Infrastructure Posts

The highlight of any customer visit to a SoftLayer office is always the data center tour. The infrastructure in our data centers is the hardware platform on which many of our customers build and run their entire businesses, so it’s not surprising that they’d want a first-hand look at what’s happening inside the DC. Without exception, visitors to a SoftLayer data center pod are impressed when they walk out of a SoftLayer data center pod … even if they’ve been in dozens of similar facilities in the past.

What about the customers who aren’t able to visit us, though? We can post pictures, share stats, describe our architecture and show you diagrams of our facilities, but those mediums can’t replace the experience of an actual data center tour. In the interest of bridging the “data center tour” gap for customers who might not be able to visit SoftLayer in person (or who want to show off their infrastructure), we decided to record a video data center tour.

If you’ve seen “professional” video data center tours in the past, you’re probably positioning a pillow on top of your keyboard right now to protect your face if you fall asleep from boredom when you hear another baritone narrator voiceover and see CAD mock-ups of another “enterprise class” facility. Don’t worry … That’s not how we roll:

Josh Daley — whose role as site manager of DAL05 made him the ideal tour guide — did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to feedback from our customers about whether this data center tour style is helpful and/or entertaining.

If you want to see more videos like this one, “Like” it, leave comments with ideas and questions, and share it wherever you share things (Facebook, Twitter, your refrigerator, etc.).

-@khazard

One of the founding principles of SoftLayer is automation. Automation has enabled this company to provide our customers with a world class experience, and it enables employees to provide excellent service. It allows us to quickly deploy a variety of solutions at the click of a button, and it guarantees consistency in the products that we deliver. Automation isn’t the whole story, though. The human element plays a huge role in SoftLayer’s success.

As a Site Manager for the corporate facility, I thought I could share a unique perspective when it comes to what that human element looks like, specifically through the lens of the Server Build Team’s responsibilities. You recently heard how my colleague, Broc Chalker, became an SBT, and so I wanted take it a step further by providing a high-level breakdown of how the Server Build Team enables SoftLayer to keep up with the operational demands of a rapidly growing, global infrastructure provider.

The Server Build Team is responsible for filling all of the beautiful data center environments you see in pictures and videos of SoftLayer facilities. Every day, they are in the DC, building out new rows for inventory. It sounds pretty simple, but it’s actually a pretty involved process. When it comes to prepping new rows, our primary focus is redundancy (for power, cooling and network). Each rack is powered by dual power sources, four switches in a stacked configuration (two public network, two private network), and an additional switch that provides KVM access to the server. To make it possible to fill the rack with servers, we also have to make sure it’s organized well, and that takes a lot of time. Just watch the video of the Go Live Crew cabling a server rack in SJC01, and you can see how time- and labor-intensive the process is. And if there are any mistakes or if the cables don’t look clean, we’ll cut all the ties and start over again.

Interns working on brand new rows.

DAL05 SBTs prepping new racks.

In addition to preparing servers for new orders, SBTs also handle hardware-related requests. This can involve anything from changing out components for a build, performing upgrades / maintenance on active servers, or even troubleshooting servers. Any one of these requests has to be treated with significant urgency and detail.

Jon (SBT) working through a server build.

Working on a server in the data center.

The responsibilities do not end there. Server Build Technicians also perform a walk of the facility twice per shift. During this walk, technicians check for visual alerts on the servers and do a general facility check of all SoftLayer pods. Note: Each data center facility features one or more pods or “server rooms,” each built to the same specifications to support up to 5,000 servers.

DAL05 SBTs changing server components.

Cory on a DC walkthrough.

The DAL05 facility has a total of four pods, and at the end of the build-out, we should be running 18,000-20,000 servers in this facility alone. Over the past year, we completed the build out of SR02 and SR03 (pod 2 and 3, respectively), and we’re finishing the final pod (SR04) right now. We’ve spent countless hours building servers and monitoring operating system provisions when new orders roll in, and as our server count increases, our team has grown to continue providing the support our existing customers expect and deserve when it comes to upgrade requests and hardware-related support tickets.

Adam teaching troubleshooting techniques.

Chad and Richard working tickets.

To be successful, we have to stay ahead of the game from an operations perspective. The DAL05 crew is working hard to build out this facility’s last pod (SR04), but for the sake of this blog post, I pulled everyone together for a quick photo op to introduce you to the team.

DAL05 Day / Evening Team and SBT Interns (with the remaining racks to build out in DAL05):

DAL05 Overnight Server Build Technician Team:

Let us know if there’s ever anything we can do to help you!

-Joshua

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

Innovation. Automation. Innovation. Automation. Innovation. Automation. That’s been our heartbeat since SoftLayer was born on May 5, 2005. The “Innovation” piece is usually the most visible component of that heartbeat while “Automation” usually hangs out behind the scenes (enabling the “Innovation”). When we launch a new product line like Object Storage, add new functionality to the SoftLayer API, announce a partnership with a service provider like RightScale, or simply receive and rack the latest and greatest server hardware from our vendors, our automated platform allows us to do it quickly and seamlessly. Because our platform is built to do exactly what it’s supposed to without any manual intervention, it’s easily overlooked.

But what if we wanted to show what automation actually looks like?

It seems like a silly question to ask. If our automated platform is powered by software built by the SoftLayer development team, there’s no easy way to show what that automation looks like … At least not directly. While the bits and bytes aren’t easily visible, the operational results of automation are exceptionally photogenic. Let’s take a look at a few examples of what automation enables to get an indirect view of what it actually looks like.

Example: A New Server Order

A customer orders a dedicated server. That customer wants a specific hardware configuration with a specific suite of software in a specific data center, and it needs to be delivered within four hours. What does that usually look like from an operations perspective?

If you want to watch those blinking lights for two or three hours, you’ll have effectively watched a new server get provisioned at SoftLayer. When an order comes in, the automated provisioning system will find a server matching the order’s hardware requirements in the requested data center facility, and the software will be installed before it is handed over to the the customer.

Example: Server Reboot or Operating System Reload

A customer needs to reboot a server or install a new operating system. Whether they want a soft reboot, a hard reboot with a full power cycle or a blank operating system install, the scene in the data center will look eerily familiar:

Gone are the days of server build technicians wheeling a terminal over to every server that needs work done. From thousands of miles away, a customer can remotely “unplug” his or her server via the rack’s power strip, initiate a soft reboot or reinstall an operating system. But what if they want even more accessibility?

Example: What’s on the Screen?

When remotely rebooting or power cycling a server isn’t enough, a customer might want someone in the data center to wheel over to their server in the rack to look at any of the messages that can only be read with a monitor attached. This would generally happen behind the server, but for the sake of this example, we’ll just watch the data center technician pass in front of the servers to get to the back:

Yeah, you probably could have seen that one coming.

Because KVM over IP is included on every server, physical carts carrying “keyboard, video and mouse” are few and far between. By automating customers’ access to their server and providing as much virtual access as we possibly can, we’re able to “get out of the way” of our technical users and only step in to help when that help is needed.

I could go on and on with examples of cloud computing upgrades and downgrades, provisioning a firewall or adding a load balancers, but I’ll practice a little restraint. If you want the full effect, you can scroll up and watch the blinking lights a little while longer.

Automation looks like what you don’t see. No humanoid robots or needlessly complex machines (that I know of) … Just a data center humming along with some beautiful flashing server lights.

-Duke

P.S. If you want to be able to remotely bask in the glow of some blinking server lights, bookmark the larger-sized SoftLayer Rack animated gif … You could even title the bookmark, “Check on the Servers.”

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

Last week was HUGE for the inaugural class of companies in the TechStars Cloud accelerator in San Antonio. The program’s three-month term concluded with “Demo Day” on Wednesday where all of the participating companies presented to more than 300 venture capitalists and investors, and given our relationship with TechStars, SoftLayer was well represented … We were even honored to present a few of the companies we’ve been working with over the past few months. All of the 20-hour days, mentor sessions and elevator pitches culminated in one pitch, and while I can’t talk much about the specifics, I can assure you that the event was a huge success when it came to connecting the teams to (very interested) investors.

Demo Day wasn’t the end of the fun, though. After the post-pitch celebrations (and a much-needed night of sleep), the teams had one more item on their agenda for the week: A visit to SoftLayer.

On Thursday, the teams piled into a bus and made their way from San Antonio to Dallas where we could continue the celebration of their successful completion of the program … And so many of the teams could see the actual hardware powering their businesses. After a nice little soiree on Thursday evening at the House of Blues in Dallas, we put the teams up in a hotel near our Alpha headquarters promised them an informative, interesting and fun Friday.

After a few hours of sleep, the teams were recharged on Friday morning and ready to experience some SoftLayer goodness so…

They loaded up the bus and took a 10-minute ride to our corporate headquarters.

Given our security and compliance processes, each visitor checked in at our front desk, and they were divided into smaller groups to take a quick data center tour.

I could tell that going on a data center tour wasn’t the most exciting prospect for a few of the visitors, but I asked them to forget everything they thought they knew about data centers … This is SoftLayer. Yes, that’s pretty bold, but when each team walked out of SR01.DAL05, I could see in their eyes that they agreed.

The tour started innocently enough at a window looking into Server Room 01 (the first data center pod we built in DAL05). In the picture above, Joshua Daley, our DAL05 site manager, is explaining how all of SoftLayer’s facilities are built identically to enable us to better manage the customer experience and our operational practices in any facility around the world. After a few notes about security and restrictions on what can/can’t be done in the server room the group was led through the first set of secured doors between the facility’s lobby and the data center floor.

From the next hallway, the tour group observed the generators and air conditioning units keeping DAL05 online 24×7. Josh explained the ways we safeguard the facility with n+1 redundancy and regular maintenance and load testing, and the group was led through two more stages of secured doors … the first with badge access, the second requiring fingerprint authentication. When they made it through, they were officially in SR01.DAL05.

Josh explained how our data center CRAC units work, how each server row is powered and how we measure and optimize the server room environment. While that aspect of the data center could seem like “blocking and tackling,” he talked about our continued quest to improve power efficiency as he shared a few of the innovative approaches we’ve been testing, and it was clear that the tour understood it to be easier than, “Plug in server. Turn on air conditioner.”

The teams got a chance to get up close and personal (No Touching!) with a server rack, and they learned about our unique network-with-a-network topology that features public, private and out-of-band management functionality. Many “oohs” and “ahhhs” were expressed.

The tour wrapped up outside of the data center facility in front of the Alpha HQ’s Network Operations Center. From here, the TechStars could see how our network team observes and responds to any network-related events, and they could ask questions about anything they saw during the tour (without having to shout over the air conditioning hum).

When the final tour concluded, the full group reconvened in one of our conference rooms. They’d seen the result of our hard work, and we wanted them to know where all that hard work started. Because SoftLayer was started in a Dallas living room a few short years ago, we knew our story would be interesting, inspirational and informative, and we wanted to provide as much guidance as possible to help these soon-to-grow businesses prepare for their own success. After a brief Q&A period, a few of the TechStars Cloud participants (and some of their Dallas-based Tech Wildcatters cousins) presented a little about their businesses and how they’ve grown and evolved through the TechStars program, and we got to ask our own questions to help them define their business moving forward.

After the presentations at the office, we knew we couldn’t just load the bus up to send the teams back to San Antonio … We had to bid them farewell SoftLayer style. We scheduled a quick detour to SpeedZone Dallas where a few hours of unlimited eats, drinks, games and go-kart races were waiting for them.

We couldn’t have had a better time with the participating teams, and we’re looking forward to seeing the amazing things they’ll continue doing in the near future. If you want to see even more data center coverage from Friday, be sure to check out “TechStars Cloud Visits SoftLayer” on Flickr!

-@PaulFord

SoftLayer is in the business of helping businesses scale. You need 1,000 cloud computing instances? We’ll make sure our system can get them online in 10 minutes. You need to spin up some beefy dedicated servers loaded with dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors and high-capacity SSDs for a new application’s I/O-intensive database? We’ll get it online anywhere in the world in under four hours. Everywhere you look, you’ll see examples of how we help our customers scale, but what you don’t hear much about is how our operations team scales our infrastructure to ensure we can accommodate all of our customers’ growth.

When we launch a new data center, there’s usually a lot of fanfare. When AMS01 and SNG01 came online, we talked about the thousands of servers that are online and ready. We meet huge demand for servers on a daily basis, and that presents us with a challenge: What happens when the inventory of available servers starts dwindling?

Truck Day.

Truck Day not limited to a single day of the year (or even a single day in a given month) … It’s what we call any date our operations team sets for delivery and installation of new hardware. We communicate to all of our teams about the next Truck Day in each location so SLayers from every department can join the operations team in unboxing and preparing servers/racks for installation. The operations team gets more hands to speed up the unloading process, and every employee has an opportunity to get first-hand experience in how our data centers operate.

If you want a refresher course about what happens on a Truck Day, you can reference Sam Fleitman’s “Truck Day Operations” blog, and if you want a peek into what it looks like, you can watch Truck Day at SR02.DAL05. I don’t mean to make this post all about Truck Day, but Truck Day is instrumental in demonstrating the way SoftLayer scales our own infrastructure.

Let’s say we install 1,000 servers to officially launch a new pod. Because each pod has slots for 5,000 servers, we have space/capacity for 3,000-4,000 more servers in the server room, so as soon as more server hardware becomes available, we’ll order it and start preparing for our next Truck Day to supplement the pod’s inventory. You’d be surprised how quickly 1,000 servers can be ordered, and because it’s not very easy to overnight a pallet of servers, we have to take into account lead time and shipping speeds … To accommodate our customers’ growth, we have to stay one step ahead in our own growth.

This morning in a meeting, I saw a pretty phenomenal bullet that got me thinking about this topic:

Truck Day — 4/3 (All Sites): 2,673 Servers

In nine different data center facilities around the world, more than 2,500 servers were delivered, unboxed, racked and brought online. Last week. In one day.

Now I know the operations team wasn’t looking for any kind of recognition … They were just reporting that everything went as planned. Given the fact that an accomplishment like that is “just another day at SoftLayer” for those guys, they definitely deserve recognition for the amazing work they do. We host some of the most popular platforms, games and applications on the Internet, and the DC-Ops team plays a huge role in scaling SoftLayer so our customers can scale themselves.

-@gkdog

With a little one on the way, I’ve been spending a good amount of my free time starting to search for a new home for my growing family. While the search continues, I’ve learned a thing or two about what to look for and what should be done before taking the plunge, and as I’ve gone through the process, I can’t help but notice lot of parallels to what it’s like to purchase a new server:

• It’s an Investment

  Just like purchasing a new home, deciding to purchase a server is a huge investment. As you start shopping around, the costs may seem staggering, and while most servers don’t cost as much as a small home, your new server will be your business’s new home online. When you consider the revenue your site will generate (and the potential cost of not being able to properly support demand), you won’t want to skimp on the details. The truth is that like any investment, you can reap great rewards with proper planning and execution.

• You Have to Know What You Need

  One of the best tips I’ve incorporated in my home-buying process is the need to differentiate what you want, what you need, and what you can live without. Unless you’re royalty, you’re likely living on a budget. As cool as it would be to live in a 10-bedroom mansion with an indoor Olympic size pool, there’s a lot there that I don’t need. That sort of home palace also falls way outside of my personal budget. The same could be said about a business.

  I’ve heard plenty of stories about companies who slash their IT budgets in order to cut costs, and even the greatest IT departments have to live within their budgets. As you’re determining what your next server will be, you need to understand the purpose (and needs) of your workload: Will it be database server? An application server? Will it be an additional web head? Are you using it for mass storage? You need to plan accordingly. I’m sure you’d want a new Xeon E5-2600 server with all of the bells and whistles, but if you don’t need that kind of performance, you’re likely just going to burn through your budget quicker than you have to. Know your budget, know your needs and purchase your server accordingly.

• You Should Get to Know the Neighborhood

  I don’t intend on purchasing a home in a high-crime area, nor do I plan on moving into a neighborhood with exorbitant HOA dues for services I don’t intend to use. Your new server is going to have a “neighborhood” as well when it comes to the network it’s connected to, so if you plan on outsourcing your IT infrastructure, you should do the same research.

  You want your critical environments in a safe place, and the easiest way to get them in the right “neighborhood” is to work with a well-established host who’s able to accommodate what you’re doing. A $20/mo shared hosting account is great for a personal blog site, but it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for a busy database server or front-end application servers for an application dependent on advertising for revenue. A mansion worth of furniture doesn’t fit very well in a studio apartment.

• You’re Responsible for Maintenance

  Ask any homeowner: Continuous improvements — as well as routine maintenance &mdashl are a requirement. Failure to take care of your property can result in fines and much more costly repairs down the road. Likewise with any server, you have to do your maintenance. Keep your software up to date, practice good security protocols, and continue to monitor for problems. If you don’t, you could find yourself at the mercy of malicious activity or worse — catastrophic failure. Which leads me to …

• You Need Insurance Against Disaster

  Homeowner’s insurance protects you from disaster, and it provides indemnity in the event someone is hurt on your property. Sometimes additional insurance may be required. Many professionals recommend flood insurance to protect from flood damage not covered under a typical homeowner’s insurance policy. Ask any systems administrator, and they’ll tell you all about server insurance: BACKUPS. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!!! The wrong time to figure out that your backups weren’t properly maintained is when you need them, more specifically in the event of a hardware failure. It’s a fact of life: Hardware can fail. Murphy’s Law would suggest it will fail at the worst possible time. Maintain your backups!

I can’t claim that this is the guide to buying a server, but seeing the parallels with buying a new home might be a catalyst for you to look at the server-buying process in a different light. You should consider your infrastructure an asset before you simply consider it a cost.

-Matthew

About a month ago, Kevin Hazard visited SoftLayer Amsterdam after a conference in London, and while he was here, I invited him on a data center tour. You saw a few glimpses of the data center in his “This is Different” video, but he turned the camera around on me to give a simpler “Data Center Tour” video to show off some of the key characteristics of the server room environment in AMS01.

Given the fact that nearly everything in the data center is the same, if you’ve ever seen a SoftLayer data center, this tour will seem very familiar. The configuration and architecture of all 13 of our data centers are identical, and with the exceptions of a few Dutch words on the walls, this tour could be given (and is frequently given to customers) in all of our facilities around the world:

As we were recording this video, I started thinking about all the similarities and differences between all the entrepreneurs I have worked with during my career — which coincidentally lines up well with Clayton’s “Building. Business. SoftLayer.” blog. I cut my technology teeth in Silicon Valley during the dot-com tsunami of the late 90′s, and since then, I have collaborated on-location with entrepreneurs from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Chile, Ukraine and Italy. While these cultures often vary widely with customs, manners, food and methods of business, I would have to say that entrepreneurs have far more similarities than they do differences.

At the peak of the dot-com boom, money was raining from the sky, and anyone with a decent PowerPoint presentation containing the word “Internet,” could raise million dollars of dollars in a matter of days. After the bubble popped, funding all but dried up. Even real businesses with profitable business models couldn’t raise a cent. My neighbor went from being worth over $10M on paper and keeping company with the Queen of the Netherlands to scrambling to pay the rent and fighting for a seat at the local coffee shop.

In my opinion, that’s when the real magic happened: The creators just kept on creating. Despite all our friends making fun of us — telling us “the Internet thing” was dead — we kept building cool stuff and coming up with innovative products that pushed the limits of technology.

While entrepreneurs liked the idea of making tons of money and building a global company from a simple idea, money and fame are not the primary drivers of true entrepreneurs. They were really more interested in creating something that would impact peoples’ everyday lives and disrupt tired industries … Just look at SoftLayer. In 2005, “tired” would have been one of the nicest things you could have said about the hosting industry, and in response to that environment, our “Innovate or Die” mentality shot us to the front of the pack.

Entrepreneurs are a lot like our data centers … They may look a little different from the outside, but they are exactly the same on the inside. Ask them how they’d change the world, and take note of the wild look in their eyes. Our growth is fueled by the passions of our customers, and as long as we have brilliant customers doing amazing things, you can expect to see more and more of these “new data center” tour videos in the coming months and years.

-@jpwisler

P.S. If you don’t have time to watch the video right now, you can head to our Flickr page to see a few pictures we snapped while recording the tour: AMS01 – Amsterdam Data Center

P.P.S. Make sure you watch the video all the way to the end.

Unfortunately, having “book knowledge” (or in this case “blog knowledge”) about backups and applying that knowledge faithfully and regularly are not necessarily one and the same. Regardless of how many times you hear it or read it, if you aren’t actively protecting your data, YOU SHOULD BE.

Here are a few questions to help you determine whether your data is endangered:

1. Is your data backed up?
2. How often is your data backed up?
3. How often do you test your backups?
4. Is your data backed up externally from your server?
5. Are your backups in another data center?
6. Are your backups in another city?
7. Are your backups stored with a different provider?
8. Do you have local backups?
9. Are your backups backed up?
10. How many people in your organization know where your backups are and how to restore them?
11. What’s the greatest amount of data you might lose in the event of a server crash before your next backup?
12. What is the business impact of that data being lost?
13. If your server were to crash and the hard drives were unrecoverable, how long would it take you to restore all of your data?
14. What is the business impact of your data being lost or inaccessible for the length of time you answered in the last question?

We can all agree that the idea of backups and data protection is a great one, but when it comes to investing in that idea, some folks change their tune. While each of the above questions has a “good” answer when it comes to keeping your data safe, your business might not need “good” answers to all of them for your data to be backed up sufficiently. You should understand the value of your data to your business and invest in its protection accordingly.

For example, a million-dollar business running on a single server will probably value its backups more highly than a hobbyist with a blog she contributes to once every year and a half. The million-dollar business needs more “good” answers than the hobbyist, so the business should invest more in the protection of its data than the hobbyist.

If you haven’t taken time to quantify the business impact of losing your primary data (questions 11-14), sit down with a pencil and paper and take time to thoughtfully answer those questions for your business. Are any of those answers surprising to you? Do they make you want to reevaluate your approach to backups or your investment in protecting your data?

The funny thing about backups is that you don’t need them until you NEED them, and when you NEED them, you’ll usually want to kick yourself if you don’t have them.

Don’t end up kicking yourself.

-@khazard

P.S. SoftLayer has a ton of amazing backup solutions but in the interested of making this post accessible and sharable, I won’t go crazy linking to them throughout the post. The latest product release that got me thinking about this topic was the SoftLayer Object Storage launch, and if you’re concerned about your answers to any of the above questions, object storage may be an economical way to easily get some more “good” answers.