News Posts

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.

Three of Lance Crosby’s favorite things are fajitas, chicken wings, and cloud computing. Believe it or not, there is a common thread between all three. See if you can figure it out.

First, let’s consider fajitas. What are they? Well, the only true fajita is beef outside skirt steak. Everything else is just grilled meat that you stuff in a tortilla. For many years, the outside skirt steak was a “throwaway” cut often given to vaqueros as part of their pay <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajita> . I know a man who grew up in a family of migrant farm workers, and in his youth they would visit slaughterhouses to ask for free throwaway cuts. They often got fajitas.

Back in the ‘80s, the retail price of fajitas skyrocketed. Tex-mex restaurants suddenly made that cut of meat popular. Then, in 1988, a treaty with Japan allowed the Japanese to import American outside skirt steak without the usual 200% tariff. Thus, 90% of our outside skirt steak winds up in Japan. Bottom line, a previously unutilized throwaway cut of meat became a gold mine and boosted the utilization of a side of beef. Consequently, when you order fajitas today, you usually get some sort of substitute beef <http://www.dallasobserver.com/2009-06-18/restaurants/so-what-exactly-are-you-eating-when-you-order-fajitas-in-a-tex-mex-restaurant/1> , not true outside skirt steak.

Next, think about the lowly chicken wing. I just saw an ad for a local chicken wing place offering their “boneless” chicken wings for a special low price. These aren’t really wings. They are pure white tender boneless chicken breast strips – what you would think is the premium cut of a chicken. The fine print on the ad says that bone-in wings may NOT be substituted for this promotion. Huh? You can’t sub a worse cut of meat that’s mostly bone for a premium cut that’s all meat and no bone?

As it turns out, the demand for the formerly throwaway cut of chicken wings has driven up their price such that boneless breast strips yield a higher profit margin <http://www.abc3340.com/news/stories/0310/711570.html> than the bony wings. Once again, a formerly thrown away item becomes a gold mine and allows for higher utilization of the whole bird.

Finally, let’s add in cloud computing to this puzzle. When dedicated servers are used, they each often perform a single task, whether it’s an email server, a web server, an application server, a database server, etc. Such servers frequently have a resource utilization rate of less than 20%, which means that 80% of the server’s processing power is thrown away.

Enter cloud computing. When done correctly, cloud computing increases the utilization rate of each individual server and turns the formerly thrown away processing power into a gold mine. This allows for more efficient capital investments and a higher return on assets.

So what’s the common thread between fajitas, chicken wings, and cloud computing? You’ve probably already figured it out. All three have taken something that previously was almost worthless and thrown away and turned it into something valuable and highly demanded by boosting utilization.

SoftLayer plans to take this to another level later this year when we release BYOC – Build Your Own CloudTM. You’ll then be able to tailor your processing power to exactly what you need. Just select the amount of RAM, number of processors, storage space, an operating system, select hourly or monthly billing, and go. You don’t pay for resources you don’t need or use, and we have less unused processing capacity in our datacenters. It’s a win-win for our customers, our company, and the environment since power and real estate will be used more efficiently.

Serving up content on the internet can be a tricky business. It isn’t just about running a web or app server(s) in an efficient and reliable manner. One of the other critical factors is DNS. You have to understand and optimize how the name the content is advertised under gets translated to the IP address of the content. I don’t want to turn this into a DNS primer, but the two ends of the line of communication are the authoritative DNS server controlled by the domain owner which stores the official translation of the name to the number and the resolving DNS server which acts as a cache and is where the end-user connects to directly. Both ends of the chain have their own idiosyncrasies which can affect how quickly and reliably your content gets delivered.

On the end-user side, I just read an article about how public DNS providers like OpenDNS and Google are breaking the internet. OK, maybe not breaking the internet, but the public DNS providers are confusing CDN location-based algorithms. The article is here: http://www.sajalkayan.com/in-a-cdnd-world-opendns-is-the-enemy.html and I recommend strongly that both content providers and content consumers read it.

The summary is that some CDN algorithms use the ip address (and location) of the DNS server making the request and if that DNS server is nowhere near the end-user on the internet, the end-user will get served content from farther away and will get that content slower than desired. The conclusion is that an end-user should always use a DNS server located as close as possible network-wise, usually that ends up being a DNS server of the network provider.

That is good advice for the end-user, but what about the content provider? If you flip this around and come at DNS from the content provider’s point of view who doesn’t use CDN, you want to make sure that when a DNS request is made, that your authoritative DNS server gets the ip address as fast and reliably as possible back to the end-user.

SoftLayer has built out authoritative DNS farms in all our Datacenters and Network POPs and anycasted the ip addresses for the name servers. What that means is that SoftLayer customers – who get to use our DNS for free – can have their authoritative domain services hosted at all 10 points in North America and through the routing optimization inherent in the internet, the name to number conversion for those domains will happen as close as possible to the end-user and the results will be delivered as quickly as possible.

One very important goal of every content provider is to get the end-user the best experience as possible. Understanding how the internet works from the end-user and well as the server-side is critical. It doesn’t matter how good your content or app is if the end-user has a poor experience.

-@nday91

I am just curious how many ways we use the word network and how many different meanings it has. If you think about it we use it in many ways. The word was first seen in the 1500’s and related to knitting and weaving silk like a net and then in the 1600’s it refers to reticulate structures in animals and plants. In the 1800’s it is used to refer to rivers, canals, railways, and a distribution of electrical cables. In 1914 it is used to describe a wireless broadcasting system. Yep, I said 1914 and wireless in the same sentence (think Radio). Read more here.

As you can see the word has the possibility for quite a few meanings. We use the word today for quite a few things. We do this with other words in the English language as well. Here are a couple of my favorites.

“They’re over there talking about their cars.” And “He should sell those sails while they are on sale.”

The English language can be very tricky because the same words can have different meaning or different words can sound the same when spoken. Here is my best attempt at a network sentence.

“I was on my wireless network, networking with some of my in-network physicians while watching my favorite network TV show.” Um, could I get some help diagramming this sentence over here?

According to Google Webmaster tools SoftLayer uses the word Network 1916 times on our entire site. The only other word we use more is of course the word SoftLayer (because we like our name I assume!) and it has a total of 7235. I think you will see in the coming months that these two numbers will get closer together as we have just rolled out our new network.

You can read all about it here and if you like what you see then please click our “Like” button in the upper right corner of the page. Here are a few of the fun details:

• 1,000 Gbps of connectivity between 3 data centers and 7 points of presence – It makes a great network that looks like a net!
• Increased number of transit providers and peers – more control, lower latency, improved routes – PING times will improve.
• VPN Access to all PoPs – reduces latency between you and our network.
• Enterprise Grade DNS located in all 10 PoPs – this will improve d performance and help with DDOS mitigation.
• Direct Connections to PoPs – Get a Metro WAN direct to SoftLayer private network.

Keep looking for more new announcements in the coming weeks. I would make a checklist but it would be very long and would take too much of my time to manage!

Opera’s new mobile browser for the iPhone has finally been approved by Apple to be included on the App Store. Read the official announcement.

I’ve played around with the browser for the past 30 minutes. My impressions are as follows:

Pros

• It’s a wicked fast mobile browser. No doubts about that. A definite improvement over the other browser options on the iPhone.
• The Dashboard is a very welcome addition.
• Zooming in and out of the web page to read different portions of the web page was something I didn’t like at first. After browser a few pages, it grew on me. You can turn on “mobile view” in the settings to force the content to narrow to the view screen.
• Opera’s version of tabbed browsing is remarkable!
• Opera has great offline support through “Saved Pages”.

Cons

• Bookmarks were a little difficult to find at first. It’s located under “Settings” which seems to be the wrong place in my opinion. Trivial, I know.
• You can NOT set the Opera mini as the “default” browser. Though this is directed more towards a failing of the iPhone OS than the Opera browser itself.
• Text heavy pages tend to have some text overlapping issues.
• Unlike its PC brother, the Opera Mini does not pass the ACID 2 or ACID 3 tests.
  • On this note, Safari on the iPhone does pass both the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests.

My overall impression of the new Opera Mini for the iPhone is good. For me, ease of use is a major clincher for mobile internet browsing and the Opera Mini hits the target.

It’s been two and a half years (roundabout) since I started here at SoftLayer. It’s amazing to take a look back and see exactly how far we have come in that time. We sacrifice sleep for innovation and food for customer service. Our Development team works around the clock to continue to release products and features that further enhance our customers’ ability to take control of their servers and reduce interaction with our support team (although we’re sure that you love us, right?). It’s often fun to look back at the past and see exactly how far you’ve come. Sometimes when you’re buried in the day-to-day, it’s difficult to take a look from above to see that.

As I first set foot in the doors at the Dallas NOC, I walked into a maelstrom of activity. Brad showed me the ropes and walked me through my first server build. He showed me how to monitor server provisions and reloads and taught me everything (and then some) about hardware. Concurrently, two new datacenters were in the works – one in Seattle and one in WDC. As the company grew, the crew grew with it. I watched as our team grew with the company. I saw promotions, new hires, and new titles being added every day. I decided I had to get a piece of the action. After some trial, error, and plenty of downtime on an old PC, I learned a few things, and made my move to SysAdmin. I was lucky enough to have a crew who was willing to teach me some tricks of the trade.

Soon thereafter Lance announced even more growth. We’re now opening up a new corporate headquarters (watch the progress here!), our network map has been updated to add our new POPs, and there’s plenty more exciting news forthcoming. Needless to say SoftLayer doesn’t rest. While it may be rough at times, it’s great to look back at the last few years and see how far we’ve come. We’re a tight knit family. The ones that have been here for a while work closely to ensure our success, and the newbies are quickly taught the way of the SLayer. We’ll continue to grow, and opportunities for both our staff and our customers will be endless. Congrats to SL for leading the path, and kudos to our customers for making us the best in the industry!

Being the “cell phone person” here at SoftLayer has its challenges, to put it mildly. I thought that working with mostly boys (yes, I meant to say boys) would be a breeze compared to a bunch of women (we tend to be a bit ummm, picky?). I was terribly wrong! They are WORSE! Especially with gadgets like cell phones, considering the field we are in. For some reason a lot of them think that because they can configure a server they also know exactly what is wrong with their phone without actually troubleshooting it at all or why they MUST have this phone or that phone.

Reboot?! Why?! Hmmmm that was one of the first things I learned to ALWAYS do. I learned this from Jacob Linscott, my first IT guy back in 1997, who I work with once again; he is our Director of IT – Linux. I learned very quickly that I had better not EVEN think about calling him until I had rebooted my computer. Amazingly enough, I’d say the odds on a reboot fixing the issue with both computers and cell phones is very high, but that’s about the only thing that is similar in regards to issues between the two. I have been amazed at the multitude of varying issues as well as the information you can find online to fix a phone without having to call the carrier; and, that is a real life saver!

What baffles me is that everyone seems to know what’s wrong with their phone without actually researching it. When I say “So you Googled that and found info that said it was most likely the issue?” I get “nah, I just think that’s it.” I just shake my head, take their phone, and walk away. I Google my rear end off all the time! I am as specific as possible when I do a search. Such as, “my 8320 can send SMS, but is not receiving them.” Seems obvious, right? Wrong!

One would think the Geektopia of staff we have would do the same, WRONG! There is a world of knowledge and information out there regarding any number of BlackBerry and iPhone issues if you simply just take a few minutes to type your issue into a search engine. Heck, you don’t have to use Google, you can use whatever search engine you want! I’ve sent out emails regarding tips and tricks, the problem I seem to have is getting people to actually read the info. Admittedly, we get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day, some days thousands, depending on what group lists they are on; so I’ll give a little slack. It’s simply a case of missing the obvious, like when you are trying to fix a computer and it won’t work and it turns out to be the simplest thing that was forgotten, happens with phone issues too. Everyone just goes into panic mode when their phone isn’t functioning, amazing how we lived without cell phones just 20 years ago.

When SL was starting up just a few years ago, our VP of Sales was the cell phone person and he wasn’t too thrilled. He couldn’t WAIT to pass it on to someone else. I was the chosen one or sucker, depending how you look at it. I remember sitting in my cube my first week at SL, which wasn’t too far from his office, and giggling when he had to call the carrier and deal with some phone issues. I don’t giggle anymore. They told me by no means was it a punishment, taking over this particular job duty, but some days I wonder—especially the days when I get stuck on the phone for hours and hours trying to get a phone fixed, repeating myself over and over to 5 different people in 5 departments! It’s a source of some major meltdowns to say the least.

You see, we have about 130 phones throughout the company in four different locations. Dallas has Corporate and the DC and of course Seattle and WDC. So a lot of phones, a lot of folks, a lot of issues; from “My phone got ruined when I went hiking wearing khaki’s and got caught in a rain storm, the rain soaked through and ruined my phone, can I have a better one now?” to, “I lost it at the Christmas Party, sorry” to “If I step on it, does that mean I have to pay for it, because I want a better one?!” Yes, those are just a few of them, and obviously some of my favorites.

I, with the help of a few others, just recently upgraded 31 phones; Lance our CEO is cool like that. You see, the 31 were 8700c BB models, or fondly referred to as “coasters” around here. Of course they were spread across our four locations, so this required lots of coordination with someone on the other end of the line. This upgrade took over a month due to device issues (new phone to market at the time).

The guys in the Dallas NOC all know better than to laugh as they hear my cursing due to being on the phone for countless hours; or if they do, they’ve gotten much better about hiding it.  The point of all of this is to remind you that if you have a company cell phone and it has issues, be kind to your cell phone person and know that you are not the only one with an issue. Cell phones break. Cell phones die. Cell phones get dropped on the ground, in the toilet, or, my favorite, thrown across a room in anger every single day. So if your cell phone person can’t get to you RIGHT THAT MINUTE, try trouble shooting it yourself. No, not installing things, but maybe just try and look up your issue, and let them know what you found. Send them the link or print it out. It will make their day. Trust me on this one!

SoftLayer is joining the online project Hosting for Haiti in an effort to raise awareness and funding for the American Red Cross. The earthquakes in Haiti on January 12 and the resulting aftershocks have left the country devastated.

The American Red Cross is dedicated to providing emergency relief and recovery to help those affected by the disaster.

This project is a joint effort between hosting providers like ourselves. Peer1 Hosting, GoGrid, The Planet, ServInt, and Rackspace are all involved in helping with donations and spreading awareness. If you would like to get involved, follow the info link at http://hostingforhaiti.com/.

Follow on Twitter: @hostingforhaiti or use the hashtag #hostingforhaiti.

There is some confusion out there on what’s a good way to back up your data. In this article we will go over several options for good ways to backup and sore your backups along with a few ways that are not recommended.

There is some confusion out there on what’s a good way to back up your data. In this article we will go over several options for good ways to backup and sore your backups along with a few ways that are not recommended.

When it comes to backups storing them off site (off your server or on a secondary drive not running your system) is the best solution with storing them off site being the recommended course.

When raids come into consideration just because the drives are redundant (a lave mirror situation) there are several situations, which can cause a complete raid failure such as the raid controller failing, the array developing a bad stripe. Drive failure on more than one drive(this does happen though rarely) , out of date firmware on the drives and the raid card causing errors. Using a network storage device like our evault or a nas storege is also an excellent way to store backups off system. The last thing to consider is keeping your backups up to date. I suggest making a new back every week at minimum (if you have very active sites or data bases I would recommend a every other day backup or daily backup). It is up to you or your server administrator to keep up with your backups and make sure they are kept up to date. If you have a hardware failure and your backups are well out of date it’s almost like not having them at all.

In closing consider the service you provide and how your data is safe, secure, and recoverable. These things I key to running a successful server and website.

Some mornings after work when the weather is nice I’ll go to a local coffee shop on the way home to read or study for the CCNA exams. Sometimes I’ll just end up pulling out the netbook and browse around online. There are times during these outings when I’ll get asked the title question of this blog: is that a real computer? I guess the size that throws people but the answer is yes.

For those who are not familiar with the netbook class of systems here are the specs for mine:

• 10.2 inch screen
• 1 GB RAM
• 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor
• 160GB SATA hard drive
• 3 USB ports
• Card reader
• Built-in Wifi
• Built-in webcam
• Windows XP (I’ve got plans for Windows 7)
• 5 hour battery life
• Light weight (I’ve got books that weigh more)

Netbooks are great for when you’re just knocking around town and might want to do some light web work. This morning while at Starbucks I’ve checked e-mail several times, caught up on the daily news, and reviewed the game statistics from the Cowboys game I missed last night. Other mornings I’ve fired up a VPN connection into the office and been able to remotely help with tickets, work on documentation for our SSL product and tinker around with a NetScaler VPX Express virtual machine (an interesting bit of tech for a later article).

So how does this tie into server hosting?

You’ve probably had a time when your monitoring has indicated a service ceasing to respond on a server. If all you have is a cell phone the options are somewhat limited. With a fancy enough phone you might have an SSH or RDP client but do you really want to do anything on a PDA sized screen? I didn’t think so. You can put in a ticket from your phone and our support can help out but the person best able to fix a service failure is still going to be you, the server administrator who knows where all the bodies are buried and how the bits tie together.

A small netbook can be a lightweight (and inexpensive) administration terminal for your servers hosted with us. Just find an Internet connection, connect up to the SoftLayer VPN and now you have complete access to work on your servers via a secure connection.

Through the wonders of the IPMI KVM this access even includes the console which opens up the possibility of doing a custom kernel build and install safely, while sitting under the stars, drinking a hot chocolate and watching the local nightlife.

Sounds like a pretty nice reality to me.