Posts Tagged ‘Cloud’

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep the parts of a relationship that you like and “move on” from the parts you don’t? You’d never have to go through the awkward “getting to know each other” phase where you accidentally order food the other person is allergic to, and you’d never have to experience a break up. As it is, we’re faced with a bit of a paradox: Relationships are a lot of work, and “Breaking up is hard to do.”

I could tell you story after story about the break ups I experienced in my youth. From the Ghostbuster-jumpsuited boyfriend I had in kindergarten who stole my heart (and my barrettes) to until it was time to take my had-to-have “My Little Pony” thermos lunchbox to another table at lunch after a dramatic recess exchange to the middle school boyfriend who took me to see Titanic in the theater four times (yes, you read that correctly), my early “romantic” relationships didn’t pan out in the “happily ever after” way I’d hoped they would. Whether the result of an me unwelcome kiss under the monkey bars or a move to a different school (which might as well have been on Mars), I had to break up with each of the boys.

Why are you reading about my lost loves on the SoftLayer Blog? Simple: Relationships with IT environments — specifically applications and data — are not much different from romantic relationships. You might want to cut ties with a high maintenance piece of equipment that you’ve been with for years because its behavior is getting erratic, and it doesn’t look like it’ll survive forever. Maybe you’ve outgrown what your existing infrastructure can provide for you, and you need to move along. Perhaps you just want some space and need to take a break from a project for six months.

If you feel like telling your infrastructure, “It’s not you, it’s me,” what are your options? Undo all of your hard work, schedule maintenance and stay up in the dead of a weeknight to migrate, backup and restore all of your data locally?

When I talk to SoftLayer customers, I get to be a relationship therapist. Because we’ve come out with some pretty innovative tools, we can help our customers avoid ever having to break up with their data again. Two of the coolest “infrastructure relationship”-saving releases: Flex Images (currently in public beta) and portable storage volumes for cloud computing instances (CCIs).

With Flex Images, customers using RedHat, CentOS or Windows systems can create and move server images between physical and virtual environments to seamlessly transition from one platform to the other. With about three clicks, a customer-created image is quickly and uniformly delivered to a new dedicated or cloud server. The idea behind Flex Images is to blur the line between physical and virtual environments so that if you feel the need to break up with one of the two, the other is able to take you in.

Portable storage volumes (PSVs) are secondary CCI volumes that can be added onto any public or private CCI. Users can detach a PSV from any CCI and have it persist in the cloud, unattached to any compute resource, for as long as necessary. When that storage volume is needed again, it can be re-attached as secondary storage on any other CCI across all of SoftLayer’s facilities. The best relationship parallel would be “baggage,” but that’s got a negative connotation, so we’ll have to come up with something else to call it … “preparedness.”

We want to help you avoid break ups and provide you easy channels to make up with your old infrastructure if you have a change of heart. The result is an infrastructure that’s much easier to manage, more fluid and less dramatic.

Now if I can only figure out a way to make Flex Images and portable storage volumes available for real-life relationships …. I’d make millions!

-Arielle

This guest blog comes to us from Cloudability, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Cloudability is a cloud budget management service that helps companies manage their cloud spending, prevent overages, reduce waste and save money. In this video we talk to Cloudability Founder and CEO Mat Ellis about how the company developed, and we hear examples of how Cloudability is supporting and businesses money.

5 Things You Need to Know to Control Variable Infrastructure Costs

If you have on premise equipment, then your costs are fixed — you paid your money and now you own a fixed amount of hardware and software. The cloud, on the other hand, has variable costs due to two important features — you only pay for the services you use and it’s scalable, providing the resources you need at any given time. By using a cloud infrastructure, you end up with what we call Variable Infrastructure Costs (VICs).

Most of SoftLayer’s services meet the criteria for a VIC. You need an extra cloud server for a few hours? No problem. More disk? Done.

With great power, comes great responsibility, and the biggest problem with VICs is that they are just like a faucet: Leave it running, and the water bill can add up fast … Not to mention all that waste! Unless you keep a close eye on VICs, you could find yourself in front of your CFO, pleading for your budget’s life.

Cloudability was created to keep those costs under control, and in the course of working with our customers, we’ve come up with a simple five-point checklist of best practices:

1. Collation

Make sure you have insight to all your costs, create a single contract database, and review it regularly. Don’t forget to include total cloud spending alongside your fixed contracts. Talk to your finance department, then drill your employees and tech teams to make sure you REALLY know the whole truth. There can be — and usually is — a disconnect in the organization about how much cloud is really being used.

2. Analysis

Get into the weeds to see why each project is spending what they are spending. Try to calculate some tangible metrics like cost per thousand web pages served or cost per new customer, and benchmark these against public data and common sense.

3. Organization and Rebalancing

Put each of your projects into one of four quadrants:

1. High Spend/Low Efficiency
2. High Spend/High Efficiency
3. Low Spend/Low Efficiency
4. Low Spend/High Efficiency.

Read the rest of Cloudability’s blog about best practices in variable cost management. »

If you read Nathan’s “A Cloud to Call Your Own” blog, and you wanted to learn a little more about private clouds in general or SoftLayer Private Clouds specifically, this post is for you. We’re going take a little time to dive deeper into the technology behind SoftLayer Private Clouds, and in the process, I’ll talk a little about why particular platforms/hardware/configurations were chosen.

The Platform: Citrix CloudPlatform

There are several cloud infrastructure frameworks to choose from these days. We have surveyed a number of them and actively work with several of them. We are active members of the happenings around OpenStack and we have working implementations of vSphere, Nimula, Eucalyptus and other stacks in our data centers. So why CloudPlatform by Citrix?

First off, it’s one of the most mature of these options. It’s been around for several years and now has the substantial backing of Citrix. That backing includes investment, support organizations and the multitude of other products managed by Citrix. There are also some futuristic ideas we have regarding how to leverage products like CloudBridge and Netscaler with Private Clouds. Second, CloudPlatform operates in accordance with how we believe a private cloud should work: It’s simple, it doesn’t have a huge management infrastructure and we can charge for it by the CPU per month, just like all of our other products. Finally, CloudPlatform has made good inroads with enterprise customers. We love the idea that an enterprise ops team could leverage CloudPlatform as the management platform for both their on-premise and their off-premise private cloud.

So, we selected CloudPlatform for a multitude of reasons; not just one.

Another huge key was our ability to integrate CloudPlatform into the SoftLayer portals/mobile apps/API. Because many SoftLayer customers manage their environments exclusively through the SoftLayer API, we knew that a seamless integration there was an absolute necessity. With the help of the SoftLayer dev team and the CloudStack folks, we’ve been able to automate private clouds the same way we did for public cloud instances and dedicated servers.

The Hardware

When it came to choosing what hardware the private clouds would use, the decision was pretty simple. Given our need for automation, SoftLayer Private Clouds would need to be indistinguishable from a standard dedicated server or CloudLayer environment. We use the latest and greatest server hardware available on the market, and every month, you can see thousands of new SuperMicro boxes being delivered to our data centers around the world. Because we know we have a reliable, powerful and consistent hardware foundation on which we can build the private clouds product, it makes the integration of the system even easier.

When it comes to the specs of the hardware provided for a private cloud environment, we provide as much transparency and flexibility as we can for a customer to build exactly what he or she needs. Let’s look into what that means…

The Hardware Configurations

A CloudPlatform environment can be broken down into these components:

• A single management server (that can manage multiple zones across layer 2 networks)
• One or more zones
• One or more clusters in a zone
• One or more hosts in a cluster
• Storage shared by a cluster (which can be a single server)

A simple diagram of a two-zone private cloud might look like this:

We’ve set a standard “management server” configuration that we know will be able to accommodate all of your needs when it comes to running CloudPlatform, and how you build and configure the rest of your private cloud infrastructure is up to you. Whether you want simple dual proc, quad core Nehalem box with a lot of local disk space for a dev cloud or an environment made up of quad proc 10-core Westmeres with SSDs, you have the freedom to choose exactly what you want.

Oh, and everything can be online in two to four hours, and it’s offered on a month-to-month contract.

The Network Configuration

When it comes to where the hardware is provisioned, you have the ability to deploy zones in multiple geographies and manage them all through a single CloudPlatform management node. Given the way the SoftLayer three-tier network is built, the management node and host nodes do not even need to be accessible by our public network. You can choose to make accessible only the IPs used by the VMs you create. If your initial private cloud infrastructure is in Dallas and you want a node online in Singapore, you can just click a few buttons, and the new node will be provisioned and configured securely by CloudPlatform in a couple of hours.

Imagine how long it would have taken you to build this kind of infrastructure in the past:

It doesn’t take days or weeks now. It takes hours.

As you can see, when we approached the challenge of bringing private clouds to the SoftLayer platform, we had to innovate. In Texas, that would be roughly translated as “Go big or go home.” Given the response we’ve seen from customers and partners since the announcement of SoftLayer Private Clouds, we know the industry has taken notice.

Will all of our customers need their own private cloud infrastructure? Probably not. But will the customers who’ve been looking for this kind of functionality be ecstatic with the CloudPlatform environment on SoftLayer’s network? Absolutely.

-Duke

“Game Changers” in technology force a decision: Adapt or die. When repeating rifles gained popularity in the late 1800s, a business of manufacturing muzzle-loading or breech-loading rifles would have needed to find a way to produce a repeating rifle or it would have lost most (if not all) of it’s business to Winchester. If a fresh-faced independent musician is hitting it big on the coffee shop scene in 2012, she probably won’t be selling out arenas any time soon if she refuses to make her music available digitally. Just ask any of the old-timers in the print media industry … “Game Changers” in technology can be disastrous for an established business in an established industry.

That’s pretty intimidating … Even for tech businesses.

Shifts in technology don’t have to be as drastic and obvious as a “printed newspaper v. social news site” comparison for them to be disruptive. Even subtle advances can wind up making or breaking a business. In fact, many of today’s biggest and most successful tech companies are scrambling to adapt to two simple “game changers” that seem terribly significant:

• IPv6
• “The Cloud”

IPv6

A quick search of the SoftLayer Blog reminds me that Lance first brought up the importance of IPv6 adoption in October 2007:

ARIN has publically announced the need to shift to IPv6 and numerous articles have outlined the D-Day for IPv4 space. Most experts agree, its coming fast and that it will occur sometime in 2010 at the current pace (that’s about two years for those counting). IPv6 brings enough IP space for an infinite number of users along with improved security features and several other operational efficiencies that will make it very popular. The problem lies between getting from IPv4 to IPv6.

When IPv4 exhaustion was just a blip on the horizon, many businesses probably thought, “Oh, I’ll get around to it when I need to. It’s not a problem yet.” When IANA exhausted the IPv4 pool, they probably started picking up the phone and calling providers to ask what plans they had in place. When some of the Internet’s biggest websites completed a trial transition to IPv6 on World IPv6 Day last year, those businesses started feeling the urgency. With today’s World IPv6 Launch, they know something has to be done.

Regardless of how conservative providers get with IPv4 space, the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses in existence will not last much longer. Soon, users will be accessing an IPv6 Internet, and IPv4-only websites will lose their opportunity to reach those users. That’s a “game changer.”

“The Cloud”

The other “game changer” many tech businesses are struggling with these days is the move toward “the cloud.” There are a two interesting perspectives in this transition: 1) The challenge many businesses face when choosing whether to adopt cloud computing, and 2) The challenges for businesses that find themselves severing as an integral (sometimes unintentional) part of “the cloud.” You’ve probably seen hundreds of blog posts and articles about the first, so I’ll share a little insight on the second.

When you hear all of the hype about cloud computing and cloud storage offering a hardware-agnostic Utopia of scalable, reliable power, it’s easy to forget that the building blocks of a cloud infrastructure will usually come from vendors that provided a traditional hosting resources. When a computing instance is abstracted from a hardware device, it’s opens up huge variations in usage. It’s possible to have dozens of public cloud instances using a single server’s multi-proc, multi-core resources at a given time. If a vendor prices a piece of software on a “per server” basis, how do they define a “server” when their users are in the cloud? It can be argued that a cloud computing instance with a single core of power is a “server,” and on the flip-side, it’s easy to define a “server” as the hardware object on which many cloud instances may run. I don’t know that there’s an easy way to answer that question, but what I do know is that applying “what used to work” to “what’s happening now” isn’t the right answer.

The hardware and software providers in the cloud space who are able to come up with new approaches unencumbered by the urge to continue “the way we’ve always done it” are going to be the ones that thrive when technology “game changers” emerge, and the providers who dig their heels in the dirt or try to put a square peg into a round hole will get the short end of the “adapt or die” stick.

We’ve tried to innovate and take a fresh look at every opportunity that has come our way, and we do our best to build relationships with agile companies that we see following suit.

I guess a better way to position the decision at the beginning of this post would be to add a little tweak: “Innovate, adapt or die.” How you approach technology “game changers” will define your business’s success.

-@gkdog

Citrix Synergy 2012 took over San Francisco this week. Because Citrix is one of SoftLayer’s technology partners, you know we were in the house, and I thought I’d share a few SoftLayer-specific highlights from the conference.

Before I get too far, I should probably back up give you a little context for what the show is all about if you aren’t familiar with it. In his opening keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton explained:

“We call it ‘Citrix Synergy,’ but really it’s ‘Synergy’ because this is an event that’s coordinated by us across a hundred sponsors, our ecosystem partners, companies in the industry that we work together with to bring you an amazing set of solutions around cloud, virtualization, networking and mobility.”

Given how broad of a spectrum those areas of technology represent, the short four-day agenda was jam-packed with informational sessions, workshops, demos and conversations. It goes without saying that SoftLayer had to be in the mix in a BIG WAY. We had a booth on the expo hall floor, I was lined up to lead a breakout session about how business can “learn how to build private clouds in the cloud,” and we were the proud presenting sponsor of the huge Synergy Party on Thursday night.

Our partnership with Citrix is unique. We incorporate Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenServer as part of our service offerings. Plus, Citrix is also a SoftLayer customer, using SoftLayer infrastructure to offer a hosted desktop solution. Designed and architected from the ground up to run in the cloud, the Citrix Virtual Demo Center provides a dashboard interface for managing Citrix XenDesktop demo environments that are provisioned on-demand using SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

My biggest thrill at the conference came when I was asked to speak and share a little of our expertise in a keynote address on simplifying cloud networking. I like to tell people I have a great face for radio, but that didn’t keep me off the stage. The hall was packed to capacity and after defeating a few “demo gremlins,” I got to show off how easy SoftLayer makes it for our customers to take advantage of amazing products like Citrix Netscaler VPX:

In my “Learn How to Build Private Clouds in the Cloud” breakout session, I had a little more time to speak to the larger question of how SoftLayer is approaching the shift to cloud-specific architectures and share some best practices in moving to a private cloud. Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists, so I tried to explain how businesses can leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to add scalability to a private cloud environment.

Thanks to SynergyTV, that presentation has been made available for all to see:

As I joked at the beginning of the breakout session, an attendee at Citrix Synergy was probably bombarded by “the cloud” in presentations and conversations at the show. While it’s important to demystify the key terms we use on a daily basis, a few straight days of keynotes and breakout sessions about the cloud can get you thinking, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Beyond our capabilities as a cloud infrastructure provider, SoftLayer knows how to have a good time, so after we took care of the “work” stuff in the sessions above, we did our best to help provide a little “play” as well. This year, we were the proud sponsor of the Synergy Party, featuring Lifehouse!

Citrix Synergy 2012 was a blast. As a former rocket scientist, I can say that authoritatively.

-@nday91

This guest blog comes to us from Nexmo, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Nexmo is the wholesale messaging API that lets you send and receive high volumes of SMS at a global level. In this video we talk to Nexmo CEO Tony Jamous about the benefits of Nexmo, how it came to be and the problem it solves for you.

Cutting out the Middleman with Nexmo

These days, optimizing mobile messaging deliverability comes at a price. Businesses must connect to multiple carriers, operate heavy infrastructure, and build their own data analytics. On top of that, many third-party SMS solutions require contracts, price negotiations and significant up-front costs.

Nexmo was created to eliminate the need for a business to connect to carriers or complex third party protocols through simple, powerful RESTful and SMPP APIs. Our scalable infrastructure allows you to send and receive SMS in high volumes to over 5 billion users around the world. This is a market need that hasn’t been addressed, and we approached it with a few ideas in mind. If you were going to replicate the functionality of Nexmo on your own, these are the key areas you’d have to look at:

Direct to Carrier Model

With every hop, the quality of a connection has the potential to degrade, and cost inflates. Adding intermediaries in the chain also impact the granularity of collected data, such as delivery reports and reasons of failure. By reducing the number of hops to the final subscriber you’ll see:

• An improved delivery ratio and lower latency
• Enhanced security
• Fewer single points of failure
• Reduced cost, less fat in the chain

With a closer position to the final carrier, a business can access more “Telco” data like phone status, whether it is ported to another network, or if it’s roaming abroad. With that information, you can also make better routing decisions and ultimately see higher delivery ratios.

Get Your own SMS-Enabled Phone Numbers

We’ve seen in the last two years the emergence of “Over the Top” (OTT) messaging apps such as Google Voice and TextPlus. Those apps provide a virtual phone number to each user, and Nexmo behaves similarly by enabling apps to behave like a “super virtual carrier” without the need for heavy Telco infrastructure. North America is the most mature market with OTT players generating significant SMS traffic, and now these models are going abroad. We pinpointed a unique need in the value chain:

• Source virtual phone numbers from global carriers
• Build the business models that protect carriers’ interests without eliminating the opportunity for innovative apps
• Provide the elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure for high volume two-way transactions

Nexmo approached those needs with APIs that enabled app developers to search for available phone numbers, provision new numbers and cancel numbers they weren’t using any more. It doesn’t take days or weeks to launch in a new market … Apps can launch in a new market in a matter of hours with minimal upfront investment!

Read the rest of Nexmo’s blog about adding SMS functionality to your app…

SoftLayer’s goal is to provide unparalleled value to the customers who entrust their business-critical computing to us — whether via dedicated hosting, managed hosting, cloud computing or a hybrid environment of all three. We provide the best platform on the market, delivering convenience, ease of use, compelling return on investment (ROI), significant competitive advantage, and consistency in a world where the only real constant seems to be change.

That value proposition is one of the biggest driving forces behind our partnership with RightScale. We’re cloud computing soul mates.

RightScale understands the power of automation, and as a result, they’ve created a cloud management platform that they like to say delivers “abstraction with complete customization.” RightScale customers can easily deploy and manage applications across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, unencumbered by the underlying details. They are free to run efficient, scalable, highly available applications with visibility into and control over their computing resources available in one place.

As you know, SoftLayer is fueled by automation as well, and it’s one of our primary differentiators. We’re able to deliver a phenomenal customer experience because every aspect of our platform is fully and seamlessly automated to accelerate provisioning, mitigate human error and provide customers with access and features that our competitors can only dream of. Our customers get simple and total control over an ever-expanding number of back-end services and functions through our easy-to-use Customer Portal and via an open, robust API.

The compatibility between SoftLayer and RightScale is probably pretty clear already, but if you needed another point to ponder, you can ruminate on the fact that we both share expertise and focus across a number of vertical markets. The official announcement of the SoftLayer and RightScale partnership will be particularly noteworthy and interesting in the Internet-based business and online gaming market segments.

It didn’t take long to find an amazing customer success story that demonstrated the value of the new SoftLayer-RightScale partnership. Broken Bulb Game Studios — the developer of social games such as My Town, Braaains, Ninja Warz and Miscrits — is already harnessing the combined feature sets made possible by our partnership with RightScale to simplify its deployment process and scale to meet its customers’ expectations as its games find audiences and growing favor on Facebook. Don’t take our word for it, though … Check out the Broken Bulb quote in today’s press release announcing the partnership.

Broken Bulb and other developers of social games recognize the importance of getting concepts to market at breakneck speed. They also understand the critical importance of intelligently managing IT resources throughout a game’s life cycle. What they want is fully automated control over computing resources so that they can be allocated dynamically and profitably in immediate response to market signals, and they’re not alone.

Game developers of all sorts — and companies in a growing number of vertical markets — will need and want the same fundamental computing-infrastructure agility.

Our partnership with RightScale is only beginning. You’re going to see some crazy innovation happening now that our cloud computing mad scientists are all working together.

-Marc

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