News Posts

The last 2 months have been full of surprises and a little stressful for all employees involved. The Planet and Softlayer have been merged into a giant, yet powerful organization. SoftLayer’s CEO Lance Crosby has taken control and he has been very clear on his vision. Yesterday in Houston was “Introduction to Softlayer” and Lance was very open seems to be a person who holds no punches. He stated the vision and path the company has chosen and gave us an overview of what it takes to be the leading IaaS provider.

During our 2.5 hour meeting Lance was clear and to the point on how his “family” is growing and I agree this will feel like a very large family soon. Lance gave us an open forum and the ability to throw out any question we saw fit, and we did with no holds barred. He never once dodged a question, he just answered them. This is how Softlayer is and will continue to be, we will be straight shooters to you and all our customers alike. This is what makes me excited to be part of Lance’s team.

We covered everything from upcoming services to be offered, to a global footprint being key. He said sales and support need to follow the sun; so no matter where you are in the world you will have the same level of support. He talked about how the “family members” are the driving forces with new innovations and bleeding edge technology. Where else can you be told your hardware will be ready in 4 hours. (Rackspace, I say nay). So our competition needs to look out because we will not be touched, why?

Because, we are BIGGER BETTER BADDER!

-Lee

It seems like just yesterday I was writing a blog about my confessions of being a new Planeteer. After being laid off after 13 years with the same company, rumors of a merger were feeding my anxiety. I know change is inevitable, just like taxes and picking the slowest line wherever I go, but I was not ready for more shake ups just yet. I am still getting to know everyone and getting used to the company. I pride myself on avoiding office politics and gossip as much as possible, but the water cooler mongers were relentless! Should I look for a job? Will I be let go? Will I have to pursue the Wal-Mart greeter job that I am convinced would be stress free? The months since the announcement were hard. Our leaders did a great job of keeping us informed, but there was only so much information that could be shared. I continued as I always had, focused on my work and trying not to worry about what would come. There is a great saying, it is what it is. I could not stop this train and my freaking out would only bring stress to me and my family. So I took a deep breath and waited.

Last week when the signatures were in place and the “new world” was official, I found out that I was fine. My job was not impacted. I breathed a sigh of relief and immediately begin to wonder what was around the corner. It has been a hectic week. Some of my Planeteers have chosen to move on to other avenues, and some were informed they had to. With any type of business merger, there is always sorrow and joy mixed into your day. I am excited about the changes. The more I hear about what SoftLayer has to offer, the happier I am to be part of day one. The biggest focus was not to impact our customers and everyone has done a fabulous job. So as mail servers are merged and phone systems are integrated it is fun to get to know our new colleagues. We have come together as a team long before the ink was dry and I feel that each tomorrow will bring more and more excitement.

I will always think fondly of The Planet, but I will wear the SoftLayer colors with pride. After all, I have almost 12 more years to go!

-Tracy

General George S. Patton once said, “A good plan vigorously executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” This statement sums up the SoftLayer philosophy (well some of it anyways) – decisions are made and then quickly executed against – no paralysis by analysis here. Given the speed that the market is moving at, I think this is a good thing.

The events of the past few weeks are great evidence of a market that is moving at a rapid pace with little signs of slowing down.

• SoftLayer opened our second DC in Dallas at the end of September. In ten days we were pushing 10 GB of traffic. Yesterday we hit 15 GB of sustained traffic.
• Rackspace announced that they are already hosting 2 million paid users of its hosted email solution.
• 1 million servers have been announced as registered in Cloudkick.
• Siemens has revealed that they have 400,000 employees that interact with the HR system for a number of functions including compensation management, performance management ad career development planning via the cloud.
• The Android version of Angry Birds was downloaded an astonishing 2 million times on its launch day. (Angry Birds publisher, Chillingo was purchased by EA for under $20 million in cash plus other “undisclosed considerations”. I keep thinking that I am in at the wrong end of this business…)
• The US General Services Administration has announced that its Apps.gov cloud solution is going to add storage, virtualization and hosting to its portfolio. This will impact federal, state, local and tribal governments across the county. This works out to over 19 million employees, spread across thousands of departments (federal, state and local) and tens of thousands of municipalities. (SoftLayer is a part of this with strategic partners, Computer Technologies Consultants, Inc. Check out the PR stuff here.)

My suspicion is that you can pick almost any month over the previous 6 and you would find similar announcements and I suspect that they are going to continue over the next 6 months and beyond as well. The sign post seems pretty clear to me – we are in a rapidly growing market with little signs of a slowdown ahead. I don’t think this is going to be a market for the timid, companies that have a clear vision of what lays ahead and possess the ability to quickly execute against that vision will succeed. The rest will falter and miss the turn ahead. Guess where SoftLayer is going to be?

-@quigleymar

On October 11, our friends at Microsoft unveiled what promises to be the first in a long series of devices that will be powered by the newly minted Windows Mobile 7 operating system.

From a device perspective, they look familiar to what we currently get from Apple and Google Android powered devices. Each device features a relatively large touch screen, and a number of on-board applications that let you send and receive phone calls, send email, listen to music, watch videos and browse the internet. In addition, Microsoft offers the promise of the Marketplace Hub – here you can download other applications and games to the device.

The great thing about all of this is the potential impact on SoftLayer. The success of both Apple and Google’s Android OS (which is found on a number of different vendors including HTC, LG, Lenovo, Samsung and others) is due to a lot of factors. What is certain is that one of those factors has been the birth of a developer community that feeds all sorts of wild and wonderful applications to the Apple App Store and the Android Market. It is amazing how many people will pay $2.00 to hurl a bunch of fowl at pigs…make no mistake, this is a lucrative marketplace.

It goes without saying that SoftLayer has a bunch of app developers as clients. Our ability to quickly scale combined with a network architecture that can take whatever is thrown at it makes us a great partner. Not only do we host a number of test and development environments, but we also host a number of the live applications that are getting pushed out to end users. The addition of a robust Microsoft powered device to the family means a few things for us:

1. A number of companies will begin to work on porting games/apps to Microsoft Mobile 7. (We have already started)
2. A new flock of developers will arrive that are focused on Microsoft Mobile 7 apps. They will start there and consider porting to Apple and Android environments if they are successful.
3. Once the test and development work has been completed, it will be time to put those new apps in the hands of a bunch of eager consumers.

As far as I can tell, everything points to more SoftLayer! And the world needs more SoftLayer. So, on that note, let’s me take the opportunity to wish Microsoft terrific success with the new mobile OS. After all, a rising tide raises all ships!

-@quigleymar

Today, SoftLayer released an Advanced Monitoring Solution based on Nimsoft’s Monitoring software suite. In a nutshell the product will give SoftLayer visibility onto a customer’s server at the OS level. In addition to the great product benefit the customers receive, it will add tools to our sales and support staff to troubleshoot, diagnose and systems design.

The core product works through a piece of software that gets installed on a customer server called a robot. The robot in turn allows probes to be run on the server. The different probes collect various data points from the OS and applications. As the probes collect data they pass the information onto some intermediate backend servers, and eventually end up on our brand new HBase data warehouse (HBase is the massively scaled database for large amounts (petabytes) of data). This is the corner piece for the scalability of the offering. So, robot is the main software and the probes are the application watchers that run inside the robot framework.

There are additional features outside of the process mentioned called ‘Offbox Monitors’ or ‘Offbox Probes.’ These are probes that live on servers in the SoftLayer data center. The idea behind these is that we are able to let customers have network services they want to monitor from a remote location. An example would be url_reponse, which monitors if a url is active and passing data (along with some other pieces of data people might be interested in like response time).

What it can monitor? The better question might be what can’t it monitor? The SoftLayer offer comes in three packages – Basic, Advanced and Premium. Basic is a free package that monitors core hardware (CPU, memory, disk) along with simple process and services. Advanced moves into deeper system monitoring, and Premium adds more application monitoring (like databases, web services etc.). This offering is available for hardware, Monthly CCI’s and hourly CCI’s – basically for everything we sell. Customers can order the software from all order forms (external, internal, cci, server etc.) as well as add the service post deployment from the advanced monitoring portal page.

The service offering has two distinctive reporting features that we call graphing and alarms. Graphing allows customers to (yep, you guessed it) graph all the data we collect. For example, we can show a graph of CPU usage over time. Alarms are notifications that services are outside of a predetermined range. For example, you could setup an alarm when CPU usage goes above 90%. Alarms can be tracked from the customer portal, or email alerts (SoftLayer calls this list ‘Alarm Subscribers’) can be setup by the customer.

All the features of the product are accessed via the customer portal, or via SoftLayer’s internal portal. Configuration, graphing, and alarm management can all be done from one management page in the customer portal. In near real-time customers can change configurations directly on their server or cloud computing instance (CCI) for the various data points they want graph and alarm. It’s pretty slick, and it adds to the SoftLayer secret sauce. We have also added a feature that allows the customer to save configurations on a particular server and “redeploy” them on different servers or future servers they may add. This feature makes it easier to scale and customize for a particular customer’s needs.

As time goes on we will continue to add more probes and more features. This is just the beginning – make no mistake it’s pretty damn cool.

-@quigleymar

So this blog may be a tad bit delayed, seeing that it is about HostingCon, but better late than never. Right?? During HostingCon, at the SoftLayer Happy Hour, we filmed customers, random followers, and employees to see Why SoftLayer Rocks. Here are the responses we got….

Why Does SoftLayer Rock? Because……

“I get 100% uptime with them and they make sure all my servers are up”

“They offer the best cloud storage in the business”

“They are the ambassadors of the industry and help our business grow”

“My server has never gone down”

Now the most common responses were from the random guests at the Happy Hour. Go figure!

“Cause they throw great parties”

“When you mix alcohol and weapons that could potentially poke an eye out (SoftLayer Rockets)….It’s always in good fun” But… I think the best responses came from the employees….

“Because it is the best company to ever exist” Why is that? “The automation, technology, innovation, and the COO” –Sam Fleitman

“Cause we have a butt ton of cool customers” – Steve Kinman

“The bald guy makes a lot of very cool people happy” –Sean Charnock

There are many reasons Why SoftLayer Rocks and we could ask everyone and will get a different answer. Now if you ask an employee most likely they will eventually mention in their statement “because of me”. Here is why I think SoftLayer rocks….

SoftLayer is one of the fastest growing private companies (Inc 500/5000). SoftLayer offers customers everything at their fingers tips, especially now with the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android mobile apps. Besides everything that SoftLayer offers to customers, they are extremely good to their employees. Oh and another reason Why SoftLayer Rocks ‘because of ME!’

Lets here what more people have to say Why SoftLayer Rocks….Post a comment and tell us!

Most days, it seems that technology progresses all too slowly. It is a different feeling when you work with cutting edge technology on a daily basis: deploying the first dual network datacenter infrastructure, being entrenched in solutions for everything from CDN to ISCI to DTS and more, testing the latest enterprise solutions from leading industry vendors long before money could buy them… it never really meant a whole lot to me; it was very much just, “How we roll”, as the gang would say.

But every so often, there is a day when a new technology catches my attention and reminds me why I got involved in the IT industry. Something that reminds me of the days spent tapping out QuickBasic 2.0 applications on my 18MHz 386 and 16 color EGA monitor. Surprisingly, the rise of cloud computing did just that. There was a day some still remember, when the cost of localized hardware was significant enough that terminals ruled the world. Occasionally, you may still see one at a grocery checkout stand or being used in a retail stockroom to check inventory across locations. Early terminals were commonly thin clients lacking a processor, non-volatile user storage, and only possessing enough memory to display what was on the screen at any given time. As the cost of memory declined, fat clients gained some popularity offering locally programmable memory. However, the concept was still the same: one host machine, usually a mainframe, serving applications over a distance to multiple (less capable) client machines.

Terminals were not destined to last though. In a twist of irony one of the innovations that they helped to inspire, the microprocessor, combined with the falling price and increased capacity of memory eventually led the decline of terminals. Left behind, in a cloud of dust, by hardware manufacturer’s race for speed capacity combined with advances in networking technology, the terminal PC became a historical relic looked upon as a necessary stop-gap solution used in the days when hardware was just too-darn-expensive. It was at that time the truly personal computer that we know and love was born and has forever-since reigned supreme. Then came the ARPANET, which gave way to the Information Super Highway, gave way to the World Wide Web, gave way to the internet we know today.

Mainframes gave way to servers. And today, I walk into a datacenter surrounded by servers boasting quad octo-core processors and Cloud Computing Instances, talking to customers who use their smart-phones to remotely access their web hosts, and quietly thinking to myself, “Have things really changed?” How far off is the day, when the benefits of remotely hosted applications outweigh the benefits of localized hardware? When we sit at the start of a new era where CCI’s can be created in minutes, regularly imaged for data security, migrated and restored quickly in the event of hardware failure, accessed from anywhere and from a variety of client hardware and software implementations, how much more would it take for us to return to the days of terminal PC’s. As bandwidth continues to improve, purchase and operational costs per processing core continues to fall, people demand more and more ‘anywhere access’, open source gains popularity and the idea of renting freely upgraded applications becomes accepted outside of the IT community, who knows what the future might hold. In a future where the concept of parallel uplinks may be no more foreign than that of parallel data transfer over CAT6 is to the layman, I wonder if personal computers will be thought of as the necessary stop-gap solution used while we waited for bandwidth to catch up to useable processing power; nothing more than a dinosaur that gave way to the green-movement and our need to be connected everywhere.

While I work on bringing my head out of the clouds, I remember why I am here. I am not here because technology’s past was all that fantastic, or because the present is all that glamorous, but because the future is still wide open. Whether-or-not clouds ever really kill the PC is anyone’s guess and only time will tell. However, one thing is currently known, as companies continue to see the benefit of having their staff conduct business through a web-portal interface, consumers continue trying to figure out what they are going to do with the extra two or three of the four cores they have, and the cost-to-performance ratio associated with remote resources continues to fall, we are steadily moving that way.

Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4 has had an interestingly polarized reaction. While many have praised the all-new design and unprecedented screen quality, others, who are already happy with another platform, have found it almost completely un-compelling. Beyond the natural tendency for human bias and the obvious contrast in priorities of the two platforms, this difference of opinion still provides some food for thought.

If you had asked me what the iPhone’s strongest advantages over its competitors were before the iPhone 4 announcement, I probably would have cited, among other things, build quality and text rendering. And yet, apparently, those are two of the things Apple has most focused on improving. It could be argued that this is an illogical move on Apple’s part—that Apple should have instead focused on the software features touted by competitors. (I’m not an Android user, but I’m told its notification system, for example, is excellent.)

But I don’t think Apple’s decisions are at all illogical. I think they’ve employed a principle we could all do well to realize and remember: when your company has a best-in-class product or service, it shouldn’t get too distracted with beating its competitors to beat itself. Certainly there are things to be learned from competitors in any industry; but the most important customers are always the ones you already have.

So, why strengthen what’s already strong? Current customers probably chose your company because of its strengths and in spite of its weaknesses. In a way, then, they’ve already identified that what your company does well is extremely important to them. This is, of course, no excuse to ignore weaknesses—doing so could be catastrophic. But it is a charge to never get complacent about what your company does well. One day, someone else will do it better. But no company is in a better position to do so than yours.

Our API has gone through more than a few changes since the middle of 2006 when it was first released in beta to a few of our customers. Since then, it has grown from a handful of available features to your one stop shop for infrastructure automation needs. Providing all the functionality our customer portal has, plus putting automation in your/the customers’ hands that was only dreamed of a few short years ago. We have a few NEW note worthy features we just released concerning the API that numerous people have asked for. So here goes:

1. Opened the API up to the public network

We now have two ways to access the SoftLayer API. The first is the same method you have been using utilizing our private network. Some developers have asked for a way to bypass the VPN and private network. So we have added a publicly accessible entry point for the API in addition to the private network. This should open up your development to new exciting desktop widgets and consumption of our API for external software projects without requiring the VPN overhead. More information is available in the SLDN wiki.

2. RESTful web services

We added a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) interface to the arsenal of already supported SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. REST is great if you want to perform simple requests that do not require the complexity of SOAP and for simple integration into AJAX related operations on web pages.

3. New documentation

We have just revised our documentation located in the SLDN wiki. We added more examples, updated connection information for public access and usage for our new REST protocol support. We have also been busy working on our growing collection of open source projects.

4. New Code Samples

As you may or may not have heard Softlayer has a github account now. We are uploading projects and examples as fast as we can. You might want to check out Stratos a white label portal example, Client libraries for Python, Perl and PHP, as well as our growing gist examples which outline common tasks requested by customers.

We would love to hear any feature requests you are looking for, so let us hear from you.

OK so 360 degrees covers every direction, right? It’s everything top to bottom, front to back, and side to side. Is it possible for a network or datacenter to have you covered by 360 degrees? No way. Impossible. Can’t happen and wont happen in this life nor the next. That kind of total coverage is on the level of other mythological beings, like Big Foot, that are awe-inspiring, and the stuff of legend. The new network extensions in addition to what we had before have brought a lot of light to what the possibilities are. I mean at one point most people in the world thought their world was flat. So if you can see things the way I do you may agree that the 360 degree network is real and SoftLayer is the key to this understanding. Who knows, if we prove this to be true maybe we can even find hard proof evidence of Big Foot too.

Steve Kinman, affectionately known as SKinman, beat me to the punch in writing about the new POPs that have been recently released. If we didn’t know better we’d think it was his job or something to write blogs. But seriously, if you haven’t already, take the time to check out http://theinnerlayer.softlayer.com/2010/network/. I was all hyped up to write up about the new additions, and luckily that there are so many things that this offering has to give Skinman was only able to get in some of the cool stuff about it. The overly quick review of recent updates to the network is that we’ve added POPs in pretty much each and every major Telecom city in America. This not only gives us additional capacities, redundancies, and even luxuries that are not just impossible for you to get anywhere else, but also that you don’t have to pay for it.

So what do we get from this additional network capacity? The answer is a much better overall end user experience. The internet isn’t about just a bunch of tubes, but instead it is about people. It’s about people who want to connect to others, people who want to learn things, and people who want to make life easier. We’ve simply taken one of the widely acclaimed networks in the world and increased its capacity and potential exponentially. We know we get a better end user experience, but I say we also get tons of Value which is what makes this business. “How so” you ask? If you think about it we’ve all been given all of these awesome additional features and it costs us nothing, zip, nada. In fact it probably increases our leverage to make more enterprise level solutions even more affordable and within reach. Geographical diversity is a huge tool to have at your disposal, but most times it costs way too much to think about things like Disaster Recovery, or High Availability solutions and not to mention too complex. Think about it. If you have different facilities in different cities there are few ways of making something work and endless road blocks keeping you from being able to do what you need before you even think of the costs. Let’s face it; Innovation is both expensive and Risky. The value that new POPs bring on top of what our network was already capable of does more to neutralize the cost and risk of expansion more than anything that has ever been available to the masses. The POPs do not even mention what is possible and what often gets overlooked about the private network already. Lets take a look at what matters most to the majority of our customers.

1. Free inbound bandwidth. – We were the first to introduce this and some have followed to offer as well, but not everyone.
2. All 10G connections from each Carrier or Peer – In order to make sure you have the best end user experience there is a vast amount of BW capacity and we will not work with any providers that cannot give us 10G in a location. This has caused us to no longer work with providers we have previously worked with to get this done.
3. Cisco Network Routing and Switch Gear from top to bottom – We use this throughout our infrastructure to make sure we have the best results. We are also constantly testing new technologies to make sure that we do not miss out on pushing the industry from an innovative standpoint.
4. Arbor Peakflow and Atlas Traffic Analysis – This may not be necessary for everyone at all times, and it is something of a minor point. Still it is somewhat important to note how traffic is coming in and that it is available for you if and when you need it.
5. Automated IP routing & Management via FCP – This makes sure we use the best routes for your traffic which further ensures a better overall experience.
6. Individual and Secure Private VLANS – Without this you can be exposed on a network which is a problem and you could have additional unnecessary risk. Without this others in the data center could “sniff your traffic” steal your IPs, or simply see and hack into your servers somewhat easily.
7. Up to 1000mbps connection on the server – it just includes all of our backbone carriers and our peering partners as well. (this number is expected to grow as we add more peering partners each week)
8. Geographically Redundant DNS services – this is made even more powerful with the additional POPs available.
9. This doesn’t even mention higher styles of load balancing, firewalls, or the control that we offer, but that is a whole other blog post.

OK, so now we’ve really tooted the Public network horn pretty hard. Doing this is necessary, because it doesn’t get a lot of attention sometimes. If you are wondering why then it’s important that we cover the other half of the coin: The Private Network. SoftLayer is built from the ground up making sure that we can imperative things to our customers: Unparalleled control, Automation, Integration and all of it is On-Demand with no long term contracts or large CapX to risk. We know this is important to you because it’s also important to us. We have always strived to be the innovative leader and the very first step was the private network. Normally, this is what gets all of the attention in anything that we bring out or offer because it ties everything in without having the normal hassles and complications caused by time and space issues in a datacenter. Where else can you integrate a cloud solution with dedicated servers while setting up a DMZ to make it all PCI compliant? You guessed it, nowhere. Where else could you take the same solution and expand it to multiple datacenters for higher levels of failover and performance?….. OK I guess this is getting kind of redundant and I could keep this up all day long, but I think you get the point. I am interested to hear of things that anyone feels that cannot be done within our network

With as much acclaim as the SoftLayer Private Network has gotten (and well deserved I might add) it is a major feet to provide an extended public network that is equally as impressive. Together they combine to create the 360 degree network, like all 5 lions coming together to form Voltron- Defender of the Universe. I’m just saying that if we have this here…. Keep your eyes out for Big foot.