Author Archive: Steve Kinman

I heard a story over the weekend, and somehow I translated it into a blog about SoftLayer. The story went something like this. “A horse walks into a bar…” Oops, wrong story.

A little background, as you may know it was really cold here last week in Texas terms and a sunny day here is usually not 20 degrees for the high. Now for the story, the person told me that he is not really adept at checking his gas gauge on a regular basis and for certain he would not think far enough ahead to get gas on the last warm day before the cold air hit. So he jumps in his car and takes off down the freeway. About 20 minutes into the drive he notices his low fuel light is on and he can’t remember the last time he filled up or approximately how many miles he has driven. He has run dry on fuel a couple of times in the past and doesn’t want to risk it in the cold weather. He has no choice but to pull into the first station he sees and fill up the tank. As he is filling up he starts to think about how much cheaper the gas is closer to his house and how much extra he will be paying for his lack of attention. He makes a mental note that in 2010 he is going to pay more attention to detail and be a little more on top of things going forward.

Has this ever happened to you? Not just with fuel, but how about in technology? How many times have you “jumped” in to a new provider and not checked the gauges? How many times has your hosting provider run out of fuel on you? How much did that down time cost you? Was it more expensive because you just had to do whatever it took to get back up and running? What if you had planned ahead and had better disaster recovery scenarios in place? Could you have same time, money and effort?

Did you know that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again the same way expecting different results? How can you stay with a failing provider if they are insane? How can you keep using CAPEX for equipment that is obsolete the minute you take it out of the box? How can you keep running your site, application or database without a good backup policy? You still haven’t added that next piece of redundancy, why not? All these bad habits that you continue to carry from year to year have to go! These are no different than eating too much chocolate! That is the habit I am giving up in 2010, what is yours?

Make 2010 different. Give us a call.

Have you seen the new Brita commercials that have the girl running on the treadmill? The tag line says something like, “1 hour on the treadmill.” Then a new tagline appears right above a store bought water bottle and says, “in the landfill for life.” That is a telling commercial. Convenience kills our planet. Before bottled water we grabbed a glass or plastic cup, filled it up and drank it, washed it, then rinsed and repeated it. Nothing went to the landfill. Even further back, and I barely remember this one, my grandfather would walk my brother and I over to a tiny little drug store close to his house; and, we could get a Dr. Pepper from a soda fountain in a glass soda cup and drink it and leave the glass behind for the next customer. You got it—nothing in the landfill. The same goes for coffee now. Cup after cup from a drive through window and where do the cups go? The landfill. In the past, you had a mug to use again and again. Cell phones? Why, yes! They are culprits too. We used to simply use a wall phone and not have to worry about upgrading it every 2 years and getting a new battery once a year. We now fill landfills with phones, chargers, and wasted batteries. If you look closely at everything I have mentioned so far, they are all designed to make our lives more and more convenient.

With so many people using convenient things today, we at SoftLayer do the best we can to make things very convenient but also do our part for the globe. We only print things on paper when absolutely necessary. Not only do we save a tree, but it is much more secure. Everyone recently received a plastic cup with the SoftLayer logo on it for water or tea. We can use these instead of using so many disposable plastic cups. We have recycle bins in each break room for the recyclables; and, as we have stated in many blogs, we have contracts in place with recycling shops for the extra server packaging we receive with new shipments. We do our best to stick to the 3 R’s—reduce, reuse, and recycle.

So how does SoftLayer continue making our service so convenient without being wasteful? I am glad you asked! Instead of going out and buying home servers, or desktop servers—which seems to be the newest craze—and then having to throw away all the unused documentation and un-used packing materials, we simply choose to team up with Supermicro. They are a server manufacturer that listens to their customers needs and provides solutions as well as design flexibility, rapid order fulfillment, and superior quality. We are no longer relegated to do what the other server manufacturers force on other customers. This gives us the freedom of convenience while still being green. Does it make our competitors green with envy? Sure it does. That is why there are lower price points offered in the hosting market by our competitors still using workstations, desktop and home servers instead of enterprise class, high efficiency, and low power consuming servers. The efficiency of our servers allows us to have very dense server rooms with a smaller footprint, which saves on power consumption for cooling as well. Last but not least, by using rack mount servers instead of towers, Supermicro has worked with us to reduce the packing materials by 80%—resulting in an eight pound reduction in the total weight of each server.

At SoftLayer we take pride in making convenient, green IT; and with Supermicro as a great partner, we continue to do just that.

I know you already know everything about PCI compliance, especially the if’s, and’s, and but’s that go along with it. But, just in case you forgot, here it is in a nutshell.
Is PCI compliance a Federal law? Nope! Not yet anyway. Some states do make it a crime to let credit card data “be” stolen.
What is PCI? It is actually PCI DSS and it stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
Who needs it? Anyone that accepts, transmits, or stores ANY credit card data.
Are there different levels? Yes, I am glad you asked.

• Level 4 – Any merchant processing fewer than 20,000 credit card e-commerce transactions in a 12 month period
• Level 3 – 20,000 up to 1 Million transactions
• Level 2 – 1 Million up to 6 Million
• Level 1 – 6 million + (or any merchant that Visa feels should meet level 1 to minimize risks) This is what we are all striving for, right?

Who cares if you are PCI compliant? For starters, YOU should! And secondly, your merchant bank will care. They will care more the larger you get. See minimize risks statement above.
Since it isn’t a federal law should I risk it, because I know my security and I am impenetrable? I wouldn’t take that risk because you can still pay fines, card replacement costs, and pay for forensic audits, etc if someone were to get in and steal data.
How can SoftLayer help? For starters and a quick level 4 fix you can go here and get free scanning on a single IP. Combine that with a “quick” questionnaire about your physical and data security policies and voila, no onsite visit needed and you are now PCI Level 4. Mcafee can help you with you higher level compliance if you would like. Don’t take the questionnaire too lightly because remember you do care about PCI!
Ok so if you have made it this far then you must like boring reading. Go read this. It might come in handy someday. It is the “do this if you get hacked” cheat sheet.
On to 2010! MasterCard stepped up in 2009 and stated that even their Level 2 merchants had to have an onsite QSA assessment by December 31, 2010. That has now been pushed to June 30, 2011. There seems to be some confusion from the other Credit Card companies and they didn’t all jump on board. One thing that they did all agree on is that you can’t put credit card info on WEP secured wireless at all after July 2010. Just don’t do it! And don’t use old un-patched payment applications because they are insecure and will not be allowed after July as well.
This could all change just like Texas weather. If you don’t like the new rules, then just wait a couple of days and they may change it more to your liking. There are still a few things they are looking at going forward that I will let you in on and then I assure you I will stop typing. PCI 1.2 is still about stopping hackers from getting in, there is a new interest in the community on addressing “internal” hackers. The current focus of PCI is aimed at card data “after” authorization but doesn’t say much about card data that is kept prior to authorization, so you can bet that will be added soon too and of course cloud infrastructure and card data has to be on everyone’s radar screen soon.

8/24/2009 1:00PM – Just ordered 3 more servers from SL. Man I love how easy it is to order, and the provisioning time is incredible.

8/24/2009 11:45PM – Got the new servers setup; now I have redundancy for my app. G’nite.

9/04/2009 8:00AM – Suhweet, just passed 50K users for my app. Hitting the pool.

9/21/2009 6:42PM – Oops, app crashed too many users. Recovering now. Thank goodness for monitoring alerts.

9.21/2009 8:13PM – Sorry all, app back up. SL CloudLayer really helped. Their portal makes it all easy.

9/22/2009 3:13AM – Ok stayed up late tonight and added new functionality to the app and added a new app server, geographic load balancing baby!

10/6/2009 2:45PM – Thanks for all the support on the app, keep the new ideas coming. 450K users and growing.

10/31/2009 5:50PM – Happy Halloween! 627K users. Thank you!!

11/14/2009 6:02AM – Getting close 989K users. Party at 1 Million. Just added 2 new front end servers in each DC, adding cloud storage now for Data replication/protection.

11/21/2009 7:31AM– It’s finally here 1 Mil. Party time! Isn’t ad revenue the greatest. The in game pay to play money is fun too. Thanks all!

12/10/2009 4:42PM – Still growing. I was alerted that one server crashed. No users affected. Technology is cool.

12/18/2009 9:16PM– ‘Bout to go silent for the Holidays. Hope you all have good ones. See you at 1.5 million when I return.

12/19/2009 7:00AM – Decided to add a couple more cloud instances for good measure. App is smoking fast.

12/31/2009 10:45PM – Monitoring just hit my phone, at party will check asap.

12/31/2009 11:00PM – Found a netbook at the party. App is crashed. Looking.

12/31/2009 11:07 PM – WT? All servers down, hard down. SL up and friend app good on SL network. Investigating, sorry for outage.

12/31/2009 11:10 PM – Hackers? Not sure all servers affected. Ping only. Had very secure. No problem before.

12/31/2009 11:29PM – Portal password got hacked. Intruders OS reloaded every server with RedHat, turned off all CCI.

1/04/2009 6:00AM – Happy New Year, mine sucked – app back – 5000 daily users. Sad day.

While the above is completely fictional, it could happen to just about anyone. Don’t let it happen to you. No matter how long and how secure you think your password is, there is someone out there who can crack it. It is one thing keeping a server secure and most technical geniuses are very adept at doing just that. With all the time and effort it takes to keep your servers secure, you might find that you have slipped in other areas. SoftLayer is here to help in VIP Style.

The cutting edge SoftLayer portal now has optional Two Factor Authentication support using VeriSign’s Identity Protection. First, what is Two Factor Authentication? It is defined as, “something you know (password) and something you HAVE (pin number of sorts).” Here is how it works:

You buy a physical device in the form of a keychain token or a credit card token; or in the cool age of technology, you can simply get one of the free phone apps that do the same thing for you without the extra piece of equipment to carry. Once you get the device/app you would go to the portal and register the token’s unique ID and attach it to a username on the account. The master user gets this FREE and then if you want other users on your account to have this functionality it is $3 per user per month. If the master user does turn on this functionality no one else will be allowed into the system without using two factor authentication. Once this is setup, the user will login using their “known” password and then they will also have to enter the “code” (the thing you have) on the token device or phone app to gain access. The code changes on a fast schedule so this is extremely secure. This would have made the New Year’s celebration for the person above much more fun.

One last thing, since we partnered with VeriSign you can use the token device or phone app for different sites that use the VeriSign product. PayPal is one example. Here is a complete list.

Now that you know about it, and now that we offer it, don’t be the guy that doesn’t keep the portal secure and misses out on a Happy New Year!

As I sat in front of my computer Sunday evening, after the Cowboys flat out destroyed the Eagles in reality, just about to go play a few of my favorite Facebook games, I noticed a link to an article that I knew I had to read. I will give the writer his due at the end of the blog so you can read it for yourself and form your own opinion; but, I must say it was quite humorous.

Its title alone can be answered in one word I believe, and; the tag line under the picture in the article is simply amazing.

The title is “What does Farmville Mean for Farmers?” Wait for it… Wait for my one word answer… Nothing! The lone picture in the article is of some crop squares looking freshly plowed with no crops growing and a small avatar frowning instead of smiling with a single tear rolling down his cheek. The line under the picture states, “Stop caring about your virtual farm and start caring about real ones.” To quote the younger generation all I have to say is, “Really? Really?”

At first, I am thinking that farmers worldwide are neglecting their crops and prices are going up on wheat, corn, fruit, etc. I decided to read further. “The Sun Always Shines. Pink cows produce strawberry milk. Soybeans take two days to grow and ripen. Something is not right. It’s too clean. Nothing smells. Coffee beans grows next to squash.” Ok. At this point, I am having a hard time trying to correlate this to “actual” farming. By the way, it hasn’t gotten any clearer.

The author then goes on to discuss how virtual farming can be relaxing and give you a virtual country calm . It can transport you “somewhere else for a minute or an hour.” I can’t decide if the author thinks this is a good thing or not. I personally do. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit and click and not think about everything else going on in the world. Carpel tunnel or no carpel tunnel, it is just harmless mindless, clicking; oh and, you might make a new friend in a new state at the same time. I have a few myself. I have never met them in person, but they are nice folks and we have fun playing the games.

Then it takes a turn for the worse; the author suddenly switches from a social game to reality. He describes the trials of a person and her homesteading experience. After trying to live off the land, her marriage crumbed and she was forced to move back to the city. I am not making lite of the hardship of farmers with this blog—as I know this is a very hard lifestyle. In my neck of the woods, I see rows of corn never produce because of a lack of rain and end up baled for hay. I see winter wheat turn to dust. As it will this week when we have 3 days of freezing temperatures; and, the plants just aren’t big enough to make it through it yet. There are forces of nature that farmers just have to deal with and hope for the best; but, let’s not blame a Facebook application for their trials.

The final sentence in the article states, “It’s time to support actual small farmers and stop playing around.” I can agree with that statement. Maybe the makers of Farmville could start a fund for small farmers that are deserving of help, maybe. But the folks that actually play the game have no business driving the modern equipment used by farmers. So, please don’t ask them to show up at local farms and ask to help. That would be a huge social reality mess!

Normally this is the place where I would try to somehow tie this into SoftLayer, but in this one I am just drawing a blank.

For your reading and commenting pleasure http://www.good.is/post/What-Does-Farmville-Mean-for-Farmers/?GT1=48001.

The show about nothing that took over NBC years ago is being lived out at SoftLayer. In case you haven’t been keeping up, SoftLayer has a team called STAT and without making you sit through the gory details we use ninja tactics in our efforts to keep the churn rate low. Much like the show Seinfeld which was about everything and nothing at the same time, the STAT group does everything and nothing as well.

It has been said that the team does simply enough to stay employed and we get a little grief from just about everyone in the company but I just blame the stealthy ninja tactics for all that. We haven’t built a bed under our desks just yet but a prototype is being designed as we speak. When the products, support, and culture are so cool why would customers want to leave?

The STAT group has been around since the dawn of time (2008 to be exact!) and have many years of tradition handed down which we must use daily to complete our mission. Some of the traditions have gone away over the long journey since our inception like a loud and proud bell ring when a customer was saved. It seemed to annoy some of our non SLeinfeld co-workers. Those crazy developers said “No bell for you!” There are other traditions that have gone away over time but we continue to make more as often as possible.

Our latest episode is a pretty cool one so we will not be “jumping the shark” just yet. It is one that the industry may have never seen. If so, it is very rare and this makes the STAT team very proud. In the on-demand virtual datacenter industry, churn is defined as, “when a customer doesn’t want your services anymore!” That being said we have designated churn as a bad thing (like Elaine dancing!). A higher churn percentage is not as good as a lower one. Get the picture? From this day forward let it be said that in October 2009 the STAT team and every other person involved with SoftLayer including every employee in every department and our resellers and customers have achieved a monumental goal! The year over year churn numbers are equal in raw numbers and LOWER in percentage for the month of October. When you incorporate the sales growth into that equation this is an impressive accomplishment because typically when you add servers month after month the churn rate grows due to sheer volume. So I say to everyone involved, take a few hours today and go hit some golf balls into the ocean (except Jones), you deserve a break!

Just know that the next time the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you feel like someone is watching you or their might be someone or something lurking in the shadows and Kramer doesn’t burst through your door, don’t be frightened it is most likely just a STAT team member waiting to help you in a time of need or maybe just goofing off in a relatively close proximity to you and creating yet another day in SLeinfeld land.

RIP Seinfeld!

American cars aren’t reliable. That is what the 70’s and 80’s taught me. Up until then it was about the only choice. Enter the Datsun’s, Toyota’s and Mazda’s they were lower priced and didn’t break down as often and it wasn’t like breaking a chicken bone to turn on the blinker. Today, American cars are much more reliable and the 3 or 4 I have had in the last 10 years have had few or no problems at all. But ask anyone my age and you got it; America cars aren’t reliable. You know what they say, “perception is 9/10th’s of the law” or is that possession. Oh well.

Would you rather have an RCA Small Wonder or Flip Video device? I bet that due to the great marketing minds of the world and the type of folks that read blogs you want the Flip Video and you are now on Google trying to find out what the heck an RCA Small Wonder is. This is probably more related to marketing but even now that you have searched and you know what the Small Wonder is, which would you buy? It’s the perception that RCA is old and wasn’t and still isn’t very reliable. It’s also why Radio Shack is now just The Shack, it was time to rebrand because Radio Shack was for the “Bolt-On” generation and The Shack is for the “integrated” generation. Where is all this leading?

In a recent meeting I was asked why we sell more LAMP stack operating systems (RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Etc.) than we do Microsoft Servers and the point was made that there is still the perception that Windows in insecure and has lots of bugs. I believe Microsoft has a huge mountain to climb to rid the world of this perception whether it is true or not, much like the American auto industry. Even if they release a secure and stable product today, and they have, it would still take many years for our society to realize it. Why? Because much like RCA, Microsoft was around when technology was just starting to become cool. As Lance (our CEO) would say, “RCA and Windows NT Server came out in a time period when the people using them were in a bolt-on mentality and today’s users are fully integrated into the technological lifestyle.” What does that mean? The bolt-on generation saw things happen and had do adapt: knobs on TV’s became remotes, rotary phones became push button became cordless became bag became cellular phones, arcade games became pong became Atari became Nintendo became Wii video games, Commodore became IBM XT became clones (running Windows 3.1) became Dell (running Windows 95) became servers (running NT4.0) became the Internet (running LAMP stacks and Windows servers), and this list could go on and on. I think I need a t-shirt that says “I’m a Bolt-on”. My kids however, are fully integrated into this lifestyle and don’t realize how bad some things were in technology to get to where we are today. They wake up every day and technology is everywhere they turn. Of course technology still changes quickly and people have to adapt, but the changes aren’t as life changing as they were when technology was young. The bolt-on society is much more forgiving of mistakes with technological advances where the integrated society wants perfection. They hear on TV and the radio that Windows is insecure and had/has bugs and they want instant gratification and perfect technology. Some of the bad stigma Windows has is due to the bolt-on generation using Windows desktop software and applying those bad memories to the new Server products from Microsoft. If Vista is unstable and insecure then Server 2008 must be as well, right? Linux, on the other hand, was a server OS first and then became a desktop tool. It just didn’t get scrutinized like the Windows OS’s and since it’s desktop product isn’t as mainstream its issues are mainly low key and under the radar.

Microsoft has some challenges in the coming years and may need to take a few lessons from the American car manufacturers and “The Shack”. I believe a large separation of the desktop OS’s and the Server OS’s is needed and it all starts with rebranding the server choices. Maybe the desktop OS keeps the Windows name but change the Server Operating System to “Insert cool trendy name here” and drop Windows from it completely. This is just my opinion and I could be wrong.

This was a long read so I think I will go get in my unreliable American truck and hit the road, I am just 33,000 miles from hitting 300K!

Ok, I admit it. I am addicted to Facebook games. For those of you who are a bit “long in the tooth” you might remember a series of games from a certain era where all you did was walk around and try to figure “it” out, but you really didn’t know what “it” was. Zork for instance was my favorite. In Zork you simply walked around and talked to people, touched walls and things rumbled, and picked up and dropped items. etc. Now don’t misunderstand, you didn’t see this happen, it was all in your head because the only thing on the screen was text. Think of it like the hit TV show LOST in text and you were John Locke. Are you LOST yet? Here is an example:

Facebook has taken us back to the world of Zork but now you can almost see what is going on. Let’s use the early on Mobster style games as example number one. They were sleek and simple; do a job, fight someone, whack someone on the hitlist, write a script, find a bot to do it all for you and become a “made man”. Now, the main idea in these games is ad generation and page views, so when the techies of the world figured out how to cheat, um I mean make the game more efficient, it was time to add some new ideas to the games to keep you more in tune to your monitor and the ads on the page instead of your bot! Enter the flash games, they are shiny and I like shiny things! Maybe the word should be polished. There are a few farm simulation games that are very popular. A couple of them have over 18 million monthly active users. Who would have thought that everyone in the world wanted to move to Texas and become a veggie farmer, or berries, or raise animals and fruit trees? I have to say that the new games are to carpel tunnel as Krispy Kreme is to clogged arteries. You have to click and then click a little more and then even a little more. You have to do tasks, so you can do jobs, so you can move up in levels so you can do more tasks to do even more jobs to make more money and it just keeps getting more involved. Maybe there is a flash automation system out there I can find to do it for me!

I am going back to the farm idea for a minute. When I started out I had a couple of small plots and I would plant different crops. I had a few animals walking around and a fruit tree or two, some fences, some green space in between and flowers. I began to notice that some of the extra shiny things got in the way and made my farm very inefficient. I began to streamline, one crop, no green space because that is just wasted, no animals, just plant the whole screen, harvest and plow, rinse and repeat. It is now very profitable, easy to manage and I don’t have to worry about this crop will be ready in 2 hours, that crop will be ready in 2 days, etc. It just works!

So I have just described SoftLayer to you in a nutshell. At first we tried many things, streamlined it, got it down to a very efficient science automated “it” and then wrapped products around “it”. Our products are shiny, we don’t waste space, we have one crop, and it just works!

So here I sit cramped in a seat built for a 10 year old on American flight 1492 from New Orleans to Dallas. There isn’t enough room left for a marshmallow I bet. Yep, I am thankful I just left the site of the Microsoft WPC 2009 where I had to do a little booth duty and mingle with some folks that run the coolest companies out there. The show seemed a little different this year. Last year the recession was just getting going and gaining some steam. The big companies still had previously budgeted money to burn and were doing just that. They had very large booths and better swag and Microsoft rented Minute Maid Park in Houston and threw quite the party. This year was noticeably different. I would bet that over 50% of the people that came by our booth were international which tells me that US companies are still cutting back. One very large US Company wasn’t even at the show and they were a flagship last year. One of our much larger competitors was barely existent, a flyer here a business card there and most other companies had much smaller booths and the swag was just not quite as enticing. Thankfully my kids like anything so they will still be extremely happy with the 3 bags of stuff I was able to round up. I am thankful that SoftLayer was able to hand out just over 1000 cool SoftLayer Frisbees (boomers to our international friends) and 200 cooler bags. The boomers were a great hit at the show and as far as I know no one lost an eye in the process of handing them out. Microsoft still put on a great show and “The Party” at the House of Blues was really cool. I just wish one year they would actually send me the email so I could get the wristband instead of standing in the slacker line.

Enter the ton of bricks that hit me. I am extremely thankful and 99% percent sure, no wait, I am 100% sure that I work for the coolest and one of the fastest growing companies out there. Thankfully after a week of spreading the word about SoftLayer I am on this flight back home. Thankful the pilot knows how to fly and land this jet. Thankful the flight attendant just gave me some lukewarm orange juice. Thankful I remembered to take my laptop out of the bag I checked this time but still managed to leave my cell phone in the checked bag! I am off my leash!

Ok so back to my subject.

I am Thankful this is almost my 2 year anniversary at SoftLayer. Thankful the guys that started this place and the great minds they have added along the way are really running a top notch company. Thankful that I wake up every day excited about my company and my role, thankful that SoftLayer lives within our means, and thankful the things we spend money on are for one thing, to make our product better and our customers happy. Thankful we do not waste on the posh extras that some other companies brag about. Thankful that once a customer tries us out and understands what our system is capable of they rarely ever leave. Thankful SoftLayer has great punch and people drink it regularly with pride, both customers and employees alike. Thankful that our products have the ability to help struggling companies in this down economy and we continue to grow because of it. Thankful we are setting sales records and our churn rates are much lower than this time last year. Thankful word is spreading on how we can let a company hold on to their capital for other expenditures and simply pay monthly for their IT needs on demand. Thankful we have a plan and we stick to it. Thankful we know what we are great at and don’t try to be everything to everyone wasting countless hours complicating our business plan. Thankful I can sleep at night knowing I am at a stable company and I don’t have the worries that many people in our country have during this recession. I wish everyone affected by the recession a fruitful second half of the year and hope that everyone can start recovering from the current hardships.

Oh and I am thankful that the flight attendant has moved along to the folks behind me and is finally finished booty bumping me every 3 seconds and thankful we are 45 minutes from DFW!

And I know…… you are thankful……. that this blog is ending……. Thanks for reading…….thankfully……

Wow, where did we come from to get to here?

How many readers remember being your Dad’s remote control for the TV, heating a bit of oil that covered the bottom of a pan till it sizzled to make popcorn, percolating coffee pots, wondering how long it would take for enough hot water to take a shower after your primping older brother hogged it all? What about “fast” forwarding cassette and VCR tapes or thawing a chicken breast for hours on the counter? The list goes on and on.

My absolute favorite was sitting around on a Friday night at about age 10 at the baby sitters with my brother listening to the radio just hoping that “Shake your Booty” would come on the radio so we could record it instead of having to go buy it.

The amount of time we used to sit around waiting for things to happen was huge! Today, it’s all in an instant!

We have five remote controls or at the very least one really smart one that can do it all. Microwave popcorn that takes minutes and no cleanup, instant coffee – just add water, instant hot water heaters that never go cold, mp3 players that you can just click and go from song to song with no waiting; DVD/DVR that you can just go from scene to scene or skip those boring commercials… and you can use that same microwave to thaw your chicken in no time at all.

Today you can be listening to the radio in your car and click a button and it will tell iTunes what song it was and queue it up for your next download, you just have to love technology and the speed at which it happens.

I also remember the days when we had a rotary phone with an 82.5 foot cord that you could string across the house to the bathroom or in front of the TV and keep talking. Then it became the wall phone with the 84 foot stretchy cord and the number keys were on the handset, how cool was that? It never failed though- no matter how long the cord, you always needed more!

Today, you can Facebook, Tweet, chirp, yell, chat, and instant message from just about anywhere, even from a Jet Blue jet flying through the air. That is just pretty cool stuff.

In my previous life before I became a booth babe and a bloghogger I was known for being fairly technical in the world of Microsoft Windows Server and Citrix MetaFrame. They actually worked pretty well for a few of the company apps I had to deal with along my career path. The hardest part was actually setting up the application server to be just perfect and getting it on the wire to allow the employees to do their jobs.

The real challenge was getting more servers added to the pool in a timely fashion at month end for accounting or at rush times of the year for the sales group. It takes time to blast an OS no matter what method you are using, then get the app installed and functioning and then add it to the pool. Sure, I came up with a few tricks on how to image Citrix and they worked but it was still a waiting game trying to procure the hardware, install the image, get the server racked and cabled, etc. It never failed, a week before I had them ready the sales and/or accounting group managers were all over me because it was MY fault that they had slow applications. A few times just about the time I had the servers ready they didn’t need them anymore, I missed the rush.

Welcome to Instant Servification! CloudLayer, oh CloudLayer, I would have paid out of my own pocket back then to have this technology. With the release of hourly billing you can just use them when you need them even if your peak loads are only a fraction of one day. You create your golden image, save it, and push it out to as many as you need for as long as you need, and then when your peak usage is over, cancel them like high interest credit cards!

That is instant Gratification at its best! Welcome to SoftLayer how can we help you?