Cloud Posts

SoftLayer’s goal is to provide unparalleled value to the customers who entrust their business-critical computing to us — whether via dedicated hosting, managed hosting, cloud computing or a hybrid environment of all three. We provide the best platform on the market, delivering convenience, ease of use, compelling return on investment (ROI), significant competitive advantage, and consistency in a world where the only real constant seems to be change.

That value proposition is one of the biggest driving forces behind our partnership with RightScale. We’re cloud computing soul mates.

RightScale understands the power of automation, and as a result, they’ve created a cloud management platform that they like to say delivers “abstraction with complete customization.” RightScale customers can easily deploy and manage applications across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, unencumbered by the underlying details. They are free to run efficient, scalable, highly available applications with visibility into and control over their computing resources available in one place.

As you know, SoftLayer is fueled by automation as well, and it’s one of our primary differentiators. We’re able to deliver a phenomenal customer experience because every aspect of our platform is fully and seamlessly automated to accelerate provisioning, mitigate human error and provide customers with access and features that our competitors can only dream of. Our customers get simple and total control over an ever-expanding number of back-end services and functions through our easy-to-use Customer Portal and via an open, robust API.

The compatibility between SoftLayer and RightScale is probably pretty clear already, but if you needed another point to ponder, you can ruminate on the fact that we both share expertise and focus across a number of vertical markets. The official announcement of the SoftLayer and RightScale partnership will be particularly noteworthy and interesting in the Internet-based business and online gaming market segments.

It didn’t take long to find an amazing customer success story that demonstrated the value of the new SoftLayer-RightScale partnership. Broken Bulb Game Studios — the developer of social games such as My Town, Braaains, Ninja Warz and Miscrits — is already harnessing the combined feature sets made possible by our partnership with RightScale to simplify its deployment process and scale to meet its customers’ expectations as its games find audiences and growing favor on Facebook. Don’t take our word for it, though … Check out the Broken Bulb quote in today’s press release announcing the partnership.

Broken Bulb and other developers of social games recognize the importance of getting concepts to market at breakneck speed. They also understand the critical importance of intelligently managing IT resources throughout a game’s life cycle. What they want is fully automated control over computing resources so that they can be allocated dynamically and profitably in immediate response to market signals, and they’re not alone.

Game developers of all sorts — and companies in a growing number of vertical markets — will need and want the same fundamental computing-infrastructure agility.

Our partnership with RightScale is only beginning. You’re going to see some crazy innovation happening now that our cloud computing mad scientists are all working together.

-Marc

It’s not easy to choose a cloud hosting provider.

In the first post of this series, we talked about the three key deciding factors every cloud customer has to consider, and we set up a Venn diagram to distinguish the surprisingly broad range of unique priorities customers can have:

Because every customer will prioritize a cloud’s cost, technology and hosting provider a little differently (for completely valid reasons), we mapped out seven distinct “zones” to differentiate some of the basic market segments, or “personas,” of cloud hosting buyers. That post was intended to set the stage for a larger discussion on how customers choose their cloud providers and how cloud providers choose their customers, and we’re just scratching the surface. We’re tackling a pretty big topic here, so as Bill Cosby famously says, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”

As a hosting provider, SoftLayer can’t expect to be all things for all people. It’s impossible to offer a quad-core hex-proc dedicated server for a price that will appeal to a customer in the market for a $49/mo dedicated server.

To better illustrate SoftLayer’s vision in the cloud market, we need to take that generic cost v. technology v. hosting provider diagram and give it the “Three Bars” treatment:

We’re much more interested in living and breathing the Zone 5 “Technology” space rather than the traditional Zone 2 “Hosting Provider” space. That’s why in the past two months, you’ve seen announcements about our launch of the latest Intel Processors, HPC computing with NVidia GPUs, searchable OpenStack Object Storage, and an innovative “Flex Image” approach to bluring the lines between physical and virtual servers. We choose to pursue the cloud customers who make their buying decisions in Zone 3.

That’s a challenging pursuit … It’s expensive to push the envelope in technology, customers primarily interested in technology/performance have demanding needs and expectations, and it’s easier to make mistakes when you’re breaking new ground. The majority of the hosting industry seems to have an eye on the buyer in Zone 1 because they believe the average hosting customer is only interested in the bottom line … That hosting is more or less a commodity, so the focus should be on some unverifiable qualitative measure of support or the next big special that’ll bring in new orders.

As you may have seen recently, GigaOm posted a lovely article that references several high-profile companies in our 25,000+ customer family. We like to say that SoftLayer builds the platform on which our customers build the future, and that short post speaks volumes about the validity of that statement. Our goal is to provide the most powerful, scalable and seamlessly integrated IT infrastructure for the most innovative companies in the world. Innovate or Die isn’t just our company motto … It’s our hope for our customers, as well.

We might miss out on your business if you want a $49/mo dedicated server, but if you’re looking to change the world, we’ve got you covered.

-@khazard

If you had to order a new cloud server right now, how would choose it?

I’ve worked in the hosting industry for the better part of a decade, and I can safely say that I’ve either observed or been a part of the buying decision for a few thousand hosting customers — from small business owners getting a website online for the first time to established platforms that are now getting tens of millions of visits every day. While each of those purchasers had different requirements and priorities, I’ve noticed a few key deciding factors that are consistent in a all of those decisions:

How much will the dedicated server or cloud computing instance cost? What configuration/technology do I need (or want)? Which hosting provider should I trust with my business?

Every website administrator of every site on the Internet has had to answer those three questions, and while they seem pretty straightforward, they end up overlapping, and the buying decision starts to get a little more complicated:

The natural assumption is that everyone will choose a dedicated server or cloud computing instance that falls in the “sweet spot” where the three circles overlap, right? While that makes sense on paper, hosting decisions are not made in a vacuum, so you’ll actually see completely valid hosting decisions targeting every spot on that graph.

Why would anyone choose an option that wouldn’t fit in the sweet spot?

That’s a great question, and it’s a tough one to answer in broad strokes. Let’s break the chart down into a few distinct zones to look at why a user would choose a server in each area:

Zone 1

Buyers choosing a server in Zone 1 are easiest to understand: Their budget takes priority over everything else. They might want to host with a specific provider or have a certain kind of hardware, but their budget doesn’t allow for either. Maybe they don’t need their site to use the latest and greatest hardware or have it hosted anywhere in particular. Either way, they choose a cloud solely based on whether it fits their budget. After the initial buying decision, if another server needs to be ordered, they might become a Zone 4 buyer.

Zone 2

Just like Zone 1 buyers, Zone 2 buyers are a pretty simple bunch as well. If you’re an IT administrator at a huge enterprise that does all of your hosting in-house, your buying decision is more or less made for you. It doesn’t matter how much the solution costs, you have to choose an option in your data center, and while you might like a certain technology, you’re going to get what’s available. Enterprise users aren’t the only people deciding to order a server in Zone 2, though … It’s where you see a lot of loyal customers who have the ability to move to another provider but prefer not to — whether it’s because they want their next server to be in the same place as their current servers, they value the capabilities of a specific hosting provider (or they just like the witty, interesting blogs that hosting provider writes).

Zone 3

As with Zone 1 and Zone 2, when a zone doesn’t have any overlapping areas, the explanation is pretty easy. In Zone 3, the buying decision is being made with a priority on technology. Buyers in this area don’t care what it costs or where it’s hosted … They need the fastest, most powerful, most scalable infrastructure on the market. Similar to Zone 1 buyers, once Zone 3 buyers make their initial buying decision, they might shift to Zone 5 for their next server or cloud instance, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Zone 4

Now we’re starting to overlap. In Zone 4, a customer will be loyal to a hosting provider as long as that loyalty doesn’t take them out of their budget. This is a relatively common customer … They’ll try to compare options apples-to-apples, and they’ll make their decision based on which hosting provider they like/trust most. As we mentioned above, if a Zone 1 buyer is adding another server to their initial server order, they’ll likely look to add to their environment in one place to make it easier to manage and to get the best performance between the two servers.

Zone 5

Just like the transitional Zone 1 buyers, when Zone 3 buyers look to build on their environment, they’ll probably become Zone 5 buyers. When your initial buying decision is based entirely on technology, it’s unusual to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your next buying decision. While there are customers that will reevaluate their environment and choose a Zone 3 option irrespective of where their current infrastructure is hosted, it’s less common. Zone 5 users love having he latest and greatest technology, and they value being able to manage it through one provider.

Zone 6

A Zone 6 buyer is usually a Zone 1 buyer that has specific technology needs. With all the options on the table, a Zone 6 buyer will choose the cloud environment that provides the latest technology or best performance for their budget, regardless of the hosting provider. As with Zone 1 and Zone 3 buyers, a Zone 6 buyer will probably become a Zone 7 buyer if they need to order another server.

Zone 7

Zone 7 buyers are in the sweet spot. They know the technology they want, they know the price they want to pay, and they know the host they want to use. They’re able to value all three of their priorities equally, and they can choose an environment that meets all of their needs. After Zone 6 buyers order their first server(s), they’re going to probably become Zone 7 buyers when it comes time for them to place their next order.

As you probably noticed, a lot of transitioning happens between an initial buying decision and a follow-up buying decision, so let’s look at that quickly:

Regardless of how you make your initial buying decision, when it’s time for your next server or cloud computing instance, you have a new factor to take into account: You already have a cloud infrastructure at a hosting provider, so when it comes time to grow, you’ll probably want to grow in the same place. Why? Moving between providers can be a pain, managing environments between several providers is more difficult, and if your servers have to work together, they’re generally doing so across the public Internet, so you’re not getting the best performance.

Where does SoftLayer fit in all of this? Well beyond being a hosting provider that buyers are choosing, we have to understand buyers are making their buying decisions, and we have to position our business to appeal to the right people with the right priorities. It’s impossible to be all things for all people, so we have to choose where to invest our attention … I’ll leave that post for another day, though.

If you had to choose a zone that best describes how you made (or are currently making) your buying decision, which one would it be?

-@khazard

This guest blog comes to us from Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of marketing and business development. Dome9 is a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. With Dome9, you get secure, on-demand access to all your servers by automating and centralizing firewall management and making your servers virtually invisible to hackers.

Three Tips to Securing Your Cloud Servers

By now everyone knows that security is the number one concern among cloud adopters. But lesser known is why and what to do to mitigate some of the security risks … I hope to shed a little light on those points in this blog post, so let’s get to it.

One of the greatest threats to cloud servers is unsecured access. Administrators leave ports (like RDP and SSH) open so they can connect to and manage their machines … After all, they can’t just walk down the hall to gain access to them like with an on-premise network. The trouble with this practice is that it leaves these and other service ports open to attack from hackers who need only guess the credentials or exploit a vulnerability in the application or OS. Many admins don’t think about this because for years they’ve had a hardened perimeter around their data center. In the cloud, however, the perimeter collapses down to each individual server, and so too must your security.

Tip #1: Close Service Ports by Default

Instead of leaving ports — from SSH to phpMyAdmin — open and vulnerable to attack, close them by default and open them only when, for whom, and as long as is needed. You can do this manually — just be careful not to lock yourself out of your server — or you can automate the process with Dome9 for free.

Dome9 provides a patent-pending technology called Secure Access Leasing, which enables you to open a port on your server with just one click from within Dome9 Central, our SaaS management console, or as an extension in your browser. With just one click, you get time-based secure access and the ability to empower a third party (e.g., a developer) with access easily and securely.

When your service ports are closed by default, your server is virtually invisible to hackers because the server will not respond to an attacker’s port scans or exploits.

Read Two More of Dome9′s Security Best Practices

This guest blog was submitted by Sumit Gupta, senior director of NVIDIA’s Tesla High Performance Computing business.

The demand for greater levels of computational performance remains insatiable in the high performance computing (HPC) and technical computing industries, as researchers, geophysicists, biochemists, and financial quants continue to seek out and solve the world’s most challenging computational problems.

However, access to high-powered HPC systems has been a constant problem. Researchers must compete for supercomputing time at popular open labs like Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. And, small and medium-size businesses, even large companies, cannot afford to constantly build out larger computing infrastructures for their engineers.

Imagine the new discoveries that could happen if every researcher had access to an HPC system. Imagine how dramatically the quality and durability of products would improve if every engineer could simulate product designs 20, 50 or 100 more times.

This is where NVIDIA and SoftLayer come in. Together, we are bringing accessible and affordable HPC computing to a much broader universe of researchers, engineers and software developers from around the world.

GPUs: Accelerating Research

High-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) are quickly becoming the go-to solution for HPC users because of their ability to accelerate all types of commercial and scientific applications.

From the Beijing to Silicon Valley — and just about everywhere in between — GPUs are enabling breakthroughs and discoveries in biology, chemistry, genomics, geophysics, data analytics, finance, and many other fields. They are also driving computationally intensive applications, like data mining and numerical analysis, to much higher levels of performance — as much as 100x faster.

The GPU’s “secret sauce” is its unique ability to provide power-efficient HPC performance while working in conjunction with a system’s CPU. With this “hybrid architecture” approach, each processor is free to do what it does best: GPUs accelerate the parallel research application work, while CPUs process the sequential work.

The result is an often dramatic increase in application performance.

SoftLayer: Affordable, On-demand HPC for the Masses

Now, we’re coupling GPUs with easy, real-time access to computing resources that don’t break the bank. SoftLayer has created exactly that with a new GPU-accelerated hosted HPC solution. The service uses the same technology that powers some of the world’s fastest HPC systems, including dual-processor Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) based servers with one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs:

SoftLayer also offers an on-demand, consumption-based billing model that allows users to access HPC resources when and how they need to. And, because SoftLayer is managing the systems, users can keep their own IT costs in check.

You can get more system details and pricing information here: SoftLayer HPC Servers

I’m thrilled that we are able to bring the value of hybrid HPC computing to larger numbers of users. And, I can’t wait to see the amazing engineering and scientific advances they’ll achieve.

-Sumit Gupta, NVIDIA – Tesla

At my house, we share a single iTunes account because as much as I hate to admit it … I listen to the same music as my 11-year-old on occasion, so why buy the same music twice? I have my iPhone setup to automatically sync via any wireless connection, so I occasionally get new apps when someone else in the house downloads something.

Last week, my 8-year-old handed me his iPod and said, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install BloodnGuns?” No way. He went through three or four reasons that he thought he needed the game, and I just went about my business. A couple of minutes later, he hands me the iPod again and says, “Dad, can you enter the password so I can install Temple Run?” Being a much tamer game, I said I would, but (knowing my son) I followed that up by saying, “Just remember: Anything you install goes to my iPhone, too.” If I entered the password for him for Temple Run, he would be authenticated and could then get BloodnGuns, so I just wanted to remind him that I was born at night, not last night.

The sneaky little guy looked up to me and grinned, “Oh yea, ‘cuz of that cloudamajigger thing.”

Once I finished laughing, I asked him what he meant by Cloudamajigger, and before he could answer, I told him to wait … I wanted to document how he would describe “The Cloud.” With two other kids at home, I thought it might be an interesting focus group of the way kids are learning about technology, so I made it a family project.

I asked each of them three questions and told them to email their answers to me”

1. What is “The Cloud?”
2. Where does “The Cloud” live?
3. What is SoftLayer?

Here are the responses:

The 6-year-old

1. The cloud shoots out a ball and the cloud is awesome!
2. In the sky. It is made out of water.
3. Where dad works, I think he makes monitors.

The 8-year-old

1. It’s a cloud in the sky and they shot a satellite in it. And they could see all the things you need to see on the internet.
2. See number 1 (Yes, he really typed that).
3. Where dad works, he works to make the Internet, and the Internet makes him work.

The 11-year-old

1. It is a group of people where when you post something everyone will be able to see it.
2. I don’t know.
3. A company.

You can see that the 11-year-old is darn close to those wonderful teenage years with that loquacious participation … Wish me luck!

I ask these same questions of people at conferences I attend and get generally the same answers as above. We can write reams of descriptions of the cloud, but in my world, it’s simply “The Cloudamajigger Thing.”

How would you answer those three questions?

-@Skinman454

This is a guest blog from our featured Technology Partners Marketplace company, Cloudant. Cloudant enables you to build next-generation data-driven applications without having to worry about developing, managing, and scaling your data layer.

Cloudant: Data Layer for the Big Data Era

The recipe for big data app success: Start small. Iterate fast. Grow to epic proportions.

Unfortunately, most developers’ databases come up short when they try to simultaneously “iterate fast” and “grow to epic proportions” — those two steps are most often at odds. I know … I’ve been there. In a recent past life, I attacked petabyte-per-second data problems as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider together with my colleagues and Cloudant co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kocoloski. Here are some lessons we learned the hard way:

1. Scaling a database yourself is brutally hard (both application level sharding and the master-slave model). It is harder with SQL than it is with NoSQL databases, but either way, the “scale it yourself” approach is loaded with unknowns, complications and operational expense.
2. Horizontal scaling on commodity hardware is a must. We got very good at this and ended up embedding Apache CouchDB behind a horizontal scaling framework to scale arbitrarily and stay running 24×7 with a minimal operational load.
3. The data layer must scale. It should be something that applications grow into, not out of.

That last point inspired Alan, Adam and me to co-found Cloudant.

What is Cloudant?
Cloudant is a scalable data layer (as a service) for Big Data apps. Built on CouchDB, JSON, and MapReduce, it lets developers focus on new features instead of the drudgery of growing or migrating databases. The Cloudant Data Layer is already big: It collects, stores, analyzes and distributes application data across a global network of secure, high-performance data centers, delivering low-latency and non-stop data access to users no matter where they’re located. You get to focus on your code; we’ve got data scalability and availability covered for you.

Scaling Your App on Cloudant
Cloudant is designed to support fast app iteration by developers. It’s based on the CouchDB NoSQL database where data is encapsulated and transferred as JSON documents. You don’t need to design and redesign SQL data models or migrate databases in order to create new app features. You don’t need to write object-relational mapping code either. The database resides behind an HTTP layer and provides a rich permission model, so you can access, secure and share your data via a RESTful API.

Your app is a tenant within a multi-tenant data layer that is already big and scalable. You get a URL end point for your data layer, get data in and out of it via HTTP, and we scale and secure it around the globe. Global data distribution and intelligent routing minimizes latency between your users and the data, which can add 100s of milliseconds per request (we’ve measured!). Additionally, Cloudant has an advanced system for prioritizing requests so that apps aren’t affected by ‘noisy neighbors’ in a multi-tenant system. We also offer a single-tenant data layer to companies who want it — your very own white-labeled data cloud. As your data volume and IO requests rise (or fall), Cloudant scales automatically, and because your data is replicated to multiple locations, it’s always available. Start small and grow to epic proportions? Check.

Other Data Management Gymnastics
The Cloudant Data Layer also makes it easy to add advanced functionality to your apps:

• Replicate data (all of it or sub-sets) to data centers, computers or even mobile devices for local processing (great for analytics) or off-line access (great for mobile users). Re-synching is automatic.
• Perform advanced analytics with built-in MapReduce and full-text indexing and search.
• Distribute your code with data — Cloudant can distribute and serve any kind of document, even HTML5 and other browser-based code, which makes it easy to scale your app and move processing from your back-end to the browser.

Why We Run on SoftLayer
Given the nature of our service, people always ask us where we have our infrastructure, and we’re quick to tell them we chose SoftLayer because we’re fanatical about performance. We measured latencies for different data centers run by other cloud providers, and it’s no contest: SoftLayer provides the lowest and most predictable latencies. Data centers that are thousands of miles apart perform almost as if they are on the same local area network. SoftLayer’s rapidly expanding global presence allows Cloudant to replicate data globally throughout North America, Europe and Asia (with plans to continue that expansion as quickly as SoftLayer can build new facilities).

The other major draw to SoftLayer was the transparency they provide about our infrastructure. If you run a data layer, IO matters! SoftLayer provisions dedicated hardware for us (rather than just virtual machines), and they actually tell us exactly what hardware we are running on, so we can tweak our systems to get the most bang for our buck.

Get Started with Cloudant for Free
If you’re interested to see what the Cloudant Data Layer could do for your app, sign up at cloudant.com to get your FREE global data presence created in an instant.

-Michael Miller, Cloudant

Since our inception in 2005, SoftLayer’s goal has been to provide an array of on-demand data center and hosting services that combine exceptional access, control, scalability and security with unparalleled network robustness and ease of use … That’s why we’re so excited to unveil SoftLayer Object Storage to our customers.

Based on OpenStack Object Storage (codenamed Swift) — open-source software that allows the creation of redundant, scalable object storage on clusters of standardized servers — SoftLayer Object Storage provides customers with new opportunities to leverage cost-effective cloud-based storage and to simultaneously realize significant capex-related cost savings.

OpenStack has been phenomenally successful thanks to a global software community comprised of developers and other technologists that has built and tweaked a standards-based, massively scalable open-source platform for public and private cloud computing. The simple goal of the OpenStack project is to deliver code that enables any organization to create and offer feature-rich cloud computing services from industry-standard hardware. The overarching OpenStack technology consists of several interrelated project components: One for compute, one for an image service, one for object storage, and a few more projects in development.

SoftLayer Object Storage
Like the OpenStack Swift system on which it is based, SoftLayer Object Storage is not a file system or real-time data-storage system, rather it’s a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged and updated when necessary. Typical applications for this type of storage can involve virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving.

One of the primary benefits of Object Storage is the role that it can play in automating and streamlining data storage in cloud computing environments. SoftLayer Object Storage offers rich metadata features and search capability that can be leveraged to automate the way unstructured data gets accessed. In this way, SoftLayer Object Storage will provide organizations with new capabilities for improving overall data management and storage efficiency.

File Storage v. Object Storage
To better understand the difference between file storage and object storage, let’s look at how file storage and object storage differ when it comes to metadata and search for a simple photo image. When a digital camera or camera-enabled phone snaps a photo, it embeds a series of metadata values in the image. If you save the image in a standard image file format, you can search for it by standard file properties like name, date and size. If you save the same image with additional metadata as an object, you can set object metadata values for the image (after reading them from the image file). This detail provides granular search capability based on the metadata keys and values, in addition to the standard object properties. Here is a sample comparison of an image’s metadata value in both systems:

Using the rich metadata and search capability enabled by object storage, you would be able to search for all images with a dimension of 2240×1680 or a resolution of 72×72 in a quick/automated fashion. The object storage system “understands” more about what is being stored because it is able to differentiate files based on characteristics that you define.

What Makes SoftLayer Object Storage Different?
SoftLayer Object Storage features several unique features and ways for SoftLayer customers to upload, access and manage data:

• Search — Quickly access information through user-defined metadata key-value pairs, file name or unique identifier
• CDN — Serve your content globally over our high-performance content delivery network
• Private Network — Free, secure private network traffic between all data centers and storage cluster nodes
• API — Access to a full-feature OpenStack-compatible API with additional support for CDN and search integration
• Portal — Web application integrated into the SoftLayer portal
• Mobile — iPhone and Android mobile apps, with Windows Phone app coming soon
• Language Bindings — Feature-complete bindings for Java, PHP, Python and Ruby*

*Language bindings, documentation, and guides are available on SLDN.

We think SoftLayer Object Storage will be attractive to a broad range of current and prospective customers, from web-centric businesses dependent on file sharing and content distribution to legal/medical/financial-services companies which possess large volumes of data that must be stored securely while remaining readily accessible.

SoftLayer Object Storage significantly extends our cloud-services portfolio while substantially enriching the storage capabilities that we bring to our customers. What are you waiting for? Go order yourself some object storage @ $0.12/GB!

-Marc

The open-source model has significantly revolutionized not only the IT industry but the business world as well. In fact, it was one of the key “flatteners” Thomas Friedman covered in his tour de force on globalization — The World is Flat. The trend toward collaborating on online projects — including open-source software, blogs, and Wikipedia — remains one of “the most disruptive forces of all.”

The success of open-source projects like Linux, Ruby on Rails, and Android reveals the strength and diversity of having developers around the world contributing and providing feedback on code. The community becomes more than the sum of its parts, driving innovation and constant improvement. The case has been made for open source in and of itself, but a debate still rages over the developing case for businesses contributing to open source. Why would a business dedicate resources to the development of something it can’t sell?

The answer is simple and straightforward: Contributing to open source fosters a community that can inspire, create and fuel the innovation a business needs to keep providing its customers with even better products. It makes sense … Having hundreds of developers with different skills and perspectives working on a project can push that project further faster. The end result is a product that benefits the open-source community and the business world. The destiny of the community or the product cannot be defined by a single vendor or business; it’s the democratization of technology.

Open-Source Cloud Platforms
Today, there are several open-source cloud platforms vying for industry dominance. SoftLayer has always been a big proponent and supporter of open source, and we’ve been involved with the OpenStack project from the beginning. In fact, we just announced SoftLayer Object Storage, an offering based on OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift). We’ll provide code and support for Swift in hopes that it continues to grow and improve. The basic idea behind Swift Object Storage is to create redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data. I could go on and on about object storage, but I know Marc Jones has a blog specifically about SoftLayer Object Storage being published tomorrow, and I don’t want to steal too much of his thunder.

We have to acknowledge and embrace the heterogeneous nature of IT industry. Just as you might use multiple operating systems and hypervisors, we’re plan on working with a variety of open-source cloud platforms. Right now, we’re looking into supporting initiatives like Eucalyptus, and we have our ear to the street to listen to what our customers are asking for. Our overarching goal is to provide our customers with much-needed technologies that are advancing the hosting industry, and one of the best ways to get to that end is to serve the needs of the open-source community.

As I write this blog post, I can’t help but think of it in terms of a the Lord of Rings reference: “One ring to rule them all.” The idea that “one ring” is all we need to focus on as a hosting provider just doesn’t work when it comes to the open-source community … It all comes down to enabling choice and flexibility. We’ll keep investing in innovation wherever we can, and we’ll let the market decide which ring will rule where.

What open-source projects are you working on now? How can SoftLayer get involved?

-Matt

Our customers are not concerned with technology for technology’s sake. Information technology should serve a purpose; it should function as an integral means to a desired end. Understandably, our customers are focused, first and foremost, on their application architecture and infrastructure. They want, and need, the freedom and flexibility to design their applications to their specifications.

Many companies leverage the cloud to take advantage of core features that enable robust, agile architectures. Elasticity (ability to quickly increase or decrease compute capacity) and flexibility (choice such as cores, memory and storage) combine to provide solutions that scale to meet the demands of modern applications.

Another widely used feature of cloud computing is image-based provisioning. Rapid provisioning of cloud resources is accomplished, in part, through the use of images. Imaging capability extends beyond the use of base images, allowing users to create customized images that preserve their software installs and configurations. The images persist in an image library, allowing users to launch new cloud instances based their images.

But why should images only be applicable to virtualized cloud resources?

Toward that end, we’re excited to introduce SoftLayer Flex Images, a new capability that allows us to capture images of physical and virtual servers, store them all in one library, and rapidly deploy those images on either platform.

Physical servers now share the core features of virtual servers—elasticity and flexibility. With Flex Images, you can move seamlessly between and environments as your needs change.

Let’s say you’re running into resource limits in a cloud server environment—your data-intensive server is I/O bound—and you want to move the instance to a more powerful dedicated server. Using Flex Images, you can create an image of your cloud server and, extending our I/O bound example, deploy it to a custom dedicated server with SSD drives.

Conversely, a dedicated environment can be quickly replicated on multiple cloud instances if you want the scaling capability of the cloud to meet increased demand. Maybe your web heads run on dedicated servers, but you’re starting to see periods of usage that stress your servers. Create a Flex Image from your dedicated server and use it to deploy cloud instances to meet demand.

Flex Image technology blurs the distinctions—and breaks down the walls—between virtual and physical computing environments.

We don’t think of Flex Images as new product. Instead—like our network, our portal, our automated platform, and our globe-spanning geographic diversity—Flex Image capability is a free resource for our customers (with the exception of standard nominal costs in storing the Flex Images).

We think Flex Images represents not only great value, but also provides a further example of how SoftLayer innovates continually to bring new capabilities and the highest possible level of customer control to our automated services platform.

To sum up, here are some of the key features and benefits of SoftLayer Flex Images:

• Universal images that can be used interchangeably on dedicated or cloud systems
• Unified image library for archiving, managing, sharing, and publishing images
• Greater flexibility and higher scalability
• Rapid provisioning of new dedicated and cloud environments
• Available via SoftLayer’s management portal and API

In public beta, Flex Images are available now. We invite you to try them out, and, as always, we want to hear what you think.

-Marc