Executive Blog Posts

In the startup world, the resources you have are almost as important as your vision and your ability to execute. That simple idea fueled the creation of Catalyst, and it’s a big component of our incredible success. We’re taking the complexity (and cost) out of the hosting decision for the coolest startups we meet, and by doing so, those startups have the freedom to focus on their applications. But that’s only the beginning.

In addition to providing infrastructure, my team and I also try to introduce Catalyst participants to investors, incubators, accelerators and other startup founders. By building a strong network of experienced peers, entrepreneurs have a HUGE advantage as they’re building their businesses. The difficulty in making those introductions is that it’s such a labor-intensive process … Or I guess I should say that it *was* a labor-intensive process. Then we found YouNoodle.

YouNoodle is an online network for entrepreneurs that was founded in 2010 in San Francisco, California. The 18-person startup is built to connect entrepreneurs with people, startups, competitions and groups based on what’s relevant to each entrepreneur’s mission. What the Catalyst team has been doing in a labor-intensive fashion, YouNoodle has automated and streamlined! We had to meet these folks.

We heard that YouNoodle was putting together a start-up crawl during one of their immersion programs — they bring international entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to learn best practices and make connections in the US market — and we jumped at an opportunity to provide the beer and sandwiches at one of the stops. If you’ve ever worked at a startup before, you know that the way to an entrepreneur’s heart is through his/her stomach, so we hoped it would be “love at first bite.”

We chatted with the YouNoodle team, and they showed us the recently released 2.0 version of Podium, the SaaS platform they built to manage the selection process for entrepreneurial competitions and challenges from organizations like Start-Up Chile, The Next Web, Intel, NASA and seven out of the top ten universities around the world. Basically, Podium enables the most talented individuals and innovative startups to rise to the top and get the opportunities they deserve.

YouNoodle was an obvious fit for Catalyst, and Catalyst was an obvious fit for YouNoodle. Other Catalyst participants could join the thriving community of entrepreneurs that YouNoodle has built, and YouNoodle could take advantage of the power of SoftLayer’s hosting platform. And by helping support YouNoodle, Catalyst gets to indirectly help even more entrepreneurs and startups … Very “meta!”

Over the past two years, YouNoodle has managed over 400 competitions which have received entries from more than 28,000 entrepreneurs around the world. They’re a key player in the acceleration of global entrepreneurship, and they share our vision of breaking down the geographic barriers to innovation. And with the momentum they’ve got now, it’s clear that they’re just getting started.

If you have a second, head over to YouNoodle.com to check out the fresh, easy-to-use interface they launched to help users discover, get inspired by and connect with like-minded individuals on a global scale.

-@PaulFord

Last week, I got an email from a huge technology conference about their new website, exciting new speaker line up and the availability of early-bird tickets. I clicked on a link from that email, and I find that their fancy new website was down. After giving up on getting my early-bird discount, I surfed over to Facebook, and I noticed a post from one of my favorite blogs, Dutch Cowboys, about another company’s interesting new product release. I clicked the link to check out the product, and THAT site was down, too. It’s painfully common for some of the world’s most popular sites and applications buckle under the strain of their own success … Just think back to when Diablo III was launched: Demand crushed their servers on release day, and the gamers who waited patiently to get online with their copy turned to the world of social media to express their visceral anger about not being able to play the game.

The question everyone asks is why this kind of thing still happens. To a certain extent, the reality is that most entrepreneurs don’t know what they don’t know. I spoke with an woman who was going to be featured on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, and she said that the traffic from the show’s viewers crippled most (if not all) of the businesses that were presented on the program. She needed to safeguard from that happening to her site, and she didn’t know how to do that.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to keep sites and applications online with on-demand infrastructure and auto-scaling tools. Unfortunately, most business owners don’t know how easy it is, so they don’t take advantage of the resources available to them. Preparing a website, game or application for its own success doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. With pay-for-what-you-use pricing and “off the shelf” cloud management solutions, traffic-caused outages do NOT have to happen.

First impressions are extremely valuable, and if I wasn’t really interested in that conference or the new product Dutch Cowboys blogged about, I’d probably never go back to those sites. Most Internet visitors would not. I cringe to think about the potential customers lost.

Businesses spend a lot of time and energy on user experience and design, and they don’t think to devote the same level of energy on their infrastructure. In the 90′s, sites crashing or slowing was somewhat acceptable since the interwebs were exploding beyond available infrastructure’s capabilities. Now, there’s no excuse.

If you’re launching a new site, product or application, how do you get started?

The first thing you need to do is understand what resources you need and where the potential bottlenecks are when hundreds, thousands or even millions of people want to what you’re launching. You don’t need to invest in infrastructure to accommodate all of that traffic, but you need to know how you can add that infrastructure when you need it.

One of the easiest ways to prepare for your own success without getting bogged down by the bits and bytes is to take advantage of resources from some of our technology partners (and friends). If you have a PHP, Ruby on Rails or Node.js applications, Engine Yard will help you deploy and manage a specialized hosting environment. When you need a little more flexibility, RightScale‘s cloud management product lets you easily manage your environment in “a single integrated solution for extreme efficiency, speed and control.” If your biggest concern is your database’s performance and scalability, Cloudant has an excellent cloud database management service.

Invest a little time in getting ready for your success, and you won’t need to play catch-up when that success comes to you. Given how easy it is to prepare and protect your hosting environment these days, outages should go the way of the 8-track player.

-@jpwisler

SoftLayer has a passion for social media, online gaming and mobile application developers. We were in “startup mode” just a few years ago, so we know how much work it takes to transform ideas into a commercially viable enterprise, and we want to be the platform on which all of those passionate people build their business. To that end, we set out to find ways we could help the next generation of web-savvy entrepreneurs and digital pioneers.

About a year ago, we kicked off a huge effort to give back to the startup community. We jumped headfirst into the world of startups, incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity firms. This was our new ecosystem. We started to make connections with the likes of TechStars and MassChallenge, and we quickly became a preferred hosting environment for their participants’ most promising and ambitious ideas. This ambitious undertaking evolved into our Catalyst Program.

When it came to getting involved, we knew we could give back from an infrastructure perspective. We decided to extend a $1,000/mo hosting credit to each Catalyst company for one full year, and the response was phenomenal. That was just the beginning, though. Beyond the servers, storage and networking, we wanted to be a resource to the entrepreneurs and developers who could learn from our experience, so we committed to mentoring and making ourselves available to answer any and all questions. That’s not just lip service … We pledged access to our entire executive team, and we made engineering resources available for problem-solving technical challenges. We’re in a position to broker introductions and provide office space, so we wanted didn’t want to pass up that opportunity.

One of the superstars and soon-to-be graduates of Catalyst is MODX, and they have an incredible story. MODX has become leading web content management platform (#4 open source PHP CMS globally) by providing designers, developers, content creators and Unix nerds with all the tools they need to manage, build, protect and scale a web site.

Back in December 2011, the MODX team entered the program as a small company coming out of the open source world, trying to figure out how to monetize and come up with a viable commercial offering. Just over 10 months later, the company has grown to 14+ employees with a new flagship product ready to launch later this month: MODX Cloud. This new cloud-hosting platform, built on SoftLayer’s infrastructure, levels the playing field allowing users to scale and reach everyone with just a few clicks of a mouse and not need to worry about IT administration or back-end servers. Everything associated with managing a web site is fully automated with single-click functionality, so designers and small agencies can compete globally.

We’re proud of what the MODX team has accomplished in such a short period of time, and I would like to think that SoftLayer played a significant role in getting them there. The MODX tag line is “Creative Freedom,” and that might be why they were drawn to the Catalyst Program. We want to “liberate” entrepreneurs from distractions and allow them to focus on developing their products – you know, the part of the business that they are most passionate about.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of Catalyst next … We’re always looking to recruit innovative, passionate and creative startups who’d love to have SoftLayer as a partner, so if you have a business that fits the bill, let us help!

-@gkdog

I like to think that we are beyond ‘defining’ cloud, but what I find in reality is that we still argue over basics. I have conversations in which people still delineate things like “hosting” from “cloud computing” based degrees of single-tenancy. Now I’m a stickler for definitions just like the next pedantic software-religious guy, but when it comes to arguing minutiae about cloud computing, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. Instead of discussing underlying infrastructure and comparing hypervisors, we’ll look at two well-cited definitions of cloud computing that may help us unify our understanding of the model.

I use the word “model” intentionally there because it’s important to note that cloud computing is not a “thing” or a “product.” It’s a way of doing business. It’s an operations model that is changing the fundamental economics of writing and deploying software applications. It’s not about a strict definition of some underlying service provider architecture or whether multi-tenancy is at the data center edge, the server or the core. It’s about enabling new technology to be tested and fail or succeed in blazing calendar time and being able to support super-fast growth and scale with little planning. Let’s try to keep that in mind as we look at how NIST and Gartner define cloud computing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a government organization that develops standards, guidelines and minimum requirements as needed by industry or government programs. Given the confusion in the marketplace, there’s a huge “need” for a simple, consistent definition of cloud computing, so NIST had a pretty high profile topic on its hands. Their resulting Cloud Computing Definition describes five essential characteristics of cloud computing, three service models, and four deployment models. Let’s table the service models and deployment models for now and look at the five essential characteristics of cloud computing. I’ll summarize them here; follow the link if you want more context or detail on these points:

• On-Demand Self Service: A user can automatically provision compute without human interaction.
• Broad Network Access: Capabilities are available over the network.
• Resource Pooling: Computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned.
• Rapid Elasticity: Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released.
• Measured Service: Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported.

The characteristics NIST uses to define cloud computing are pretty straightforward, but they are still a little ambiguous: How quickly does an environment have to be provisioned for it to be considered “on-demand?” If “broad network access” could just mean “connected to the Internet,” why include that as a characteristic? When it comes to “measured service,” how granular does the resource monitoring and control need to be for something to be considered “cloud computing?” A year? A minute? These characteristics cast a broad net, and we can build on that foundation as we set out to create a more focused definition.

For our next stop, let’s look at Gartner‘s view: “A style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet infrastructure.” From a philosophical perspective, I love their use of “style” when talking about cloud computing. Little differentiates the underlying IT capabilities of cloud computing from other types of computing, so when looking at cloud computing, we really just see a variation on how those capabilities are being leveraged. It’s important to note that Gartner’s definition includes “elastic” alongside “scalable” … Cloud computing gets the most press for being able to scale remarkably, but the flip-side of that expansion is that it also needs to contract on-demand.

All of this describes a way of deploying compute power that is completely different than the way we did this in the decades that we’ve been writing software. It used to take months to get funding and order the hardware to deploy an application. That’s a lot of time and risk that startups and enterprises alike can erase from their business plans.

How do we wrap all of those characteristics up into unified of definition of cloud computing? The way I look at it, cloud computing is as an operations model that yields seemingly unlimited compute power when you need it. It enables (scalable and elastic) capacity as you need it, and that capacity’s pricing is based on consumption. That doesn’t mean a provider should charge by the compute cycle, generator fan RPM or some other arcane measurement of usage … It means that a customer should understand the resources that are being invoiced, and he/she should have the power to change those resources as needed. A cloud computing environment has to have self-service provisioning that doesn’t require manual intervention from the provider, and I’d even push that requirement a little further: A cloud computing environment should have API accessibility so a customer doesn’t even have to manually intervene in the provisioning process (The customer’s app could use automated logic and API calls to scale infrastructure up or down based on resource usage).

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at Cloud Connect Chicago, and I shared SoftLayer’s approach to cloud computing and how it has evolved into a few distinct products that speak directly to our customers’ needs:

The session was about 45 minutes, so the video above has been slimmed down a bit for easier consumption. If you’re interested in seeing the full session and getting into a little more detail, we’ve uploaded an un-cut version here.

-Duke

When SoftLayer began back in 2005, the term “cloud computing” was rarely used if at all. The founders of SoftLayer had an ambitious vision and plan to build a service platform that could easily automate, scale and meet the demands of the most sophisticated IT users. They were obviously onto something. Since then, we’ve emerged as the world’s largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, helping the next generation of web savvy entrepreneurs realize their dreams. But we didn’t do it alone. We had partnerships in place—including working with Parallels.

Today everyone is trying to scramble and figure out how this “new” IT shift will work itself out. Our friends over at Parallels had a similar ambitious undertaking—trying to automate and enable a complete gamut of hosting and cloud services. This created a framework for our partnership. We worked with their engineering and sales teams, starting back in 2005, which resulted in Parallels Plesk Panel being offered as an option on every SoftLayer server. That was just the beginning. We are now deploying Parallels Automation for hosting partners and have plans to integrate with their Application Packaging Standard offering. Plans to integrate with other products like Parallels Cloud Server are also on the horizon. It all comes down to helping hosting companies and other joint customers thrive and succeed.

To find out more about our partnership and how it can help streamline your entry into cloud computing click here. We are also the only “Diamond” sponsor at the Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore this year. We share a heritage and understanding with Parallels borne from a need to simplify and solve IT problems on a broad scale. Now that’s what I call a likeminded partnership.

-@gkdog

In January, we posted a series of blogs about legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate that would have had a serious impact on the hosting industry. We talked about SOPA and PIPA, and how those proposed laws would “break the Internet” as we know it. The hosting industry rallied together to oppose the passage of those bills, and in doing so, we proved to be a powerful collective force.

In the months that followed the shelving of SOPA and PIPA, many of the hosting companies that were active in the fight were invited to join a new coalition that would focus on proposed legislation that affects Internet infrastructure providers … The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (or “i2Coalition”) was born. i2Coalition co-founder and Board Chair Christian Dawson explains the basics:

SoftLayer is proud to be a Charter Member of i2Coalition, and we’re excited to see how many vendors, partners, peers and competitors have joined us. Scrolling the ranks of founding members is a veritable “Who’s who?” of the companies that make up the “nuts and bolts” of the Internet.

The goal of i2Coalition is to facilitate public policy education and advocacy, develop market-driven standards formed by consensus and give the industry a unified voice. On the i2Coalition’s Public Policy page, that larger goal is broken down into focused priorities, with the first being

“In all public policy initiatives of the i2Coalition will be to encourage the growth and development of the Internet infrastructure industry and to protect the interests of members of the Coalition consistent with this development.”

Another huge priority worth noting is the focus on enabling and promoting the free exercise of human rights — including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the protection of personal privacy. Those rights are essential to fostering effective Internet advancement and to maintain a free and open Internet, and SoftLayer is a strong supporter of that platform.

If you operate in the hosting or Internet infrastructure space and you want to be part of the i2Coalition, we encourage you to become a member and join the conversation. When policymakers are talking about getting “an Internet” from their staff members, we know that there are plenty of opportunities to educate and provide context on the technical requirements and challenges that would result from proposed legislation, and the Internet Infrastructure Coalition is well equipped to capitalize on those opportunities.

-@toddmitchell

Last week, SoftLayer was featured on the NOS national news here in the Netherlands in a segment that allowed us to tell our story and share how we’re settling into our new Amsterdam home. I’ve only been a SLayer for about nine months now, and as I watched the video, I started to reflect on how far we’ve come in such a surprisingly short time. Take a second to check it out (don’t worry, it’s not all in Dutch):

To say that I had to “hit the ground running” when I started at SoftLayer would be an understatement. The day after I got the job, I was on a plane to SoftLayer’s Dallas headquarters to meet the team behind the company. To be honest, it was a pretty daunting task, but I was energized at the opportunity to learn about how SoftLayer became largest privately owned hosting company in the world from the people who started it. When I look back at the interview Kevin recorded with me, I’m surprised that I didn’t look like a deer in the headlights. At the time, AMS01 was still in the build-out phase, so my tours and meetings in DAL05 were both informative and awe-inspiring.

When I returned to Europe, I was energized to start playing my role in the company’s new pursuit of its global goals.

It didn’t take long before I started seeing the same awe-inspiring environment take place in our Amsterdam facility … So much so that I’m convinced that at least a few of the “Go Live Crew” members were superhuman. As it turns out, when you build identical data center pods in every location around the world, you optimize the process and figure out the best ways to efficiently use your time.

By the time the Go Live Crew started packing following the successful (and on-time) launch of AMS01, I started feeling the pressure. The first rows of server racks were already being filled by customers, but the massive data center space seemed impossibly large when I started thinking of how quickly we could fill it. Most of my contacts in Europe were not familiar with the SoftLayer name, and because my assigned region was Europe Middle East and Africa — a HUGE diverse region with many languages, cultures and currencies — I knew I had my work cut out for me.

I thought, “LET’S DO THIS!”

EMEA is home to some of the biggest hosting markets in the world, so my first-week whirlwind tour of Dallas actually set the stage quite nicely for what I’d be doing in the following months: Racking up air miles, jumping onto trains, attending countless trade shows, meeting with press, reaching out to developer communities and corresponding with my fellow SLayers in the US and Asia … All while managing the day-to-day operations of the Amsterdam office. As I look back at that list, I’m amazed how the team came together to make sure everything got done.

We have come a long way.

As I started writing this blog, BusinessReview Europe published a fantastic piece on SoftLayer in their July 2012 magazine (starting on page 172) that seems to succinctly summarize how we’ve gotten where we are today: “Innovation Never Sleeps.”

Our first pod is almost full of servers humming and flashing. When we go to tradeshows and conferences throughout Europe, people not only know SoftLayer, many of them are customers with servers in AMS01. That’s the kind of change we love.

The best part of my job right now is that our phenomenal success in the past nine months is just a glimmer of what the future holds. Come to think of it, we’re going to need some more people.

-@jpwisler

SoftLayer has over 1,750 Gbit/s of network capacity. In each of our data centers and points of presence, we have an extensive library of peering relationships and multiple 10 Gbit/s connections to independent Tier 1 carriers. We operate one of the fastest, most reliable networks on the planet, and our customers love it:

Wow these new Softlayer servers are amazingly fast! No more lag in EU!

— ChadTheDJ (@MCChadTheDJ) July 1, 2012

From a network operations standpoint, that means we have our work cut out for us to keep everything running smoothly while continuing to build the network to accommodate a steady increase in customer demand. It might be easier to rest on our laurels to simply maintain what we already have in place, but when you look at the trend of bandwidth usage over the past 18 months, you’ll see why we need to be proactive about expanding our network:

The purple line above plots the 95th percentile of weekly outbound bandwidth utilization on the SoftLayer network, and the red line shows the linear trend of that consumption over time. From week to week, the total usage appears relatively consistent, growing at a steady rate, but when you look a little deeper, you get a better picture of how dynamic our network actually is:

The animated gif above shows the 2-hour average of bandwidth usage on our entire network over a seven-week period (times in CDT). As you can see, on a day-to-day basis, consumption fluctuates pretty significantly. The NOC (Network Operations Center) needs to be able to accommodate every spike of usage at any time of day, and our network engineering and strategy teams have to stay ahead of the game when it comes to planning points of presence and increasing bandwidth capacity to accommodate our customers’ ever-expanding needs.

But wait. There’s more.

Let’s go one level deeper and look a graph of the 95th percentile bandwidth usage on 5-minute intervals from one week in a single data center:

The variations in usage are even more dramatic. Because we have thirteen data centers geographically dispersed around the world with an international customer base, the variations you see in total bandwidth utilization understate the complexity of our network’s bandwidth usage. Customers targeting the Asian market might host content in SNG01, and the peaks in bandwidth consumption from Singapore will counterbalance the valleys of consumption at the same time in the United States and Europe.

With that in mind, here’s a challenge for you: Looking at the graph above, if the times listed are in CDT, which data center do you think that data came from?

It would be interesting to look at weekly usage trends, how those trends are changing and what those trends tell us about our customer base, but that assessment would probably be “information overload” in this post, so I’ll save that for another day.

-Dani

P.S. If you came to this post expecting to see “a big truck” or “a series of tubes,” I’m sorry I let you down.

If you read Nathan’s “A Cloud to Call Your Own” blog, and you wanted to learn a little more about private clouds in general or SoftLayer Private Clouds specifically, this post is for you. We’re going take a little time to dive deeper into the technology behind SoftLayer Private Clouds, and in the process, I’ll talk a little about why particular platforms/hardware/configurations were chosen.

The Platform: Citrix CloudPlatform

There are several cloud infrastructure frameworks to choose from these days. We have surveyed a number of them and actively work with several of them. We are active members of the happenings around OpenStack and we have working implementations of vSphere, Nimula, Eucalyptus and other stacks in our data centers. So why CloudPlatform by Citrix?

First off, it’s one of the most mature of these options. It’s been around for several years and now has the substantial backing of Citrix. That backing includes investment, support organizations and the multitude of other products managed by Citrix. There are also some futuristic ideas we have regarding how to leverage products like CloudBridge and Netscaler with Private Clouds. Second, CloudPlatform operates in accordance with how we believe a private cloud should work: It’s simple, it doesn’t have a huge management infrastructure and we can charge for it by the CPU per month, just like all of our other products. Finally, CloudPlatform has made good inroads with enterprise customers. We love the idea that an enterprise ops team could leverage CloudPlatform as the management platform for both their on-premise and their off-premise private cloud.

So, we selected CloudPlatform for a multitude of reasons; not just one.

Another huge key was our ability to integrate CloudPlatform into the SoftLayer portals/mobile apps/API. Because many SoftLayer customers manage their environments exclusively through the SoftLayer API, we knew that a seamless integration there was an absolute necessity. With the help of the SoftLayer dev team and the CloudStack folks, we’ve been able to automate private clouds the same way we did for public cloud instances and dedicated servers.

The Hardware

When it came to choosing what hardware the private clouds would use, the decision was pretty simple. Given our need for automation, SoftLayer Private Clouds would need to be indistinguishable from a standard dedicated server or CloudLayer environment. We use the latest and greatest server hardware available on the market, and every month, you can see thousands of new SuperMicro boxes being delivered to our data centers around the world. Because we know we have a reliable, powerful and consistent hardware foundation on which we can build the private clouds product, it makes the integration of the system even easier.

When it comes to the specs of the hardware provided for a private cloud environment, we provide as much transparency and flexibility as we can for a customer to build exactly what he or she needs. Let’s look into what that means…

The Hardware Configurations

A CloudPlatform environment can be broken down into these components:

• A single management server (that can manage multiple zones across layer 2 networks)
• One or more zones
• One or more clusters in a zone
• One or more hosts in a cluster
• Storage shared by a cluster (which can be a single server)

A simple diagram of a two-zone private cloud might look like this:

We’ve set a standard “management server” configuration that we know will be able to accommodate all of your needs when it comes to running CloudPlatform, and how you build and configure the rest of your private cloud infrastructure is up to you. Whether you want simple dual proc, quad core Nehalem box with a lot of local disk space for a dev cloud or an environment made up of quad proc 10-core Westmeres with SSDs, you have the freedom to choose exactly what you want.

Oh, and everything can be online in two to four hours, and it’s offered on a month-to-month contract.

The Network Configuration

When it comes to where the hardware is provisioned, you have the ability to deploy zones in multiple geographies and manage them all through a single CloudPlatform management node. Given the way the SoftLayer three-tier network is built, the management node and host nodes do not even need to be accessible by our public network. You can choose to make accessible only the IPs used by the VMs you create. If your initial private cloud infrastructure is in Dallas and you want a node online in Singapore, you can just click a few buttons, and the new node will be provisioned and configured securely by CloudPlatform in a couple of hours.

Imagine how long it would have taken you to build this kind of infrastructure in the past:

It doesn’t take days or weeks now. It takes hours.

As you can see, when we approached the challenge of bringing private clouds to the SoftLayer platform, we had to innovate. In Texas, that would be roughly translated as “Go big or go home.” Given the response we’ve seen from customers and partners since the announcement of SoftLayer Private Clouds, we know the industry has taken notice.

Will all of our customers need their own private cloud infrastructure? Probably not. But will the customers who’ve been looking for this kind of functionality be ecstatic with the CloudPlatform environment on SoftLayer’s network? Absolutely.

-Duke

Those of us who’ve been in this industry for years have seen computing evolve pretty significantly, especially recently. We started with dedicated servers running a single operating system, and we were floored by innovations that allowed dedicated servers to run a hypervisor with many operating systems. The next big leap brought virtual machine “cloud” instances into the spotlight … And the resulting marketing shenanigans have been a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, the approachable “cloud” term is a lot easier to talk about with a nontechnical audience, but on the negative side, we see uninformative TV commercials that leverage cloud as a marketing term, and we see products that further obfuscate what cloud technology actually means:

To make sure we’re all on the same page, as we continue to talk about “cloud,” our definition is pretty straightforward:

• It’s an operations model.
• It provides capacity on demand.
• It offers consumption-based pricing.
• It features self-service provisioning.
• It can be accessed and managed via an API.

Understanding those characteristics, when you hear about cloud in the hosting industry, you’re usually hearing about cloud computing instances in a public cloud environment. An instance in a public cloud is one of many instances operating on a shared cloud infrastructure alongside other similar instances that aren’t managed by you. Your data is still secure, and you can still get good performance in a public cloud environment, but you’re not managing the cloud infrastructure on which your instance resides … You’re using a piece of a cloud.

What we announced at Cloud Expo East is the next step in the evolution of technology in our industry … We’re providing a turnkey, on-demand way for our customers to provision their own Private Clouds with Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

You don’t get a piece of the cloud. You have your own cloud, provisioned in a matter of hours on a month-to-month contract.

For those who have looked into building a private cloud for their business in the past, it’s probably worth reiterating: With SoftLayer and CloudStack, you can have a geographically distributed, secure, private cloud environment provisioned in a matter of hours (not months). Given the complexity of a private cloud environment — involving a management server, private cloud zones, host servers and object storage — this is no small feat.

Those unbelievable provisioning times are only part of the story … When that cloud infrastructure is deployed quickly, it’s fully integrated into the SoftLayer platform, so it leverages our global private network alongside your existing bare metal, dedicated and virtual servers. Want to add public cloud instances to your private cloud as web heads? You’ll log into one portal or use a singular API to have that done in an instant.

Your own cloud infrastructure, fully integrated into SoftLayer’s global infrastructure. If you’re chomping at the bit to try it out for yourself, email us at privateclouds@softlayer.com, and we’ll get you on the “early access” list.

Before I sign off, I want to be sure to thank everyone at SoftLayer and Citrix who worked so hard to make SoftLayer Private Clouds such an amazing new addition to our platform.

-@nday91