Sales Posts

As a member of the illustrious the SoftLayer sales (SLales) team, I have the daily pleasure of talking with any number of potential, prospective, new and current customers, and in many of those conversations, I’ve picked up on a fairly common theme: FEAR. Now we’re not talking about lachanophobia (fear of vegetables) or nomophobia (fear of losing cell phone contact) here … We’re talking about fear that paralyzes users and holds them captive — effectively preventing their growth and limiting their business’s potential. Fear is a disease.

I’ve created my own little naming convention for the top three most common phobias I hear from users as they consider making changes to their hosting environments:

1. Pessimisobia
This phobia is best summarized by the saying, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Users with this phobia could suffer from frequent downtime, a lack of responsive support and long term commitment contracts, but their service is a known quantity. What if a different provider is even worse? If you don’t suffer from pessimisobia, this phobia probably seems silly, but it’s very evident in many of the conversations I have.

2. Whizkiditus
This affliction is particularly prevalent in established companies. Symptoms of this phobia include recurring discomfort associated with the thought of learning a new management system or deviating from a platform where users have become experts. There’s an efficiency to being comfortable with how a particular platform works, but the ceiling to that efficiency is the platform itself. Users with whizkiditus might not admit it, but the biggest reason they shy away from change is that they are afraid of losing the familiarity they’ve built with their old systems over the years … even if that means staying on a platform that prohibits scale and growth.

3. Everythingluenza
In order to illustrate this phobia of compartmentalizing projects to phase in changes, let’s look at a little scenario:

I host all of my applications at Company 1. I want to move Application A to the more-qualified Company 2, but if I do that, I’ll have to move Applications B through Z to Company 2 also. All of that work would be too time-consuming and cumbersome, so I won’t change anything.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when considering a change of cloud hosting for any piece of your business, and it’s even more intimidating when you feel like it has to be an “all or nothing” decision.

Unless you are afflicted with euphobia (the fear of hearing good news), you’ll be happy to hear that these common fears, once properly diagnosed, are quickly and easily curable on the SoftLayer platform. There are no known side effects from treatment, and patients experience immediate symptom relief with a full recovery in between 1-3 months.

This might be a lighthearted look at some quirky fears, but I don’t want to downplay how significant these phobias are to the developers and entrepreneurs that suffer from them. If any of these fears strike a chord with you, reach out to the SLales team (by phone, chat or email), and we’ll help you create a treatment plan. Once you address and conquer these fears, you can devote all of your energy back to getting over your selenophobia (fear of the moon).

-Arielle

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

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

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

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

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

-@khazard

When a SLayers pack their bags and heads to the ‘Big Apple,’ we go BIG. Our most recent trip to NYC for Cloud Expo East proved that statement over and over again. When I heard I’d be one of the employees representing SoftLayer at the Javits Convention Center, I did a little dance … Cloud Expo is one of my favorite conferences, and New York City is one of my favorite cities, so I had a lot to be excited about.

Cloud Expo East and Cloud Expo West are two of the biggest shows SoftLayer sponsors every year. Attendees come from various industries — from digital marketing agencies to software as a service providers to hosting resellers — with their own needs and questions about what’s happening “in the cloud.” Because our Cloud Expo presences usually get a ton of traffic, we decided to unveil our brand new 20′ by 20′ booth in New York:

For the last few months, we’ve been sketching, editing and tweaking our vision of the booth. Naturally, our new “Build the Future” branding was present, and you could see the simple “Our Platform. Your Vision.” statement from wherever you were. By the time the design was finalized, we were on pins and needles in anticipation, waiting for the booth leap off the paper. We weren’t disappointed, and conference attendees weren’t either.

In addition to the hundreds of conversations we had with attendees about SoftLayer’s cloud computing capabilities, it was pretty amazing to me that so many people commented on our booth design. Many attendees noticed that our booth gets bigger and bigger every year, and the fact that our booth towered over most of the other booths in the area made that a pretty easy observation. As attendees were moving down the escalators into the exhibition hall, they were greeted by the SoftLayer. Because the booth was designed with an open-concept in mind, we never felt too claustrophobic … Even when a flood of people would come hunting for the new SoftLayer flexi-frisbees we were giving out after they heard Duke or Marc present.

Despite the “openness” of the booth design, many attendees were able to gather what SoftLayer is all about from the graphic side panels … and the Server Challenge:

That’s right. The infamous Server Challenge continued to draw crowds and spark conversations in the new booth. And it was the perfect “finishing touch” to put the new conference presence over the top. While some attendees were hesitant to step up to try their hands at the competition, others were eager to accept the challenge. And as usual, the leader board was impossibly close:

1. Dejian Fang – 0:59.08
2. Corjan Bast – 0:59.59
3. Logan Best – 1:00.49
4. Jeffrey Abatayo – 1:01.00
5. Bryan Wong – 1:01.84

The top time of 59.08 seconds was a mere 2.76 seconds faster than the fifth place time!

When conference attendees weren’t watching the Server Challenge craziness or ducking to avoid an errant SoftLayer frisbee, we had a few more “oohs” and “ahhs” to share. In the new booth design, we incorporated four iMacs, one in each corner. If an attendee had a question about our portal, our pricing or our API, we could fire up a browser and use the SoftLayer-sponsored conference wifi to take them where they needed to go. If no one was using the computers, the screens would show a flashy video that included some interesting SoftLayer facts and a look at a SoftLayer Truck Day.

Off the expo floor, SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda and Vice President of Product Innovation Marc Jones announced our new product, Private Clouds. No big deal. If you didn’t see that announcement or you want to learn more, Nathan Day (SoftLayer’s Chief Scientist) posted a fantastic blog coinciding with SoftLayer’s private clouds release, and Duke followed up with an in depth look at how and why we chose to build private clouds the way we did.

Sad that you missed your chance to see the new 20′ x 20′ booth in person? Don’t cry… If you’re in the Silicon Valley for Cloud Expo West (November 5-8), we won’t be hard to spot.

-Natalie

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

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

• It’s an Investment

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

• You Have to Know What You Need

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

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

• You Should Get to Know the Neighborhood

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

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

• You’re Responsible for Maintenance

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

• You Need Insurance Against Disaster

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

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

-Matthew

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

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

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

Einstein’s SoftLayer Riddle

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

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

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

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

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

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

-@khazard

At conferences and tradeshows, I have the opportunity to meet hundreds of people. While a good number of attendees at technical conferences will come up to our booth and tell me they’re already customers, we still come across a few people who glance at our collateral and our graphics with a puzzled look on their face before they say, “What’s Soft … Layer?” This is where I spring into action!

To give some context, I’ll usually explain, “SoftLayer is an on-demand data center provider. We host dedicated servers, cloud computing instances and integrated solutions for customers around the world.” When that overview sinks in and the attendee understands that we are an infrastructure provider, I get to share some of SoftLayer’s biggest differentiators along with some pretty amazing statistics about our business. With a huge sample pool of conversations to pull from, I thought it would be fun to put together a “Top 10″ list of the facts that usually impress attendees the most.

The Top 10 SoftLayer Facts

Based on “oohs” and “ahhs” from attendees

10. No Hidden Fees: Our pricing is listed on our website and is straight-forward.
9. Huge Product Catalog: SoftLayer offers load balancers, CDN, firewalls, managed services, and storage. If you need something we don’t offer, we can usually find a way to make it work.
8. No Long-Term Contracts: Dedicated servers are offered on a month-to-month basis, and cloud instances are available on a monthly or hourly basis. We have to earn your business every month.
7. Built By Geeks For Geeks: We offer a fully programmable API that gives you complete control of your server(s) from your own application or system.
6. Free Private Network Traffic: Every SoftLayer facility is interconnected via our private network. All private network traffic and inbound public network traffic is provided at no charge – We only charge for outbound public network traffic.

The Top 5 are facts that almost always amaze:

5. Global Network: We have 13 data centers in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Jose, Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and Singapore. We also operate 16 additional network Points of Presence (PoPs) around the world.
4. Our Business is Strong: SoftLayer has 24,000+ customers in more than 150 countries. We manage more than 100,000 active servers, hosting more than 20 million domains. Oh, and we’re doing about $350 million in annual revenue.
3. Infrastructure On-Demand: Our dedicated servers can be deployed in less than four hours, and cloud instances can be provisioned in less than 15 minutes.
2. Everything Works Together: Our dedicated servers and cloud instances are fully integrated. You can have a dedicated server in Seattle and a cloud instance in Singapore, and they’re both managed by a single industry-leading portal. The fact that they can communicate with each other over SoftLayer’s private network is a huge plus there as well.

And the simple fact that impresses people most: *drum roll*

1. SoftLayer is the largest privately held hosting provider in the world!

Every time I shock attendees with these facts, I can’t help but be even more proud of our accomplishments. Let’s keep up the good work! We’re taking over the world, one data center at a time.”

-Natalie

When we last talked, I broke down the differences between features and benefits. To recap: a feature is something prominent about a person, place or thing, while a benefit is a feature that is useful to you. In that blog, I discussed our customer portal and the automation within, so with this next installment, let’s move into my favorite place: the data center … Our pride and joy!

If you have not had a chance to visit a SoftLayer data center, you’re missing out. The number one response I get when I begin a tour through any of our facilities is, “I have been through several data centers before, and they’re pretty boring,” or my favorite, “We don’t have to go in, they all look the same.” Then they get a glimpse at the SoftLayer facility through the window in our lobby:

What makes a SoftLayer DC so different and unique?

We deploy data centers in a pod concept. A pod, or server room, is a designed to be an identical installation of balanced power, cooling and redundant best-in-class equipment in under 10,000 square feet. It will support just about 5,000 dedicated servers, and each pod is built to the same specifications as every other pod. We use the same hardware vendor for servers, the majority of our internal network is powered by Cisco gear and edge equipment is now powered by Juniper. Even the paint on the walls matches up from pod to pod, city to city and now country to country. That’s standardization!

That all sounds great, but what does that mean for you? How do all these things benefit you as the end user?

First of all, setting standards improves our efficiency in support and operations. We can pluck any of our technicians in DAL05 and drop him into SJC01, and he’ll feel right at home despite the outside world looking a bit different. No facility quirks, no learning curve. In fact, the Go Live Crews in Singapore and Amsterdam are all experienced SoftLayer technicians from our US facilities, so they help us make sure all of the details are exactly alike.

Beyond the support aspect, having data centers in multiple cities around the world is a benefit within itself: You have the option to host your solution as close or as far away from you as you wish. Taking that a step further, disaster recovery becomes much easier with our unique network-within-a-network topology.

The third biggest benefit customers get from SoftLayer’s data centers is the quality of the server chassis. Because we standardize our SuperMicro chassis in every facility, we’re able to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster when a customer contacts us. Let’s say the mainboard is having a problem, and your Linux server is in kernel panic. Instead of taking time to try and fix the part, I can hot-swap all the drives into an identical chassis and use the portal to automatically move all of your IP addresses and network configurations to a new location in the DC. The server boots right up and is back in service with minimal downtime.

Try to do that with “similar” hardware (not “identical”), and see where that gets you.

The last obvious customer benefit we’ll talk about here is the data center’s internal network performance. Powered by Cisco internal switches and Juniper routers on the edge, we can provide unmatched bandwidth capacity to our data centers as well as low latency links between servers. In one rack on the data center floor, you can see 80Gbps of bandwidth. Our automated, high-speed network allows us to provision a server anywhere in a pod and an additional server anywhere else in the same pod, and they will perform as if they are sitting right next to each other. That means you don’t need to reserve space in the same rack for a server that you think you’ll need in the future, so when your business grows, your infrastructure can grow seamlessly with you.

In the last installment of this little “SoftLayer Features and Benefits” series, we’ll talk about the global network and learn why no one in the industry can match it.

-Harold

When I attend conferences, I always try to make sure that I communicate what we do the best way I can. With our new data centers opening up in Singapore and Amsterdam, I was curious to see what a SoftLayer message would look like in the two countries’ most prominent languages. With the gracious help from local representatives, we have our English message translated into Mandarin, Malay and Dutch.

English
We are the largest private hosting company in the world, providing cloud, dedicated, managed and integrated computing environments to over 25,000 customers around the world. We have recently added additional data centers and now have facilities in Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapore and Washington D.C., and network Points of Presence worldwide. On top of that, we have automated every part of our platform, giving our customers complete control, security, scalability and ease-of-management through the best Customer Portal and Open API in the industry.

Mandarin
我们是世界上最大的私人网站住办有限公司，带给全球超过25000客户的服务包括云计算，专用主机，主机托管和综合计算。最近，我们增加了额外的数据中心，现在已在阿姆斯特丹，达拉斯，休斯顿，圣何塞，西雅图，新加坡，华盛顿等拥有设施，网点遍布全球。最重要的是，我们自动化了每一个平台的部分，用同行业最好的客户门户和开放的API体系为客户提供完整的控制，集安全性，可扩展性，和易于管理与一体的服务。

Malay
Kami adalah syarikat swasta yang terbesar di dunia yang menyediakan pengkomputeran awan (cloud), hos berdedikasi yang diurus dan diintegrasikan ke dalam infrastruktur pengkomputeran untuk lebih daripada 25,000 pelanggan kami di seluruh dunia. Kami baru-baru ini telah menambah pusat data tambahan dan kini mempunyai kemudahan-kemudahan di Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapura dan Washington DC dan juga rangkaian “Points of Presence” di seluruh dunia. Selain itu, Kami telah mengautomatikkan setiap bahagian platform kami, memberikan para pelanggan kami penuh kuasa dan kawalan, keselamatan, kemampuan yang luas dan kemudahan pengurusan menggunakan pelanggan portal kami yang terbaik dan API terbuka (Open API) di dalam industri ini.

Dutch
Wij zijn het grootste, private hosting bedrijf in de wereld dat voorziet in cloud, dedicated, managed and integrated computing-omgevingen voor meer dan 25.000 klanten wereldwijd. We hebben recent extra datacenters toegevoegd en hebben nu vestigingen in Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Singapore en Washington DC en netwerk Points of Presence over de hele wereld. Bovendien hebben we elk deel van ons platform geautomatiseerd, waardoor wij onze klanten volledige controle, beveiliging, schaalbaarheid en gemak van beheer bieden met behulp van het beste Customer Portal en Open API in deze bedrijfstak

Back to English
While I might not be able to communicate those translations in conversation (yet), it’s an incredible visualization of how SoftLayer is growing and changing. It’s also exciting to think about how many more languages we’ll need to include next year!

-Summer

Recently, the SoftLayer Marketing team refreshed our corporate website. You may have already seen one of the most obvious changes: an updated homepage.

While minor updates to the look and feel of the site have been made over the last two years (adding solid colors to the main tabs, increasing the use of text inside buttons, etc.), the essential layout of the homepage hasn’t changed since December of 2008! We were due for a refresh.

Our updated homepage features a simplified layout with new graphics. Special offers and new products get a large-format banner, which clearly introduces visitors to what we are offering in a way that is more eye-catching than before. Check out the difference between the old-style banners and the new-style banners:

BEFORE

NOW

Below the main banner, we replaced the solid red banner shapes with ones that incorporate photos and colorful graphical elements. Here’s the new design for our Dedicated Server and CloudLayer Computing banners:

Our primary navigation layout has also changed. We now highlight our three main product offerings – Dedicated Severs, CloudLayer Computing, and Managed Hosting – with red tabs that contrast with our other grey tabs, as shown below:

We have also re-organized many of our information pages to make our offerings more clear and to make content easier to find.

The list of changes goes on — enhanced contact buttons on the right of each page to make it easier for website visitors to get ahold of us, a new approach to links at the top and bottom of every page, and so on.

And while the changes we added in this recent site update add a refreshing look and feel, we are by no means finished. You’ll find a lot more going on at www.softlayer.com in the weeks and months to come.

-Brad