Riak is an open source, distributed database platform based on the principles enumerated in the DynamoDB paper. It uses a simple key/value model for object storage, and it was architected for high availability, fault tolerance, operational simplicity and scalability. A Riak cluster is composed of multiple nodes that are all connected, all communicating and sharing data automatically. If one node were to fail, the other nodes would automatically share the data that the failed node was storing and processing until the node is back up and running or a new node is added. See the diagram below for a simple illustration of how adding a node to a cluster works within Riak.

We will support both the open source and the Enterprise versions of Riak. The open source version is a great place to start. It has all of the database functionality of Riak Enterprise, but it is limited to a single cluster. The Enterprise version supports replication between clusters across data centers, giving you lots of architectural options. You can use replication to build highly available, live-live failover applications. You can also use it to distribute your application’s data across regions, giving you a global platform that you can update anywhere in the world and know that those modifications will be available anywhere else. Riak Enterprise customers also receive 24×7 coverage, both from SoftLayer and Basho. This includes SoftLayer’s one-hour guaranteed response for Severity 1 hardware issues and unlimited support available via our secure web portal, email and phone.

The business use-case for this flexibility is that if you need to scale up or down, nodes can be easily added or taken down as your requirements change. You can opt for a single-data center environment with a few nodes or you can broaden your architecture to a multi-data center deployment with a 40-node cluster. While these capabilities are inherent in Riak, they can be complicated to build and configure, so we spent countless hours working with Basho to streamline Riak deployment on the SoftLayer platform. The fruit of that labor can be found in our Riak Solution Designer:

The server configurations and packages in the Riak Solution Designer have been selected to deliver the performance, availability and stability that our customers expect from their bare metal and virtual cloud infrastructure at SoftLayer. With a few quick clicks, you can order a fully configured Riak environment, and it’ll be provisioned and online for you in two to four hours. And everything you order is on a month-to-month contract.

Thanks to the hard work done by the SoftLayer development group and Basho’s team, we’re proud to be the first in the marketplace to offer a turn-key Riak solution on bare metal infrastructure. You don’t need to sacrifice performance and agility for simplicity.

For more information, visit SoftLayer.com/Riak or contact our sales team.

-Duke

If you’ve configured an infrastructure to accommodate big data, you know how much of a pain it can be: You choose your hardware, you configure it to run NoSQL, you install an open source NoSQL project that you think will meet your needs, and you keep tweaking your environment to optimize its performance. Assuming you have the resources (and patience) to get everything running efficiently, you’ll wind up with the horizontally scalable database infrastructure you need to handle the volume of content you and your users create and consume. SoftLayer and 10gen are making that process a whole lot easier.

Our new MongoDB solutions take the time and guesswork out of configuring a big data environment. We give you an easy-to-use system for designing and ordering everything you need. You can start with a single server or roll out multiple servers in a single replica set across multiple data centers, and in under two hours, an optimized MongoDB environment is provisioned and ready to be used. I stress that it’s an “optimized” environment because that’s been our key focus. We collaborated with 10gen engineers on hardware and software configurations that provide the most robust performance for MongoDB, and we incorporated many of their MongoDB best practices. The resulting “engineered servers” are big data powerhouses:

From each engineered server base configuration, you can customize your MongoDB server to meet your application’s needs, and as you choose your upgrades from the base configuration, you’ll see the thresholds at which you should consider upgrading other components. As your data set’s size and the number of indexes in your database increase, you’ll need additional RAM, CPU, and storage resources, but you won’t need them in the same proportions — certain components become bottlenecks before others. Sure, you could upgrade all of the components in a given database server at the same rate, but if, say, you update everything when you only need to upgrade RAM, you’d be adding (and paying for) unnecessary CPU and storage capacity.

Using our new Solution Designer, it’s very easy to graphically design a complex multi-site replica set. Once you finalize your locations and server configurations, you’ll click “Order,” and our automated provisioning system will kick into high gear. It deploys your server hardware, installs CentOS (with OS optimizations to provide MongoDB performance enhancements), installs MongoDB, installs MMS (MongoDB Monitoring Service) and configures the network connection on each server to cluster it with the other servers in your environment. A process that may have taken days of work and months of tweaking is completed in less than four hours. And because everything is standardized and automated, you run much less risk of human error.

One of the other massive benefits of working so closely with 10gen is that we’ve been able to integrate 10gen’s MongoDB Cloud Subscriptions into our offering. Customers who opt for a MongoDB Cloud Subscription get additional MongoDB features (like SSL and SNMP support) and support direct from the MongoDB authority. As an added bonus, since the 10gen team has an intimate understanding of the SoftLayer environment, they’ll be able to provide even better support to SoftLayer customers!

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice agility for performance, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice performance for agility. Most of the “big data” offerings in the market today are built on virtual servers that can be provisioned quickly but offer meager performance levels relative to running the same database on bare metal infrastructure. To get the performance benefits of dedicated hardware, many users have chosen to build, roll out and tweak their own configurations. With our MongoDB offering, you get the on-demand availability and flexibility of a cloud infrastructure with the raw power and full control of dedicated hardware.

If you’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out your own big data infrastructure, life just got a lot better for you.

-Duke

About a year ago, we kicked off a huge effort to give back to the startup community. We jumped headfirst into the world of startups, incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity firms. This was our new ecosystem. We started to make connections with the likes of TechStars and MassChallenge, and we quickly became a preferred hosting environment for their participants’ most promising and ambitious ideas. This ambitious undertaking evolved into our Catalyst Program.

When it came to getting involved, we knew we could give back from an infrastructure perspective. We decided to extend a $1,000/mo hosting credit to each Catalyst company for one full year, and the response was phenomenal. That was just the beginning, though. Beyond the servers, storage and networking, we wanted to be a resource to the entrepreneurs and developers who could learn from our experience, so we committed to mentoring and making ourselves available to answer any and all questions. That’s not just lip service … We pledged access to our entire executive team, and we made engineering resources available for problem-solving technical challenges. We’re in a position to broker introductions and provide office space, so we wanted didn’t want to pass up that opportunity.

One of the superstars and soon-to-be graduates of Catalyst is MODX, and they have an incredible story. MODX has become leading web content management platform (#4 open source PHP CMS globally) by providing designers, developers, content creators and Unix nerds with all the tools they need to manage, build, protect and scale a web site.

Back in December 2011, the MODX team entered the program as a small company coming out of the open source world, trying to figure out how to monetize and come up with a viable commercial offering. Just over 10 months later, the company has grown to 14+ employees with a new flagship product ready to launch later this month: MODX Cloud. This new cloud-hosting platform, built on SoftLayer’s infrastructure, levels the playing field allowing users to scale and reach everyone with just a few clicks of a mouse and not need to worry about IT administration or back-end servers. Everything associated with managing a web site is fully automated with single-click functionality, so designers and small agencies can compete globally.

We’re proud of what the MODX team has accomplished in such a short period of time, and I would like to think that SoftLayer played a significant role in getting them there. The MODX tag line is “Creative Freedom,” and that might be why they were drawn to the Catalyst Program. We want to “liberate” entrepreneurs from distractions and allow them to focus on developing their products – you know, the part of the business that they are most passionate about.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of Catalyst next … We’re always looking to recruit innovative, passionate and creative startups who’d love to have SoftLayer as a partner, so if you have a business that fits the bill, let us help!

-@gkdog

To make sure we’re all on the same page, as we continue to talk about “cloud,” our definition is pretty straightforward:

• It’s an operations model.
• It provides capacity on demand.
• It offers consumption-based pricing.
• It features self-service provisioning.
• It can be accessed and managed via an API.

Understanding those characteristics, when you hear about cloud in the hosting industry, you’re usually hearing about cloud computing instances in a public cloud environment. An instance in a public cloud is one of many instances operating on a shared cloud infrastructure alongside other similar instances that aren’t managed by you. Your data is still secure, and you can still get good performance in a public cloud environment, but you’re not managing the cloud infrastructure on which your instance resides … You’re using a piece of a cloud.

What we announced at Cloud Expo East is the next step in the evolution of technology in our industry … We’re providing a turnkey, on-demand way for our customers to provision their own Private Clouds with Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

You don’t get a piece of the cloud. You have your own cloud, provisioned in a matter of hours on a month-to-month contract.

For those who have looked into building a private cloud for their business in the past, it’s probably worth reiterating: With SoftLayer and CloudStack, you can have a geographically distributed, secure, private cloud environment provisioned in a matter of hours (not months). Given the complexity of a private cloud environment — involving a management server, private cloud zones, host servers and object storage — this is no small feat.

Those unbelievable provisioning times are only part of the story … When that cloud infrastructure is deployed quickly, it’s fully integrated into the SoftLayer platform, so it leverages our global private network alongside your existing bare metal, dedicated and virtual servers. Want to add public cloud instances to your private cloud as web heads? You’ll log into one portal or use a singular API to have that done in an instant.

Your own cloud infrastructure, fully integrated into SoftLayer’s global infrastructure. If you’re chomping at the bit to try it out for yourself, email us at privateclouds@softlayer.com, and we’ll get you on the “early access” list.

Before I sign off, I want to be sure to thank everyone at SoftLayer and Citrix who worked so hard to make SoftLayer Private Clouds such an amazing new addition to our platform.

-@nday91

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

Many companies leverage the cloud to take advantage of core features that enable robust, agile architectures. Elasticity (ability to quickly increase or decrease compute capacity) and flexibility (choice such as cores, memory and storage) combine to provide solutions that scale to meet the demands of modern applications.

Another widely used feature of cloud computing is image-based provisioning. Rapid provisioning of cloud resources is accomplished, in part, through the use of images. Imaging capability extends beyond the use of base images, allowing users to create customized images that preserve their software installs and configurations. The images persist in an image library, allowing users to launch new cloud instances based their images.

But why should images only be applicable to virtualized cloud resources?

Toward that end, we’re excited to introduce SoftLayer Flex Images, a new capability that allows us to capture images of physical and virtual servers, store them all in one library, and rapidly deploy those images on either platform.

Physical servers now share the core features of virtual servers—elasticity and flexibility. With Flex Images, you can move seamlessly between and environments as your needs change.

Let’s say you’re running into resource limits in a cloud server environment—your data-intensive server is I/O bound—and you want to move the instance to a more powerful dedicated server. Using Flex Images, you can create an image of your cloud server and, extending our I/O bound example, deploy it to a custom dedicated server with SSD drives.

Conversely, a dedicated environment can be quickly replicated on multiple cloud instances if you want the scaling capability of the cloud to meet increased demand. Maybe your web heads run on dedicated servers, but you’re starting to see periods of usage that stress your servers. Create a Flex Image from your dedicated server and use it to deploy cloud instances to meet demand.

Flex Image technology blurs the distinctions—and breaks down the walls—between virtual and physical computing environments.

We don’t think of Flex Images as new product. Instead—like our network, our portal, our automated platform, and our globe-spanning geographic diversity—Flex Image capability is a free resource for our customers (with the exception of standard nominal costs in storing the Flex Images).

We think Flex Images represents not only great value, but also provides a further example of how SoftLayer innovates continually to bring new capabilities and the highest possible level of customer control to our automated services platform.

To sum up, here are some of the key features and benefits of SoftLayer Flex Images:

• Universal images that can be used interchangeably on dedicated or cloud systems
• Unified image library for archiving, managing, sharing, and publishing images
• Greater flexibility and higher scalability
• Rapid provisioning of new dedicated and cloud environments
• Available via SoftLayer’s management portal and API

In public beta, Flex Images are available now. We invite you to try them out, and, as always, we want to hear what you think.

-Marc

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

Think back to your first computer. How much storage capacity did it have? You were excited to be counting in bytes and kilobytes … “Look at all this space!” A few years later, you heard about people at NASA using “gigabytes” of space, and you were dumbfounded. Fastforward a few more years, and you wonder how long your 32GB flash drive will last before you need to upgrade the capacity.

As manufacturers have found ways to build bigger and faster drives, users have found ways to fill them up. As a result of this behavior, we generally go from “being able to use” a certain capacity to “needing to use” that capacity. From a hosting provider perspective, we’ve seen the same trend from our customers … We’ll introduce new high-capacity hard drives, and within weeks, we’re getting calls about when we can double it. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to incorporate product offerings that meet and (at least temporarily) exceed our customers’ needs.

Today, we announced Quantastor Storage Servers, dedicated mass storage appliances with exceptional cost-effectiveness, control and scalability. Built on SoftLayer Mass Storage dedicated servers with the OS NEXUS QuantaStor Storage Appliance OS, the solution supports up to 48TB of data with the perfect combination of performance economics, scalability and manageability. To give you a frame of reference, this is 48TB worth of hard drives:

If you’ve been looking for a fantastic, high-capacity storage solution, you should give our QuantaStor offering a spin. The SAN (iSCSI) + NAS (NFS) storage system delivers advanced storage features including, thin-provisioning, and remote-replication. These capabilities make it ideally suited for a broad set of applications including VM application deployments, virtual desktops, as well as web and application servers. From what I’ve seen, it’s at the top of the game right now, and it looks like it’s a perfect option for long-term reliability and scalability.

-@nday91

Our new Singapore General Manager Michael Ong is in Dallas meeting the rest of the SoftLayer team, our new Server Build Technicians (SBTs) are on the data center floor assisting the Go Live Crew (GLC) and the inventory team is indexing and organizing of the mountains of gear we have in the Large Parts Room (LPR).

Thinking back just 30 days, we were getting early access to our two data center suites. Our four ocean containers were unloaded and waiting for us in the LPR, and the members of the GLC from Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. had their steel toe boots on, hard hats in place and dragging a little from the 14 hour time change. The GLC has worked tirelessly to get this data center online.

Our success on the ground was far from a standalone feat, though. The steadfast support, backing and encouragement from everyone back home enabled our successful launch. Many departments and individuals spent tireless nights on the phone and on email helping us through issues. I can’t overstate the importance of their support and willingness to step up to get things done. Without their help, the data center certainly wouldn’t look like this:

Our first international data center and office are worth celebrating, but it’s important to realize that our work doesn’t stop today. It’s critical that we continue to support the Singapore office like we do our other offices and data centers around the U.S. We are depending on the local team to run the daily operations, and they’re depending on us to provide them with the necessary guidance to keep the gears in motion. This is not a fire and forget mission — we are now truly a global company.

While we sweep up the imaginary confetti from the floor in SNG01 (since we’d never let real confetti in the DC), we know that the GLC in Amsterdam is on the ground getting our first European facility ready. The ocean containers have been delivered and racks are being built. It’s time to get some rest and sleep fast … We’ve got another data center coming online soon.

To all our new Singaporean team members: Welcome to SoftLayer. We’re excited and proud to have you join our team. To everyone that supported us: Thank you again from the very bottom of our hearts. To our customers: Enjoy your new SoftLayer servers in Singapore. And to our competition: This is just the start.

3BFL.

-@toddmitchell

This blog is my first major contribution to the InnerLayer, and when I was asked to write it I must admit I was very excited. On literally my 6th day of work, my hope was to make a major impact or at least prove that a ninja-in-training (that would be me) can hold her own with a full-fledged ninja … but I digress. The real reason I’m here is to talk about our move from SoftLayerTube to SoftLayer. With a little YouTube wizardry and some help from our friends in Mountain View, CA, we’ve been able to take the help of the better-branded /SoftLayer account.

Don’t worry, you are not going to lose any of your favorite SL videos … They’re just taking a permanent trip to the SoftLayer channel.

TL;DR Version
Old and busted: /SoftLayerTube

New Hotness: /SoftLayer

Subscribe!

-Rachel

For those of you familiar with the CloudLayer platform, you might already understand the value of a local disk storage option, but for the uninitiated, this news presents a perfect opportunity to talk about the dynamics of the cloud and how we approach the cloud around here.

As the resident “tech guy” in my social circle, I often find myself helping friends and family understand everything from why their printer isn’t working to what value they can get from the latest and greatest buzzed-about technology. As you’d probably guess, the majority of the questions I’ve been getting recently revolve around ‘the cloud’ (thanks especially to huge marketing campaigns out of Redmond and Cupertino). That abstract term effectively conveys the intentional sentiment that users shouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics of how the cloud works … just that it works. The problem is that as the world of technology has pursued that sentiment, the generalization of the cloud has abstracted it to the point where this is how large companies are depicting the cloud:

As it turns out, that image doesn’t exactly illicit the, “Aha! Now I get it!” epiphany of users actually understanding how clouds (in the technology sense) work. See how I pluralized “clouds” in that last sentence? ‘The Cloud’ at SoftLayer isn’t the same as ‘The Cloud’ in Redmond or ‘The Cloud’ in Cupertino. They may all be similar in the sense that each cloud technology incorporates hardware abstraction, on-demand scalability and utility billing, but they’re not created in the same way.

If only there were a cloud-specific Declaration of Independence …

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all clouds are not equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain distinct characteristics, that among these are storage, processing power and the ability to serve content. That to secure these characteristics, information should be given to users, expressed clearly to meet the the cloud’s users;

The Ability to Serve Content
Let’s unpack that Jeffersonian statement a little by looking at the distinct characteristics of every cloud, starting with the third (“the ability to serve content”) and working backwards. Every cloud lives on hardware. The extent to which a given cloud relies on that hardware can vary, but at the end of the day, you &nash; as a user – are not simply connecting to water droplets in the ether. I’ll use SoftLayer’s CloudLayer platform as a specific example of that a cloud actually looks like: We have racks of uniform servers – designated as part of our cloud infrastructure – installed in rows in our data centers. All of those servers are networked together, and we worked with our friends at Citrix to use the XenServer platform to tie all of those servers together and virtualize the resources (or more simply: to make each piece of hardware accessible independently of the rest of the physical server it might be built into). With that infrastructure as a foundation, ordering a cloud server on the CloudLayer platform simply involves reserving a small piece of that cloud where you can install your own operating system and manage it like an independent server or instance to serve your content.

Processing Power
Understanding the hardware architecture upon which a cloud is built, the second distinct characteristic of every cloud (“processing power”) is fairly logical: The more powerful the hardware used for a given cloud, the better processing performance you’ll get in an instance using a piece of that hardware.

You can argue about what software uses the least resources in the process of virtualizing, but apples-to-apples, processing power is going to be determined by the power of the underlying hardware. Some providers try to obfuscate the types of servers/processors available to their cloud users (sometimes because they are using legacy hardware that they wouldn’t be able to sell/rent otherwise), but because we know how important consistent power is to users, we guarantee that CloudLayer instances are based on 2.0GHz (or faster) processors.

Storage
We walked backward through the distinct characteristics included in my cloud-specific Declaration of Independence because of today’s CloudLayer Computing storage announcement, but before I get into the details of that new option, let’s talk about storage in general.

If the primary goal of a cloud platform is to give users the ability to scale instantly from 1 CPU of power to 16 CPUs of power, the underlying architecture has to be as flexible as possible. Let’s say your cloud computing instance resides on a server with only 10 CPUs available, so when you upgrade to a 16-CPU instance, your instance will be moved to a server with enough available resources to meet your need. To make that kind of quick change possible, most cloud platforms are connected to a SAN (storage area network) or other storage device via a back-end network to the cloud servers. The biggest pro of having this setup is that upgrading and downgrading CPU and RAM for a given cloud instance is relatively easy, but it introduces a challenge: The data lives on another device that is connected via switches and cables and is being used by other customers as well. Because your data has to be moved to your server to be processed when you call it, it’s a little slower than if a hard disk was sitting in the same server as the instance’s processor and RAM. For that reason, many users don’t feel comfortable moving to the cloud.

In response to the call for better-performing storage, there has been a push toward incorporating local disk storage for cloud computing instances. Because local disk storage is physically available to the CPU and RAM, the transfer of data is almost immediate and I/O (input/output) rates are generally much higher. The obvious benefit of this setup is that the storage will perform much better for I/O-intensive applications, while the tradeoff is that the setup loses the inherent redundancy of having the data replicated across multiple drives in a SAN (which, is almost like its own cloud … but I won’t confuse you with that right now).

The CloudLayer Computing platform has always been built to take advantage of the immediate scalability enabled by storing files in a network storage device. We heard from users who want to use the cloud for other applications that they wanted us to incorporate another option, so today we’re happy to announce the availability of local disk storage for CloudLayer Computing! We’re looking forward to seeing how our customers are going to incorporate cloud computing instances with local disk storage into their existing environments with dedicated servers and cloud computing instances using SAN storage.

If you have questions about whether the SAN or local disk storage option would fit your application best, click the Live Chat icon on SoftLayer.com and consult with one of our sales reps about the benefits and trade-offs of each.

We want you to know exactly what you’re getting from SoftLayer, so we try to be as transparent as we can when rolling out new products. If you have any questions about CloudLayer or any of our other offerings, please let us know!

-@nday91