Welcome to The InnerLayer, The SoftLayer Blog

It’s not easy to choose a cloud hosting provider.

In the first post of this series, we talked about the three key deciding factors every cloud customer has to consider, and we set up a Venn diagram to distinguish the surprisingly broad range of unique priorities customers can have:

Because every customer will prioritize a cloud’s cost, technology and hosting provider a little differently (for completely valid reasons), we mapped out seven distinct “zones” to differentiate some of the basic market segments, or “personas,” of cloud hosting buyers. That post was intended to set the stage for a larger discussion on how customers choose their cloud providers and how cloud providers choose their customers, and we’re just scratching the surface. We’re tackling a pretty big topic here, so as Bill Cosby famously says, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”

As a hosting provider, SoftLayer can’t expect to be all things for all people. It’s impossible to offer a quad-core hex-proc dedicated server for a price that will appeal to a customer in the market for a $49/mo dedicated server.

To better illustrate SoftLayer’s vision in the cloud market, we need to take that generic cost v. technology v. hosting provider diagram and give it the “Three Bars” treatment:

We’re much more interested in living and breathing the Zone 5 “Technology” space rather than the traditional Zone 2 “Hosting Provider” space. That’s why in the past two months, you’ve seen announcements about our launch of the latest Intel Processors, HPC computing with NVidia GPUs, searchable OpenStack Object Storage, and an innovative “Flex Image” approach to bluring the lines between physical and virtual servers. We choose to pursue the cloud customers who make their buying decisions in Zone 3.

That’s a challenging pursuit … It’s expensive to push the envelope in technology, customers primarily interested in technology/performance have demanding needs and expectations, and it’s easier to make mistakes when you’re breaking new ground. The majority of the hosting industry seems to have an eye on the buyer in Zone 1 because they believe the average hosting customer is only interested in the bottom line … That hosting is more or less a commodity, so the focus should be on some unverifiable qualitative measure of support or the next big special that’ll bring in new orders.

As you may have seen recently, GigaOm posted a lovely article that references several high-profile companies in our 25,000+ customer family. We like to say that SoftLayer builds the platform on which our customers build the future, and that short post speaks volumes about the validity of that statement. Our goal is to provide the most powerful, scalable and seamlessly integrated IT infrastructure for the most innovative companies in the world. Innovate or Die isn’t just our company motto … It’s our hope for our customers, as well.

We might miss out on your business if you want a $49/mo dedicated server, but if you’re looking to change the world, we’ve got you covered.

-@khazard

If you had to order a new cloud server right now, how would choose it?

I’ve worked in the hosting industry for the better part of a decade, and I can safely say that I’ve either observed or been a part of the buying decision for a few thousand hosting customers — from small business owners getting a website online for the first time to established platforms that are now getting tens of millions of visits every day. While each of those purchasers had different requirements and priorities, I’ve noticed a few key deciding factors that are consistent in a all of those decisions:

How much will the dedicated server or cloud computing instance cost? What configuration/technology do I need (or want)? Which hosting provider should I trust with my business?

Every website administrator of every site on the Internet has had to answer those three questions, and while they seem pretty straightforward, they end up overlapping, and the buying decision starts to get a little more complicated:

The natural assumption is that everyone will choose a dedicated server or cloud computing instance that falls in the “sweet spot” where the three circles overlap, right? While that makes sense on paper, hosting decisions are not made in a vacuum, so you’ll actually see completely valid hosting decisions targeting every spot on that graph.

Why would anyone choose an option that wouldn’t fit in the sweet spot?

That’s a great question, and it’s a tough one to answer in broad strokes. Let’s break the chart down into a few distinct zones to look at why a user would choose a server in each area:

Zone 1

Buyers choosing a server in Zone 1 are easiest to understand: Their budget takes priority over everything else. They might want to host with a specific provider or have a certain kind of hardware, but their budget doesn’t allow for either. Maybe they don’t need their site to use the latest and greatest hardware or have it hosted anywhere in particular. Either way, they choose a cloud solely based on whether it fits their budget. After the initial buying decision, if another server needs to be ordered, they might become a Zone 4 buyer.

Zone 2

Just like Zone 1 buyers, Zone 2 buyers are a pretty simple bunch as well. If you’re an IT administrator at a huge enterprise that does all of your hosting in-house, your buying decision is more or less made for you. It doesn’t matter how much the solution costs, you have to choose an option in your data center, and while you might like a certain technology, you’re going to get what’s available. Enterprise users aren’t the only people deciding to order a server in Zone 2, though … It’s where you see a lot of loyal customers who have the ability to move to another provider but prefer not to — whether it’s because they want their next server to be in the same place as their current servers, they value the capabilities of a specific hosting provider (or they just like the witty, interesting blogs that hosting provider writes).

Zone 3

As with Zone 1 and Zone 2, when a zone doesn’t have any overlapping areas, the explanation is pretty easy. In Zone 3, the buying decision is being made with a priority on technology. Buyers in this area don’t care what it costs or where it’s hosted … They need the fastest, most powerful, most scalable infrastructure on the market. Similar to Zone 1 buyers, once Zone 3 buyers make their initial buying decision, they might shift to Zone 5 for their next server or cloud instance, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Zone 4

Now we’re starting to overlap. In Zone 4, a customer will be loyal to a hosting provider as long as that loyalty doesn’t take them out of their budget. This is a relatively common customer … They’ll try to compare options apples-to-apples, and they’ll make their decision based on which hosting provider they like/trust most. As we mentioned above, if a Zone 1 buyer is adding another server to their initial server order, they’ll likely look to add to their environment in one place to make it easier to manage and to get the best performance between the two servers.

Zone 5

Just like the transitional Zone 1 buyers, when Zone 3 buyers look to build on their environment, they’ll probably become Zone 5 buyers. When your initial buying decision is based entirely on technology, it’s unusual to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your next buying decision. While there are customers that will reevaluate their environment and choose a Zone 3 option irrespective of where their current infrastructure is hosted, it’s less common. Zone 5 users love having he latest and greatest technology, and they value being able to manage it through one provider.

Zone 6

A Zone 6 buyer is usually a Zone 1 buyer that has specific technology needs. With all the options on the table, a Zone 6 buyer will choose the cloud environment that provides the latest technology or best performance for their budget, regardless of the hosting provider. As with Zone 1 and Zone 3 buyers, a Zone 6 buyer will probably become a Zone 7 buyer if they need to order another server.

Zone 7

Zone 7 buyers are in the sweet spot. They know the technology they want, they know the price they want to pay, and they know the host they want to use. They’re able to value all three of their priorities equally, and they can choose an environment that meets all of their needs. After Zone 6 buyers order their first server(s), they’re going to probably become Zone 7 buyers when it comes time for them to place their next order.

As you probably noticed, a lot of transitioning happens between an initial buying decision and a follow-up buying decision, so let’s look at that quickly:

Regardless of how you make your initial buying decision, when it’s time for your next server or cloud computing instance, you have a new factor to take into account: You already have a cloud infrastructure at a hosting provider, so when it comes time to grow, you’ll probably want to grow in the same place. Why? Moving between providers can be a pain, managing environments between several providers is more difficult, and if your servers have to work together, they’re generally doing so across the public Internet, so you’re not getting the best performance.

Where does SoftLayer fit in all of this? Well beyond being a hosting provider that buyers are choosing, we have to understand buyers are making their buying decisions, and we have to position our business to appeal to the right people with the right priorities. It’s impossible to be all things for all people, so we have to choose where to invest our attention … I’ll leave that post for another day, though.

If you had to choose a zone that best describes how you made (or are currently making) your buying decision, which one would it be?

-@khazard

This guest blog comes to us from Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of marketing and business development. Dome9 is a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. With Dome9, you get secure, on-demand access to all your servers by automating and centralizing firewall management and making your servers virtually invisible to hackers.

Three Tips to Securing Your Cloud Servers

By now everyone knows that security is the number one concern among cloud adopters. But lesser known is why and what to do to mitigate some of the security risks … I hope to shed a little light on those points in this blog post, so let’s get to it.

One of the greatest threats to cloud servers is unsecured access. Administrators leave ports (like RDP and SSH) open so they can connect to and manage their machines … After all, they can’t just walk down the hall to gain access to them like with an on-premise network. The trouble with this practice is that it leaves these and other service ports open to attack from hackers who need only guess the credentials or exploit a vulnerability in the application or OS. Many admins don’t think about this because for years they’ve had a hardened perimeter around their data center. In the cloud, however, the perimeter collapses down to each individual server, and so too must your security.

Tip #1: Close Service Ports by Default

Instead of leaving ports — from SSH to phpMyAdmin — open and vulnerable to attack, close them by default and open them only when, for whom, and as long as is needed. You can do this manually — just be careful not to lock yourself out of your server — or you can automate the process with Dome9 for free.

Dome9 provides a patent-pending technology called Secure Access Leasing, which enables you to open a port on your server with just one click from within Dome9 Central, our SaaS management console, or as an extension in your browser. With just one click, you get time-based secure access and the ability to empower a third party (e.g., a developer) with access easily and securely.

When your service ports are closed by default, your server is virtually invisible to hackers because the server will not respond to an attacker’s port scans or exploits.

Read Two More of Dome9′s Security Best Practices

This guest blog was submitted by Sumit Gupta, senior director of NVIDIA’s Tesla High Performance Computing business.

The demand for greater levels of computational performance remains insatiable in the high performance computing (HPC) and technical computing industries, as researchers, geophysicists, biochemists, and financial quants continue to seek out and solve the world’s most challenging computational problems.

However, access to high-powered HPC systems has been a constant problem. Researchers must compete for supercomputing time at popular open labs like Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. And, small and medium-size businesses, even large companies, cannot afford to constantly build out larger computing infrastructures for their engineers.

Imagine the new discoveries that could happen if every researcher had access to an HPC system. Imagine how dramatically the quality and durability of products would improve if every engineer could simulate product designs 20, 50 or 100 more times.

This is where NVIDIA and SoftLayer come in. Together, we are bringing accessible and affordable HPC computing to a much broader universe of researchers, engineers and software developers from around the world.

GPUs: Accelerating Research

High-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) are quickly becoming the go-to solution for HPC users because of their ability to accelerate all types of commercial and scientific applications.

From the Beijing to Silicon Valley — and just about everywhere in between — GPUs are enabling breakthroughs and discoveries in biology, chemistry, genomics, geophysics, data analytics, finance, and many other fields. They are also driving computationally intensive applications, like data mining and numerical analysis, to much higher levels of performance — as much as 100x faster.

The GPU’s “secret sauce” is its unique ability to provide power-efficient HPC performance while working in conjunction with a system’s CPU. With this “hybrid architecture” approach, each processor is free to do what it does best: GPUs accelerate the parallel research application work, while CPUs process the sequential work.

The result is an often dramatic increase in application performance.

SoftLayer: Affordable, On-demand HPC for the Masses

Now, we’re coupling GPUs with easy, real-time access to computing resources that don’t break the bank. SoftLayer has created exactly that with a new GPU-accelerated hosted HPC solution. The service uses the same technology that powers some of the world’s fastest HPC systems, including dual-processor Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) based servers with one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs:

SoftLayer also offers an on-demand, consumption-based billing model that allows users to access HPC resources when and how they need to. And, because SoftLayer is managing the systems, users can keep their own IT costs in check.

You can get more system details and pricing information here: SoftLayer HPC Servers

I’m thrilled that we are able to bring the value of hybrid HPC computing to larger numbers of users. And, I can’t wait to see the amazing engineering and scientific advances they’ll achieve.

-Sumit Gupta, NVIDIA – Tesla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-@PaulFord

Last week, the SoftLayer team attended ad:tech San Francisco. It’s pretty unbelievable to think that it’s only April, and this show was the seventh I’ve attended this year. 2012 has already been a HUGE year for SoftLayer in terms of growth, and our trade show and conference schedule has provided a fantastic outlet to share some of the good news. In addition to the seven shows I’ve attended, SoftLayer has exhibited at six more, and each has it’s own unique focus and audience — ad:tech in particular.

At most shows, the conversations I have can be best described as “technical.” I’ll field questions about our network capacity, hybrid environments, API functionality and data center pod architecture. The attendees that stop by and talk to us are typically technical members of IT teams familiar with their hosting needs and interested in learning about our cloud and dedicated environments. At ad:tech, the attendees that I talked to were more interested in “big picture” differentiators and the non-technical value that SoftLayer provides, so I got to tell the SoftLayer story in a fresh way.

Most of our ad:tech conversations were in a theme of managed hosting, flexibility, short-term resource availability and scalability. The attendees that stopped by our booth were no less qualified as customers than the IT administrators we might meet at other shows, but they couldn’t be won over with the industry-leading numbers we would normally share … They were more interested in hearing about the Super Bowl campaigns we’ve supported, the streaming media services we host and some of the high-profile clients that attest to platform’s ability to handle anything they can throw at us.

The messaging on our booth graphic set the stage perfectly:

Our Platform.
Your Vision.
Build on a global cloud infrastructure at Internet scale. Blur the lines between physical and virtual. Bend infrastructure to your imagination. We’ve created the platform on which you’ll create tomorrow.
Build the future.

The most surprising observation I made at ad:tech was that despite the “big picture” conversations I tended to have with attendees, they were all equally (if not MORE) interested in our Server Challenge:

During the two-day conference, these “non-technical” attendees completed the challenge with an average time of 1:37, and this show’s Server Challenge champion, Rany Grinberg, walked away with a “new iPad” after recording a blazingly fast 0:58.34 time. They might not have been able to tell you what all the pieces in our server rack did, but they could definitely put it back together quickly.

I had a blast meeting all the attendees who stopped by our booth. If you happen to be one of those people, thank you for visiting us … Now start studying and practicing to take on the Server Challenge again at our next show!

-Summer

Many of us remember when Flash was the “only” way to enhance user experience and create rich media interactivity. It was a bittersweet integration, though … Many users didn’t have the browser compatibility to use it, so some portion of your visitors were left in the dark. Until recently, that user base was relatively small — the purists who didn’t want Flash or the people whose hardware/software couldn’t support it. When Apple decided it wouldn’t enable Flash on the iPhone/iPad, web developers around the world groaned. A HUGE user base (that’s growing exponentially) couldn’t access the rich media and interactive content.

In the last year or so, Adobe released Flash Media Server to circumvent the Apple-imposed restrictions, but the larger web community has responded with a platform that will be both compatible and phenomenally functional: HTML5.

HTML5 allows us to do things we’ve never been able to do before (at least without the hassle of plugins, installations and frustration). Gone are the limitations that resigned HTML to serving as a simple framework for webpages … Now developers can push the limits of what they thought possible. As the platform has matured, some developers have even taken it upon themselves to prototype exactly where this generation of scripting is heading by creating Flash-free browser games.

Yes, you read that right: Games you can actually play on your browser, WITHOUT plugins.

From simple Pong clones that use browser windows as the paddles and ball to adventure-based Zelda-like massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like BrowserQuest, it’s pretty unbelievable to see the tip of the iceberg of possibilities enabled by HTML5 … Though it does seem a bit ironic to say that a Pong clone is such a great example of the potential of the HTML5 platform. Click on the screenshot below to check out BrowserQuest and tell me it doesn’t amaze you:

With an ingenious combination of CSS, Javascript and HTML5, developers of BrowserQuest have been able to accomplish something that no one has ever seen (nor would ever even have thought possible). Developers are now able to generate dynamic content by injecting Javascript into their HTML5 canvasses:

<code>
function handleKeyDown(evt){
	keys[evt.keyCode] = true;
}
 
function handleKeyUp(evt){
	keys[evt.keyCode] = false;
}
 
// disable vertical scrolling from arrows :)
document.onkeydown=function(){return event.keyCode!=38 && event.keyCode!=40}
</code>

Look familiar? The game-making process (not syntax!) appears eerily similar to that of any other popular language. The only difference: You don’t need to install this game … You just open your browser and enjoy.

Using a popular port of Box2D, a physics simulator, making pure browser-based games is as simple as “Make. Include. Create.” Here’s a snippit:

<code>
//Make your canvas
<canvas id="game" width="600" height="400"></canvas>  
 
//include your js physics files
 
// create your world
function createWorld() {
	// here we create our world settings for collisions
	var worldAABB = new b2AABB();
	worldAABB.minVertex.Set(-1000, -1000);
	worldAABB.maxVertex.Set(1000, 1000);
	// set gravity vector
	var gravity = new b2Vec2(0, 300);
	var doSleep = true;
	// init our world and return its value
	var world = new b2World(worldAABB, gravity, doSleep);
	return world;
}
</code>

We may be a few years away from building full-scale WoW-level MMORPGs with HTML5, but I think seeing this functionality in native HTML will be a sigh of relief to those that’ve missed out on so much Flash goodness. While developers are building out the next generation of games and apps that will use HTML5, you can keep yourself entertained (and waste hours of time) with the HTML5 port of Angry Birds!

HTML5 is not immune to some browser compatibility issues with older versions, but as it matures and becomes the standard platform for web development, we’re going to see what’s to come in our technology’s immediate future: Pure and simple compatibility for all.

-Cassandra

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

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

Truck Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-@gkdog

Sometimes it’s the little hardships and annoyances that really mold you. How do you react? Do you manage to work through them, or do you let them eat away at you to the point that you’re more paralyzed by them than you are a bigger problem?

As a new hire, I was required to take part in a Truck Day — an experience that helps everyone in the company understand (at a base level) what is involved with the actual products and services we sell. If you’ve ever had the fortune of working on one, there are certain activities that can leave you feeling weary. For me, that weariness-inducing activity was working with cage nuts.

For those of you unfamiliar with cage nuts, they’re small pieces of metal that accommodate screw-in server rails on a rack meant for slide-in server rails. Installing them is one of the most frustrating things ever … They have two little clips that fit inside the rack, and you have to bend them to get them in. Here’s a great illustration of how they work from an Oracle Sun Rack user’s guide:

I’d installed them before, but never more than eight or so at a time. After Truck Day, I now have nothing but the greatest respect for the amazing people working in the data centers who have to do them in massive volumes. I don’t think I’ve ever received as many tiny cuts on my hand as I did in the few hours I spent installing the relatively small number I managed to complete.

As a Customer Support Administrator (CSA), I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer, helping customers with their servers and doing my best to resolve issues as they are encountered. Physically installing cage nuts isn’t part of my day-to-day responsibilities (until the next Truck Day), but I realized that my job has its own “cage nuts.”

A customer wanting to lease a server from us isn’t particularly worried about the fact that cage nuts have to be meticulously installed in the rack, and they also aren’t paying any mind to the fact I might have worked with a dozen customers in my shift already — And, certainly, they shouldn’t. They’re paying for a great customer experience and helpful, friendly service, so they don’t need to take into account the context of our operations when they’re simply asking for us to help them with a server reboot to finish the installation of an OS patch upgrade.

SoftLayer, as a company, has amazed me in that everyone I’ve met is not only willing to deal with their “cage nuts,” but they will also do so without losing the smile from their face (even if there’s some good-natured grumbling every now and then). In many of the places I’ve worked, this sort of task would be met with protest, foot dragging and a tired resignation to doing the work. That simply isn’t the case here.

I’m definitely a newbie around here, and I’m still getting a feel for the culture, catching up on the inside jokes, and learning the ins and outs of the company (and the people in it). The one thing that was abundantly clear to me from the very first night, though: SLayers are truly dedicated to what they do, and the resulting work environment is one that fosters and rewards that dedication.

So in my estimation, how have the little annoyances — the cage nuts of our lives — molded SoftLayer and the people who work here? I’d say that not only do we work through them, we do so enthusiastically in the company of friends, proud of the fact that these seemingly small things are part of what has made this all possible.

I hope all of you work in environments that enable you to deal with the small things you see every day without cursing under your breath and feeling stressed. If you don’t, maybe you should look into finding a place that does. I hear we’re hiring.

-Gregory

I always think of Ford, Chevy and Toyota pick-up truck commercials when I think of load balancers. The selling points for trucks invariably boil down to performance, towing capacity and torque, and I’ve noticed that users evaluating IT network load balancers have a similar simplified focus.

The focus is always about high performance, scalability, failover protection and network optimization. When it comes to “performance,” users are looking for reliable load balancing techniques — whether it be round robin, least connections, shortest response or persistent IP. Take one of the truck commericals and replace “towing capacity” with “connections per second” and “torque” with “application acceleration” or “SSL offloading,” and you’ve got yourself one heck of a load balancer sales pitch.

SoftLayer’s goal has always been to offer a variety of local and global load balancing options, and today, I get to announce that we’re broadening that portfolio.

So what’s new?

We’ve added the capability of SSL offloading to our shared load balancers and launched a dedicated load balancer option as well. These new additions to the product portfolio continue our efforts to make life easier on our customers as they build their own fully operational virtual data center.

What’s so great about SSL offloading? It accelerates the processing of SSL encrypted websites and makes it easier to manage SSL certificates. Think of this as adding more torque to your environment, speeding up how quickly certs can be decrypted (coming in) and encrypted (heading out).

Up until now, SoftLayer has offered SSL at the server level. This requires multiple SSL certifications for each server or special certs that can be used on multiple servers. With SSL offloading, incoming traffic is decrypted at the load balancer, rather than at the server level, and the load balancer also encrypts outbound traffic. This means traffic is processed in one place — at the load balancer — rather than at multiple server locations sitting behind the load balancer.

With SoftLayer SSL offloading on shared load balancers, customers can start small with few connections and grow on the fly by adding more connections or moving to a dedicated load balancer. This makes it a breeze to deploy, manage, upgrade and scale.

What do the new load balance offerings look like in the product catalog? Here’s a breakdown:

I’m not sure if load balancing conjures up the same images for you of hauling freight or working on a construction site, but however you think about them, load balancers play an integral part in optimizing IT workloads and network performance … They’re doing the heavy lifting to help get the job done. If you’re looking for a dedicated or shared load balancer solution, you know who to call.

-Matt