia), AFRINIC (Africa) and APNIC (Asia Pacific).

When the IANA gives out its last block of IPv4 addresses, every available IPv4 address will be allocated to one of these registries. And that’s when the fun will really start. Since SoftLayer operates primarily out of the United States of America, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll use ARIN as we talk about the next steps for RIRs.

Anyone who’s requested large blocks of IPv4 space in the past few years can attest to the significant changes in the request process. Additional justification is required, you have to be using a certain percentage of the IPv4 space you’ve already been provisioned and you have to get in line.

When the IANA IPv4 address space is exhausted, regional registries like ARIN will still have space available, and that space is all they’re going to get. As a result, it’ll probably be even harder to get get large blocks of space from those registries.

SoftLayer requests IPv4 space from ARIN for our customers. As ARIN slows the distribution of IPv4 space with additional requirements, it’ll be more difficult for providers like SoftLayer to get additional space. In the same way ARIN orders IPv4 space to have stock for SoftLayer to request, SoftLayer has a pool of IPv4 addresses already assigned to us that we provision to our customers’ servers.

In Short:

1. ARIN won’t be able to get any more IPv4 space from IANA.
2. It will be more difficult for SoftLayer to get IPv4 space from ARIN.
3. It will be more difficult for customers to get IPv4 space from SoftLayer.

How long will ARIN be able to maintain a reserve of IPv4 in the midst of qualified need in the region? How long will SoftLayer continue to receive requested IPv4 address blocks from ARIN? How long will SoftLayer’s pool of IPv4 addresses last for our customers? These questions don’t have definite answers yet, but for ARIN and SoftLayer, the general answer is “As long as possible.”

What Does that Mean for You?

In the short term, it depends. If you find yourself in need of a huge block of IPv4 addresses, you’re going to run into a lot more trouble. If you’re just ordering a server and need one public IPv4 address, you might not notice much of a difference. If you’re somewhere in between, you might see a few changes as we tighten our belts in response to the belts above us being tightened.

In the long term, it means you should prioritize IPv6 adoption. You can run IPv6 in parallel with IPv4 on your SoftLayer servers, and we’ll do our best to help you understand how to implement IPv6 in your environment. IPv6 needs to be in the back of your mind as you create new applications and prepare to scale your business.

Consider the possibility that you’ll never be able to get another IPv4 address when IANA runs out of IPv4 space. What will that do for your business? How would that change your development priorities? What are the IPv6 plans for the mission-critical hardware/software vendors you use?

IPv6 traffic is only a small fraction of overall Internet traffic right now, but you can be sure that as IPv4 space is harder and harder to come by as you move down the funnel, IPv6 traffic is going to grow exponentially. The work you do in preparing for that will need to be done now or later. It’s a lot easier to start working on it now than to wait until you need it … by that time, it’ll already be too late.

-@khazard

If you’ve been watching @softlayer and @softlayer_news for the past week, you’ve probably seen a few mentions of a SoftLayer Mystery Event. In the words of Winston Churchill, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

The hints got more and more revealing as the week progressed, and any geek worth his/her salt could probably have used some Google-fu around Hint 6 to figure out what was going down. If you consider that a challenge, here are the clues we posted. Try to figure it out without peeking past this image:

Did you figure it out or did you just scroll down here to get the details on the event? Well tehe wait is over: SoftLayer is sponsoring NAMM JAM. Headliner: Megadeth.

This Friday, January 14, SoftLayer joins some of the biggest names in the music industry to co-present a face-melting 34th anniversary party for presenting sponsor Dean Guitars at The Grove of Anaheim.

If you live in Southern California and you’re interested in having your socks rocked off on Friday night, stay tuned to @SoftLayer and @SoftLayer_News for your chance to score a pair of VIP tickets to the event. The tickets are going to go to the folks who want them the most, so get ready to prove your love for SoftLayer and metal!

-@khazard

UPDATE: Phil and I are featured in a YouTube video about the event:

SoftLayer’s goal is to compete on performance and control, not price. The hosting industry is crowded with competitors undercutting each other on prices, and we don’t want run in the race to the bottom.

A few weeks ago, about 18,000 customers officially became SoftLayer customers. Over the past decade, they joined the fold under the banners of The Planet, EV1Servers, RackShack, ServerMatrix and maybe a half-dozen other brands. Each of those brands was positioned to appeal to specific market segments, but they shared the same pursuit of “value” to offer customers the biggest bang for their buck. There are two approaches to providing that kind of value:

• More bang.
• Less buck.

In many cases, the “less buck” strategy was adopted. SoftLayer takes the contrary approach by maximizing the “more bang.”

If I were to put it more presidentially, I’d say, “The ‘less buck’ stops here.”

I get to chat with customers on Twitter, Facebook, the blog and the forums, and a lot of my interactions have been about pricing: “I used to get X server for Y, but now it costs Z.” The trouble is that it’s tough to compare many of the offerings apples-to-apples.

If you were to create an apples-to-apples server comparison, you’d see that a SoftLayer server is the equivalent of a server from The Planet with a KVM, a private network, additional geographic network points of presence, increased network capacity, the ability to select where you want your server provisioned, faster provisioning, seamless integration with cloud solutions, and a lot more automation… And these are just the differences that came to me as I was writing.

As a customer of The Planet, you could choose to omit many of the features above. As a customer of SoftLayer, we want you to be able to take advantage of the platform that was designed holistically to making growing and maintaining your hosted environment easier. The platform’s architecture was dreamt up in garages and living rooms by folks that live and breathe technology:

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.” – Steve Jobs

The reactions I get when I talk about the features included in a SoftLayer server range from, “”Wow. I had no idea,” to, “I don’t care. I don’t need any of that stuff,” and as you’re reading this post, you may have already decided your stance. If you don’t see value in the SoftLayer platform, we might not get your next server-worth of business, but if you have just been looking at the dollars and cents, I’d encourage you to investigate some of the features of the platform and ask questions about how it might make your environment easier to manage.

Along the lines of the platform being built for the future, I have a question for you: What would you change about the SoftLayer platform? What is it missing? What do you want it to do that it doesn’t do yet?

-@khazard

If you’ve been watching @SoftLayer and following our posts on Facebook, you know that we’ve been spreading the holiday spirit by giving away “swag bags” to our social networks. At this point, we’ve shipped packages full of SoftLayer goodies to exotic locations like Germany, New York City, India, Southern California, Ireland, Brazil and Flower Mound, TX.

For our first few giveaways, we asked our followers to post a phrase like “I love @SoftLayer! They’re Bigger, Better, Badder. For hosting that rocks: http://softlayer.com/.” We got a great response, but that task was a little too easy. To make the next set of giveaways a little more challenging, we started asking SoftLayer Trivia questions and rewarding the first correct responder. The content of the questions spanned the spectrum from SoftLayer-specific facts to off-the-wall esoteric trivia.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• At Parallels Summit in Feb, four SoftLayer employees caught something. What was it and how has it been used?
• A SoftLayer executive shares his name with a Houston-based rapper. Who is he?
• What is SoftLayer’s ASN? What is the server capacity of our Dallas facilities? IPv6 addresses are how many bits?
• The SoftLayer “3 Bars” logo is based on a seven-layer model. What is it? What are the seven layers? What is the most common protocol you hear of from it?
• In the holiday song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” what did “my true love” give to me on Day 11?

What kind of swag are we talking about here? I thought you’d never ask:

As you can see, we’re not just sending out pens and paperweights.

Don’t be sad if you’re just now learning about these giveaways … As it turns out, this blog post is your opportunity to get in on the action. Last week, we teased the idea of a “Social Media” adventure, and here it is.

The first ten participants to complete all of the tasks below win their very own swag bag.

• Leave a comment on this blog post telling us which one of our data center locations you’d choose for your next server and why.
• Visit our Facebook page and leave a post on our wall with your favorite feature of SoftLayer’s offerings
• Post a Tweet that includes “@SoftLayer is awesome” and #socialmediaadventure
• Click through to the YouTube page for the video above and leave a comment on it like “SoftLayer’s hosting rocks!”
• Send an email to khazard@softlayer.com with your blog comment author name, Facebook name, Twitter handle and YouTube username so we verify you’ve completed the adventure.

If you’ve had a tough time finding that perfect present for the person who has everything, the SoftLayer swag bag might be exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of circling the mall for half an hour looking for a parking spot, you’ll complete our challenge in about five minutes, and your SoftLayer gear will be on its way to you.

On your mark. Get set. GO!

-@khazard

If I’ve timed this submission right, I’ll be the first person with a byline on the SoftLayer blog from the new SoftLayer office in downtown Houston. I’m part of an esteemed group of new employees who had The Planet business cards until last week, and I’m excited about the opportunity to subject a new group of readers to my abundant arsenal of esoteric references and feeble attempts at humor. I’ve joined SoftLayer’s marketing team, and I’ll be focused on our social media outreach.

Don’t worry, this post isn’t going to feature any of those “I like long walks on the beach, red wine and dinner by candlelight” introductory tidbits you usually get when you meet a new person on a blog. We’re diving right into the good stuff. Today’s topic: SoftLayer on Twitter.

If you’ve been around for a while, you already know a lot about SoftLayer’s official Twitter accounts, but because a new crowd of customers might be checking out the InnerLayer for the first time, let’s step back and look at each account. By sharing our purpose for each of our accounts, you know what to expect when you click the “follow” button.

@SoftLayer: http://twitter.com/softlayer
This is the big kahuna. The @SoftLayer account is your primary company contact on Twitter. If you have a question, send it to @SoftLayer. If you want information about a ticket, send it to @SoftLayer. If you want a haircut … you should probably go to a barber. Because @SoftLayer account has the widest reach, you’ll learn more about the company and our offerings here, and when you need a response from SoftLayer, this is one of the first places you should look.

@SoftLayer_News: http://twitter.com/softlayer_news
Now that the merger is complete, we have more than 76,000 deployed servers in 10 data centers with more than 1,500 Gbps of network connectivity. Wherever we go, we’ll be making waves, and the @SoftLayer_News account will try to keep up with all of our coverage. When we post a press release or announce a product, followers of @SoftLayer_News will hear it first.

@SoftLayer_Sales: http://twitter.com/softlayer_sales
@SoftLayer_Sales is where we teach the art of bonsai tree trimming. Actually, that’s a lie … Unless you can think of a server sales-related question involving bonsai tree trimming, you won’t read anything on that topic. It’s actually your one-stop shop for SoftLayer server specials and your Twitter contact for anything and everything sales-related.

@SLChat: http://twitter.com/slchat
A new addition to the SoftLayer Twitter team, the @SLChat account is designed to help us communicate directly with users. With more than 24,000 customers, we might have several simultaneous conversations going at a given time. Previously, if you reached out to us on Twitter, we’d reply to messages from one of the accounts above, but as our user base grows and our Twitter follower count increases, we don’t want to spam those primary channels with updates that may only be relevant to one customer. By adding @SLChat, we’re improving the signal-to-noise ratio on all of our other accounts.

SoftLayer is built around a social media culture. If you know where to look, you’ll see our executive management team checking in at the office and retweeting great press coverage we’ve gotten. Those updates can be fun and interesting in their own right, but they point to an even more important truth: As a company, we want to be engaged with our community so we can learn from it. If you’ve got something to say, we want to hear it. Post a comment, send a DM, tweet an @ reply, leave a wall post, send a carrier pigeon … We’re listening.

-@khazard