Posts Tagged ‘delivery’

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…

This is a guest blog from Tim Falls of SendGrid, a technology partner that provides cloud-based email infrastructure for reliable delivery, scalability, real-time analytics and flexible APIs for customers who want to focus on driving their own growth and profitability.

Understanding the Value of [Email] Infrastructure Services

The Fall of DIY … As We Know It
Today more than ever before, businesses depend on third party services to operate efficiently and achieve their objectives. As a business leader, you have countless web applications and software as service solutions at your fingertips, which collectively address just about any problem or demand imaginable. Examples include cloud-based file storage, cloud and dedicated web hosting, recurring billing applications, online HR management portals, APIs for telephony and geo-data, and managed email infrastructure and delivery services. Startups and established corporations alike can utilize these tools quickly and simply with a credit card and a few clicks on a trackpad.

So, what does this mean, and why is it worth recognizing and appreciating? Well, it means that your life is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago. And if you fail to recognize the opportunities and advantages that these resources offer, your competitors will soon leave you in their proverbial dust … if they haven’t already.

The gist:

• You don’t have to do everything yourself anymore … So don’t!
• Be the best at what you do, and rely on other experts to help with everything outside of your realm.

The Email Puzzle
Let’s face it. Email sucks. Not email in and of itself – obviously, it is an essential part of our lives and is arguably one of the most transformative communication tools in human history. But, from a business standpoint, the implementation and maintenance of an effective and efficient email system is truly a nightmare. If there is one thing that web developers across the world can agree upon, it may be this: Successfully integrating email into a web application just ain’t fun!

Read the rest of SendGrid’s Guest Blog! »

What do you call the day after you finish building a new data center server room and cabling the server racks in it? If you’re an employee at SoftLayer, you call it Truck Day.

Last week, a few of the folks from marketing were invited to celebrate in the Truck Day festivities for Pod 2 in DAL05 (SR02.DAL05), and I jumped at the opportunity. I don’t go anywhere without at least one camera on-hand to document and share what’s going on with the SoftLayer community, and Truck Day wasn’t an exception … In fact, I had three different cameras going at all times!

The truck arrived at around 7 a.m. with a few dozen pallets of servers, and about forty employees from all around the company immediately jumped into action. As the pallets moved from the loading dock to the inventory room, people were unboxing servers and piling them on carts. When a cart was full, it was whisked to the data center and unloaded. The data center techs plugged in each of the servers to confirm its configuration and stacked it with matching configurations in designated areas around the data center. By the time one cart got back to the inventory room, another was on its way to the data center, so very little time was lost.

Back in 2007, SamF did a great job of explaining the process, so I won’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, I’ll let you see the activities as they were captured by the three cameras I toted along:

To give you an idea of how fast all of this was done, each the time lapse cameras set up in the data center and in the inventory room captured images every five seconds. When the video was compiled, the frame rate was set to 20 frames per second, so each second of time lapse video is the equivalent of 100 seconds of work. In a matter of just a few hours, we received, inventoried, racked, cabled and started selling around 750 servers in a brand new data center pod. Competitors: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Pictures from DAL05 Pod 2 Truck Day have been posted on our Flickr Account: http://sftlyr.com/8g

In the past three weeks, we brought three different data center pods online in three different parts of the country: On April 25, it was our first server room in San Jose (SJC01); on May 2, the second server room in DAL05; and on May 10, our second server room in WDC01. As far as I know, we don’t have a new pod planned for next month, but given how quickly the operations team has been building data center space, I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call asking me to come in a little early to help unload servers in a new data center next week.

-@khazard

Music Credit: The background track in the video is “Your Coat” from SoftLayer’s very own Chris Interrante. Keep an eye out for his soon-to-be released EP: OVERDRAFT.

I often get asked “what makes SoftLayer different?” The problem with that simple question is – SoftLayer is so different from all the competition out there that it’s not a simple question to answer. I have my standard version that I run thru – but I’m not sure people really grasp how different SoftLayer really is. After talking to my wife, she recommended doing a Letterman style top 10 reason why SoftLayer is different. I figured I would give it a shot – so here it is..

10. SoftLayer terminates 40Gbps to every single rack!! 20Gbps to the public internet and 20Gbps to the private network.
9. SoftLayer offers three types of VPN services for out-of-band connectivity (SSL, PPTP, IPSEC)
8. SoftLayer manages its own nationwide MPLS network with 10 PoPs and over 1000Gbps of transit and peer connectivity
7. SoftLayer offers free enterprise grade DNS services through our DNS farms located in all 10 PoPs in North America
6. SoftLayer has over 1600 APIs for custom integration, a full service control panel for ease of use and a private label option for resellers
5. Every single server in every datacenter is a rackmount, hotswap, tool-less chassis offering enterprise grade hardware with ultra-fast modifications
4. SoftLayer has downloadable iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps in addition to our mobile phone friendly .mobi site for complete control.
3. Only hybrid solution available – dedicated, virtualized, and cloud instances operating in a single environment and control thru a single interface or API
2. Private Network – connect any server to any other server in any datacenter with a click of a button
1. Fastest service delivery

• Over 1000 servers in stock
• Dedicated servers – 4 hours or less
• Servers with virtualization – 2 hours or less
• Cloud instances & storage – 5 to 15 minutes
• Firewalls, Load Balancers, SAN Storage – added real time w/ no downtime

-@lavosby

Over the past 10 years, I’ve run or helped run all sizes of web sites and internet applications. I’ve seen everything from single-page brochure web sites to horizontally scaled interactive portals. And what I’ve learned is that it is all about the end-user experience.

I’m not a graphics specialist or a GUI designer. I just don’t have that in my DNA. I focus more on the technical side of things working on better ways to deliver content to the user. And in the purely technical area, the best thing to do to improve the user experience is to improve the delivery speed to the user.

There are a lot of tools out there that can be used to speed up delivery. CDN, for example, is an awesome way to get static content to an end user and is very scalable. But what about scaling out the application itself?

Traditionally, a simple Layer-4 Load Balancer has been a staple component of scalable applications. This type of Load Balancing can provide capacity during traffic peaks as well as increase availability. The application runs on several servers and the load balancer uses some simple methods (least connections, round robin, etc) to distribute the load. For a lot of applications this is sufficient to get content reliably and quickly to the end user. SoftLayer offers a relatively inexpensive load-balancing service for our customers that can provide this functionality.

There is another, more sophisticated, tool that can be used to manage internet application traffic. That is the “Application Delivery Controller” (obligatory Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Delivery_Controller) or “Load Balancer on Steroids”. This class of traffic manager can act in Layer-7, the data layer. These devices can make decisions based on the actual content of the data packets, not just the source and destination.

And an ADC can do more than load balance. It can act as a Web Application Firewall to protect your data. It can speed up your application using SSL Offloading, Content Caching, TCP Optimization, and more. This type of device is very smart and very configurable and will help in the delivering the application to the end user.

At SoftLayer we have seen our customers achieve a lot of success with our Layer-4 Load Balancer product. But we are always looking for other tools to help our customers. We always have admired the advanced functionality in the appliance-based Application Delivery Controllers on the market. Finding a way to get this enterprise-grade technology to our customers in an affordable manner was problematic. When Citrix announced that they were going to create a version of their NetScaler product that didn’t require an appliance we were thrilled. With the announcement of the NetScaler VPX we finally thought we had found the right product that we could use to affordably provision this advanced technology on-demand to our customers.

SoftLayer is VERY excited to partner with Citrix to provide the NetScaler VPX Application Delivery Controller to our customers. Our customers can order a NetScaler VPX, and in a matter of minutes be managing the delivery of their online applications using one of the most sophisticated tools on the market. Citrix does a better job of promoting the product than I do, so here is the link to their site: http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=21679&ntref=hp_nav_US.

Remember, it’s all about the experience of the user at the other end of the wire. Find the right tools to manage that experience and you are most of the way there. Oh yeah, and find a good graphics designer too. That helps. So does good content.

-@nday91

How do you unload 1,000 servers and have them ready to go live in a datacenter in five hours? With lots and lots of planning. Every month we take in a shipment of servers to accommodate the next 30 days of sales. Preparation for each delivery starts several months in advance with forecasting models. You have to look far enough ahead in your models to continually adjust forecasts for sales, facilities and available resources. Some vendors need more lead time than others so you have to constantly update your forecasts, all the way up to final order placement.

Also, you don’t just walk into a datacenter with a server and set it down. There’s a lot of work that goes into physical prep for the datacenter as well. You have to plan the datacenter layout, order and assemble racks, add rails, power strips, switches, power cord bundles, network cable bundles, etc. Every rack we deploy has almost 400 cage nuts and just under 200 cables in it. We don’t just string a bunch of cables up and call it a day. Every cable bundle is meticulously routed, combed and hung to make them look professional. With that much cabling, you have to make it right or you’ll never be able to work around it.

With one week to go before the trucks arrive, all of the datacenter prep starts wrapping up. And with just a few days left, we have our last manager meeting to review server placement, personnel, timing and other delivery details.

Next is Truck Day – this is when the fun begins.

On Truck Day, we leave plenty of people behind to handle sales, support and accounting, but everyone else is expected at the loading dock. After all the pallets are pulled off the truck and accounted for, the team gets busy un-boxing. As servers are unboxed, all of the spare parts in the boxes – spare screws, riser cards, SATA cables, and various other pieces – are sorted into bins on the dock. The servers themselves are then placed in custom transport carts and moved to the datacenter.

From there, the teams inside the datacenter sort the servers according to type and perform a strict QA process that includes verifying the hardware configurations and verifying that the components are all seated properly.

Once sorted, the servers get scanned into the system and racked up. As all of the cables are plugged in, another QA process is completed to verify that all of the ports are correct. At that point, it’s just a matter of turning each server on and watching them check in, get their bios flashed with the latest and greatest release and having the system update any component firmware that is needed. As the systems check themselves into inventory, they go through two more QA processes that include an inventory check and a burn-in process.

By the time the truck is empty, the last box is stashed and the final server is racked up, everyone is ready to get back to their day jobs. Months worth of planning – all wiped out in a matter of hours.

Mary is working on a great post about what Truck Day looks like from a Salesperson’s perspective. It explains why we have everyone get involved in the process.

-SamF