Infrastructure Posts

I was working on my server the other night, and I found myself needing to get sound from my Windows 2008 box through an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) connection. Because we have a huge customer base with Windows 2008 installed now, I figured there may be someone else out there that would like to be able to hear sounds from their server on their local computer when connected, so I put together a quick walkthrough with how I got it to work:

Configuring Your Server

1. Open Windows Services (Start -> Run -> Services.msc)
2. Change the properties of the Windows Audio Endpoint Service and Windows Audio Service to “Automatic”. If the services are not already started, you can manually start them at this time.
3. Open Terminal Services ( Start -> Run -> tsconfig.msc)
4. Right-click on the RDP-TCP connection and bring up its properties. Go to the “Client Settings” and make sure that on “Redirection Audio” is not disabled.
5. Fully log out and log back into the RDP connection to the server. You will see a balloon error on your speaker icon that states “No Audio Output Device is installed.”

Making Registry Changes

1. You will now need to back up your registry and some registry changes.
2. I want to reiterate the instruction to back up your registry … As with most technical guides/walkthroughs, SoftLayer will not be held liable for any corruptions that may result from you attempting these changes. The next two steps will show how to quickly back up your registry.
3. Log into your server on an account with Administrator rights, and open regedit (Start -> Run -> regedit)
4. Export the current registry (from the “File” menu) and copy it to a location off of your server so you have it backed up.
5. Locate the following key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AudioEngine\AudioProcessingObjects. This will contain several subkeys all each named with a GUID.
6. Click on each subkey, then right-click and select “Permissions.” You will then click on the “Advanced” button and the “Owner” tab. The current owner should be listed as “TrustedInstaller.”
7. Select the Administrative account and/or group from the list and click “OK” to change the ownership.
8. Select the account you just chose and give it “Full Control,” then click “OK.”
9. In the “Detail” box of each subkey, double-click on the DWORD value “MinOutputConnections” and change it from 1 to 0, then click “OK.”
10. Once you have done this for each subkey in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AudioEngine\AudioProcessingObjects, you can close regedit and restart the Windows Audio and Windows Audio Endpoint services.

Configuring Your RDP Client

Now that you have everything ready on the server, you just need to make sure your RDP client recognizes the audio. Log off of the server so you can configure your RDP client. Open RDP, go to the “Options” menu, and under “Local Resources,” select “Configure Remote Audio Settings.” Select “Play on this Computer,” and hit “OK.” Voila! You now should be able to hear sound from your Windows 2008 RDP connection.

-Bill

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

After I spent a little time weaving together a story in response to SKinman’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” puzzle (which you can read in the comments section), I was reminded of another famous logic puzzle that I came across a few years ago. Because it was begging to be SoftLayer-ized, I freshened it up to challenge our community.

In 1962, Life International magazine published a logic puzzle that was said to be so difficult that it could only be solved by two percent of the world’s population. It’s been attributed to Einstein, and apparently Lewis Carroll is given a claim to it as well, but regardless of the original author, it’s a great brain workout.

If you haven’t tried a puzzle like this before, don’t get discouraged and go Googling for the answer. You’re given every detail you need to answer the question at the end … Take your time and think about how the components are interrelated. If you’ve solved this puzzle before, this iteration might only be light mental calisthenics, but with its new SoftLayer twist, it should still be fun:

Einstein’s SoftLayer Riddle

The Scenario: You’re in a SoftLayer data center. You walk up to a server rack and you see five servers in the top five slots on the rack. Each of the five servers has a distinct hard drive configuration, processor type, operating system, control panel (or absence thereof) and add-on storage. No two servers in this rack are the same in any of those aspects.

• The CentOS6 operating system is being run on the Xeon 3230 server.
• The Dual Xeon 5410 server is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server running the Red Hat 6 operating system.
• The Dual Xeon 5610 server uses 50GB of CloudLayer Storage as its add-on storage.
• The Quad Xeon 7550 server has no control panel.
• The Cent OS 5 operating system is racked immediately below the server running the Red Hat 5 operating system.
• The server using 80GB NAS add-on storage is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server with two 100GB SSD hard drives.
• The server running the Red Hat 5 operating system uses Parallels Virtuozzo (3VPS) as a control panel.
• The server running the Windows 2008 operating system has two 100GB SSD hard drives.
• The server using Plesk 9 as a control panel is in the middle space in the five-server set in the rack.
• The top server in the rack is the Dual Xeon 5410 server.
• The Xeon 3450 server has two 147GB 10K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives.
• The server using 20GB EVault as its add-on storage has one 250GB SATA II hard drive.
• The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is next to (immediately above or below) the server using 100GB iSCSI SAN add-on storage.
• The server using cPanel as a control panel has two 2TB SATA II hard drives.
• The server with four 600GB 15K RPM SA-SCSI hard drives is racked next to (immediately above or below) the server using Plesk 10 (Unlimited) as a control panel.
• One server will use a brand new, soon-to-be-announced product offering as its add-on storage.

Question: What is the monthly cost of the server that will be using our super-secret new product offering for its add-on storage?

Use the SoftLayer Shopping Cart to come up with your answer. You can assume that the server has a base configuration (unless specifically noted in the clues above), that SoftLayer’s promotions are not used, and that the least expensive version of the control panel is being used for any control panel with several price points. You won’t be able to include the cost of the add-on storage (yet), so just provide the base configuration cost of that server in one of our US-based data centers with all of the specs you are given.

Bonus Question: If you ordered all five of those servers, how long would it take for them to be provisioned for you?

Submit your answers via comment, and we’ll publish the comments in about a week so other people have a chance to answer it without the risk of scrolling down and seeing spoilers.

-@khazard

SoftLayer data centers are designed in a “pod” concept: Every facility in every location is laid out similarly, and you’ll find the same network and server hardware connected to the same network. The idea behind it is that this design makes it easier for us to build out new locations quickly, we can have identical operational processes and procedures in each facility, and customers can expect the exact same hosting experience regardless of data center location. When you’ve got several data centers in one state, that uniformity is easy to execute. When you open facilities on opposite sides of the country, it seems a little more difficult. Open a facility in another country (and introduce the challenge of getting all of that uniformity across an ocean), and you’re looking at a pretty daunting task.

Last month, I hopped on a plane from Houston to London to attend Cloud Expo Europe. Because I was more or less “in the neighborhood” of our newest data center in Amsterdam, I was able to take a short flight to The Netherlands to do some investigatory journalism … err … “to visit the AMS01 team.”

Is AMS01 worthy of the SoftLayer name? … How does it differ from our US facilities? … Why is everything written in Dutch at the Amsterdam airport?

The answers to my hard-hitting questions were pretty clear: SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility is absolutely deserving of the SoftLayer name … The only noticeable differences between AMS01 and DAL05 are the cities they’re located in … Everything’s written in Dutch because the airport happens to be in The Netherlands, and people speak Dutch in The Netherlands (that last question didn’t get incorporated into the video, but I thought you might be curious).

Nearly every aspect of the data center mirrors what you see in WDC, SEA, HOU, SJC and DAL. The only differences I really noticed were what the PDUs looked like, what kind of power adapter was used on the crash carts, and what language was used on the AMS facility’s floor map. One of the most interesting observations: All of the servers and power strips on the racks used US power plugs … This characteristic was particularly impressive to me because every gadget I brought with me seemed to need its own power converter to recharge.

When you see us talking about the facilities being “the same,” that’s not a loosely used general term … We could pull a server from its rack in DAL05, buckle it into an airplane seat for a 10-hour flight, bring it to AMS01 (via any of the unique modes of Amsterdam transportation you saw at the beginning of the video), and slide it into a rack in Amsterdam where we could simply plug it in. It’d be back online and accessible over the public and private networks as though nothing changed … Though with Flex Images making it so easy to replicate cloud and dedicated instances in any facility, you’ll just have to take our word for it when it comes to the whole “send a server over to another data center on a plane” thing.

While I was visiting AMS01, Jonathan Wisler took a few minutes out of his day to give a full tour of the data center’s server room, and we’ve got video and pictures to share with more shots of our beautiful servers in their European home. If there’s anything in particular you want to see from AMS01, let us know, and we’ll do our best to share it!

-@khazard

P.S. Shout out to the SLayers in the Amsterdam office who offered their linguistic expertise to add a little flair to the start of the video … From the four employees who happened to be in the office when I was asking for help, we had six fluent-language contributions: English, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish and German!

**UPDATE** After posting this video, I learned that the “US” server power plugs I referred to are actually a worldwide computer standard called C13 (male) and C14 (female).

Last year, we announced that we would be the first provider to offer the Intel E7-4800 series server. This bad boy has record-breaking compute power, tons of room for RAM and some pretty amazing performance numbers, and as of right now, it’s one of the most powerful servers on the market.

Reading about the server and seeing it at the bottom of the “Quad Processor Multi-core Servers” list on our dedicated servers page is pretty interesting, but the real geeks want to see the nuts and bolts that make up such an amazing machine. I took a stroll down to the inventory room in our DAL05 data center in hopes that they had one of our E7-4850s available for a quick photo shoot to share with customers, and I was in luck.

The only way to truly admire a server is to put it through its paces in production, but getting to see a few pictures of the server might be a distance second.

When you see the 2U face of the server in a rack, it’s a little unassuming. You can load it up with six of our 3TB SATA hard drives for a total of 18TB of storage if you’re looking for a ton of space, and if you’re focused on phenomenal disk IO to go along with your unbelievable compute power, you can opt for SSDs. If you still need more space,can order a 4U version fill ten drive bays!

The real stars of the show when it comes to the E7-4850 server are nestled right underneath these heatsinks. Each of the four processors has TEN cores @ 2.00GHz, so in this single box, you have a total of forty cores! I’m not sure how Moore’s Law is going to keep up if this is the next step to jump from.

With the abundance of CPU power, you’ll probably want an abundance of RAM. Not coincidentally, we can install up to 512GB of RAM in this baby. It’s pretty unbelievable to read the specs available in the decked-out version of this server, and it’s even crazier to think that our servers going to get more and more powerful.

With all of the processing power and RAM in this box, the case fans had to get a bit of an upgrade as well. To keep enough air circulating through the server, these three case fans pull air from the cold aisle in our data center, cool the running components and exhaust the air into the data center’s “hot aisle.”

Because this machine could be used to find the last digit of pi or crunch numbers to find the cure for cancer, it’s important to have redundancy … In the picture above, you see the redundant power supplies that safeguard against a single point of failure when it comes to server power. In each of our data centers, we have N+1 power redundancy, so adding N+1 power redundancy into the server isn’t very redundant at all … It’s almost expected!

If your next project requires a ton of processing power, a lot of room for RAM, and redundant power, this server is up for the challenge! Configure your own quad-proc ten-core beast of a machine in our shopping cart or contact our SLales team for a customized quote on one: sales@softlayer.com

When you get done benchmarking it against your old infrastructure, let us know what you think!

-Summer

For better or worse, one of the most engaging posts on the SoftLayer Blog is “We are a No-Spam Network,” written by Jacob Linscott in June 2007. When it was posted, it celebrated a completely clear Spamhaus listing page – quite an accomplishment for a large hosting provider (for reasons I’ll illustrate below). Since the post was published, it has become a hotbed of conversation about any and all abuse-related issues. Google “SoftLayer SPAM,” and you’ll see the post show up as the second result, so a lot of Internet passers-by will come across the post and use the comment section as a platform to share abuse-related concerns they have for us.

That engagement is a double-edge sword: It’s good because we hear the concerns people have. It’s bad because the post was meant to be a celebration of the continuous work that the abuse department does, and uninitiated visitors seem to consider it a unilateral claim that we’ve beaten spam once and for all. In the course of responding to comments on that post, I shared an analogy to convey what it’s like to run abuse for a large hosting provider:

Given that illustration, the abuse team deserves a LOT of credit for the work they do behind the scenes. They are constantly investigating reports and working with customers to get remove any and all content that violate SoftLayer’s MSA, and too often, that can be a thankless job. Fighting abuse is an ongoing process, and while the nature of the beast might suggest the overall war will never be won, we’re always getting faster and stronger, so the individual battles are easier and easier to win.

-@khazard

In less than six years, SoftLayer has grown pretty drastically. We started as a small company with ten people crammed into a living room, brainstorming how to build one innovative data center in Dallas. Now we have more than six hundred employees managing thirteen data centers on three different continents. It’s insane to see how far we’ve come when you read those two sentences, and as I think back, I remember the sacrifices employees have made to help our business get where it is today.

In the early days, we were taking out loans and tapping our bank accounts to buy servers. When customers started asking for more features and functionality in the portal, developers coded non-stop to make it happen. A lot of those sacrifices aren’t very obvious from the outside, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without them. One of the biggest sacrifices SLayers make is when we need to build new data centers to accommodate customer demand … A “Go Live Crew” of employees moves away from their friends and family to those facilities to make sure the new SoftLayer data center meets our high expectations.

In the military, a soldier will “earn his/her stripes” by doing something that shows that he or she deserves a particular rank or position. The more stripes on the sleeve of your uniform, the higher your rank. As you’ve probably gathered from pictures and videos around the office, SoftLayer employees don’t wear uniforms, but SLayers love to wear SoftLayer swag, and this “mechanic” shirt has been one of the most popular sellers in our company store:

We wanted to recognize the employees that have given weeks (and sometimes months) of their time to join a Go Live Crew for a data center build-out, so we took that popular shirt and added a little flair. Following the “earn your stripes” idea, these employees have “earned their bars” for each data center they help build.

Every employee who was on a Go Live Crew in Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Jose, Singapore or Amsterdam will get shirts with location-specific graphics to recognize their contribution, and their most recent shirt will have the “bars” you see in the picture above.

As a bit of added recognition, here are the shirt recipients for each data center location:

Seattle Go Live Crew
John E., Edmund G., Robert G., Joe H., Brad L., Charles P., Joshua R., William S., Zane W.

Washington, D.C. Go Live Crew
Troy D., John E., Reed F., Edmund G., Robert G., Brad L., Charles P., Joshua R., Zane W.

San Jose Go Live Crew
Kalin D., John E., Chris F., Hector F., Edmund G., Robert G., Tim L., Russ M., Edward R., Brent R., Brandon S., Joshua Z.

Singapore Go Live Crew
Chris F., Joshua F.. Ryan G., Robert G., Hao H., Tim L., Russ M., Todd M., Kyle S., Eric V.

Amsterdam Go Live Crew
Raul A., Brian C., Elijah F., Hector F., Edmund G., Robert G., Sydney M., Stephen M., Michael P., Goran P., Mark Q., Edward R., Jason R., Brandon S., Sopheara S., Joshua Z.

And if you happened to compare the names between all five teams, you’ll notice that Robert Guerra was on every crew. You know what that means?

He has a brand new wardrobe.

CBNO.

-@lavosby

You’ve probably heard a lot about SoftLayer’s global expansion into Asia and Europe, and while the idea of geographically diversifying is impressive in itself, one of the most significant implications of our international expansion is what it’s done for the SoftLayer Network.

As George explained in “Globalization and Hosting: The World Wide Web is Flat,” our strategic objective is to get a network point of presence within 40ms of all of our users and our users’ users to provide the best network stability and performance possible anywhere on the planet. The reasoning is simple: The sooner a user gets on on our network, the quicker we can efficiently route them through our points of presence to a server in one of our data centers.

The cynics in the audience are probably yawning and shrugging that idea off as marketing mumbo jumbo, so I thought it would be good to demonstrate how the network expansion immediately and measurably improved our customers’ network experience from Asia to the United States. Just look at the traceroutes.

As you’re probably aware, a traceroute shows the “hops” or routers along the network path from an origin IP to a destination IP. When we were building out the Singapore data center (before the network points of presence were turned up in Asia), I ran a traceroute from Singapore to SoftLayer.com, and immediately after the launch of the data center, I ran another one:

Pre-Launch Traceroute to SoftLayer.com from Singapore

traceroute to softlayer.com (66.228.118.53), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  10.151.60.1 (10.151.60.1)  1.884 ms  1.089 ms  1.569 ms
 2  10.151.50.11 (10.151.50.11)  2.006 ms  1.669 ms  1.753 ms
 3  119.75.13.65 (119.75.13.65)  3.380 ms  3.388 ms  4.344 ms
 4  58.185.229.69 (58.185.229.69)  3.684 ms  3.348 ms  3.919 ms
 5  165.21.255.37 (165.21.255.37)  9.002 ms  3.516 ms  4.228 ms
 6  165.21.12.4 (165.21.12.4)  3.716 ms  3.965 ms  5.663 ms
 7  203.208.190.21 (203.208.190.21)  4.442 ms  4.117 ms  4.967 ms
 8  203.208.153.241 (203.208.153.241)  6.807 ms  55.288 ms  56.211 ms
 9  so-2-0-3-0.laxow-cr1.ix.singtel.com (203.208.149.238)  187.953 ms  188.447 ms  187.809 ms
10  ge-4-0-0-0.laxow-dr2.ix.singtel.com (203.208.149.34)  184.143 ms
    ge-4-1-1-0.sngc3-dr1.ix.singtel.com (203.208.149.138)  189.510 ms
    ge-4-0-0-0.laxow-dr2.ix.singtel.com (203.208.149.34)  289.039 ms
11  203.208.171.98 (203.208.171.98)  187.645 ms  188.700 ms  187.912 ms
12  te1-6.bbr01.cs01.lax01.networklayer.com (66.109.11.42)  186.482 ms  188.265 ms  187.021 ms
13  ae7.bbr01.cs01.lax01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.166)  188.569 ms  191.100 ms  188.736 ms
14  po5.bbr01.eq01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.140)  381.645 ms  410.052 ms  420.311 ms
15  ae0.dar01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.211)  415.379 ms  415.902 ms  418.339 ms
16  po1.slr01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.138)  417.426 ms  417.301 ms
    po2.slr01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.142)  416.692 ms
17  * * *

Post-Launch Traceroute to SoftLayer.com from Singapore

traceroute to softlayer.com (66.228.118.53), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  192.168.206.1 (192.168.206.1)  2.850 ms  1.409 ms  1.206 ms
 2  174.133.118.65-static.reverse.networklayer.com (174.133.118.65)  1.550 ms  1.680 ms  1.394 ms
 3  ae4.dar01.sr03.sng01.networklayer.com (174.133.118.136)  1.812 ms  1.341 ms  1.734 ms
 4  ae9.bbr01.eq01.sng02.networklayer.com (50.97.18.198)  35.550 ms  1.999 ms  2.124 ms
 5  50.97.18.169-static.reverse.softlayer.com (50.97.18.169)  174.726 ms  175.484 ms  175.491 ms
 6  po5.bbr01.eq01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.140)  203.821 ms  203.749 ms  205.803 ms
 7  ae0.dar01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.253)  306.755 ms
    ae0.dar01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.211)  208.669 ms  203.127 ms
 8  po1.slr01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.138)  203.518 ms
    po2.slr01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.142)  305.534 ms
    po1.slr01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.138)  204.150 ms
 9  * * *

I won’t dive too deep into what these traceroutes are telling us because that’ll need to be an entirely different blog. What I want to draw your attention to are a few key differences between the pre- and post-launch traceroutes:

• Getting onto SoftLayer’s network:. The first reference to “networklayer” in the pre-launch trace is in hop 12 (~187ms). In the post-launch trace, we were on “networklayer” in the second hop (~1.5ms).
• Number of hops: Pre-launch, our network path took 16 hops to get to SoftLayer.com. Post-launch, it took 8.
• Response times from the destination: The average response time from SoftLayer.com to Singapore before the launch of our network points of presence in Asia was about 417ms (milliseconds). After the launch, it dropped to an average of about ~250ms.

These traceroutes demonstrate that users in Singapore travel a much better network path to a server in one of our U.S. data centers than they had before we turned up the network in Asia, and that experience isn’t limited to users in Singapore … users throughout Europe and Asia will see fewer hops and better speeds now that the data centers and points of presence on those continents are live. And that’s without buying a server in either of those markets or making any changes to how they interact with us.

Managing a worldwide network for a worldwide customer base with thousands of different ISPs and millions of possible routes is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor, so we have a team of engineers in our Network Operations Center that focuses on tweaking and optimizing routes 24×7. Branching out into Europe and Asia introduces a slew of challenges when working with providers on the other side of the globe, but I guess it’s true: “If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

Innovate or die.

-@toddmitchell

A month ago, Summer talked about how SoftLayer defies the laws of physics by being in several different places at the same time. With a worldwide network and data center footprint, that’s always going to be the case, but when we have several events going on in a given week, we’re even more dispersed. As Summer mentioned in her Server Challenge blog this morning, she traveled east to New York City for ad:tech with a few SLayers, and I joined a team that headed west for Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara, California.

We set up shop on the expo floor and had the opportunity to meet with interesting and interested attendees between session. In addition to our exhibit hall presence, SoftLayer had three SLayers featured in presentations, and the response to each was phenomenal.

Our first presenter was none other than SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda. His presentation, “Not Your Grandpa’s Cloud,” was about dedicated servers and whether cloud computing may be surpassing that “grandpa” of the hosting industry. Joined by RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, Duke also announced our SoftLayer’s new relationship with RightScale. If you didn’t have a chance to join us, we have a treat for you … You can download Duke’s presentation from Sys-con!

Five minutes after Duke left the stage, SoftLayer Director of Product Innovation Marc Jones spoke to Cloud Expo attendees about “Building at Internet Scale in a Hosted Environment.” His focus was how businesses could enable technologies, design and architecture of Internet scale solutions in a hosted environment. He shared trends from SoftLayer customers and partners, explained what SoftLayer believes Internet-scale is from a technology perspective, and the products and services in the market that create a scalable solution.

On Day 3, SoftLayer Director of Corporate Analytics Francisco Romero presented a question to attendees: “How Smart is it to Build Your Own Cloud?” With concerns around security, hardware, software and flexibility, is a business better off going with a hosted solution over building its own cloud infrastructure. Spoiler alert: He showed how the hosted environment was head-and-shoulders over the in-house environment in most cases.

All in all, Cloud Expo West was an exemplary tradeshow for SoftLayer … Three fantastic speakers in two days driving traffic to our booth where we could share how SoftLayer has built our cloud and how our approach is part of a bigger effort to drive innovation in the world of hosting.

As Summer mentioned in her post, we want to see your smiling faces at our booths and in our presentations in the future, so bookmark the SoftLayer Event Calendar and start planning your trips to meet us in 2012!

-Natalie

How are we already in mid-November? Did 2011 just fly by us or what? As we approach 2012, I will be celebrating my fourth anniversary with SoftLayer in our Seattle data center. Seattle was SoftLayer’s first data center outside of the Dallas area when it opened four years ago, and since then, I’ve seen the launch of Washington D.C., the Dallas HQ + DAL05, San Jose, Singapore and Amsterdam … while adding a few data centers in Houston and Dallas after the merger with The Planet last year. We’ve gone from ~15,000 servers when I started to around 100,000 servers in 13 data centers with 16 network PoPs on three different continents around the world. It’s safe to say we’ve grown.

In the four years since our Seattle facility launched, over 60% of our original team – the folks our Dallas team trained – are still here. Being part of such a huge team and watching the SoftLayer roll out data centers around the world is exciting, and seeing our customers grow with us is even better. In the midst of all of that growth, our team is always trying to figure out new technologies and techniques to share with customers to help them meet their ever-evolving needs. The goal: Give our customers total control.

One great example of this focus was our recent launch of QuantaStor Storage Servers. We teamed up with industry leader OS Nexus to bring our customers a production-ready mass storage appliance with a combined SAN and NAS storage system built into the Ubuntu Server and provides a number of system features such as snapshots, compression, remote replication and thin provisioning. A customer could use this in a number of environments from virtualized systems to video production to web and application servers, or as a backup based server. If you’re looking for a mass storage system, I highly recommend it.

If we’ve grown this much in my first four years, I can only imagine what the business will look like four years from now. A SoftLayer data center on every corner? Maybe we can get PHIL to figure out how we can put a SoftLayer pod in the space normally occupied by a coffee shop … making sure to keep as much coffee as possible, obviously.

-Bill