Posts Tagged ‘diversity’

Now that I’ve had about twelve years of work experience, I’m at a point in my life where I can’t really claim to be “young” or “inexperienced” anymore. Throughout my professional career, I’ve been exposed to many different types of work environments, and I must say that never have I encountered as diverse a work force as the one I work with now at SoftLayer *ndash; everything from family background to hobbies.

Since my first day at SoftLayer, I’ve been amazed to learn about all the different places my coworkers have come from. To name a few that stood out and to give you an idea of how diverse our team is, I have colleagues that are from Madagascar, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Korea, Japan, and even “Texas.” It is fascinating to learn more about other cultures from them, and because we work together every day, I have a lot of great opportunities to do so.

To take this concept of diversity even further, as I got to know my coworkers more, I soon realized that our differences extended significantly beyond nationality since we have such varied personal hobbies and interests from all walks of life. I’ve gotten to know individuals that are into acting for short films, piloting airplanes, live-action role playing, skateboarding, cooking, car drifting, and barbecuing. You may not find this unusual if you’ve have encountered people with similar interests at some point in your lives, but to have them all in a single workplace is pretty incredible to me.

Despite all these differences in nationality and personal interests, we all share the same passion for computer hardware and software that is an integral part of the business services that SoftLayer offers. We could talk for hours on end about the different technologies, and even with all of our differences, SoftLayer’s unified, inviting corporate culture makes it easy for us to share a passion for excellent customer support. If you talk to Lance, you’ll hear him say that the customer experience is the only thing that matters to him, and when your CEO lives and breathes that mantra, it’s easy for everyone to follow.

When I first heard about the plans to expand overseas into Amsterdam and Singapore, I was a little nervous at the challenge, but when I started to think about it, our business model has always involved employing diverse talents with a common goal that could be implemented essentially anywhere in the world with little difficulty.

SoftLayer has become a great melting pot of technical staff, and because new employees are rapidly assimilated into the team, their unique interests and personalities immediately become a part of the far-reaching (and growing) landscape of SoftLayer diversity.

Want to bring some of your diversity to our team? Right now we have 50+ open positions in almost every department of the company and in every location. Just promise when you join our team that you’ll send me a message to introduce yourself!

-Danny

The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens … Let’s look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance … which doesn’t take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, “Click to Chat” on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. The “It’s better to be safe than sorry” cliche is a cliche for a reason: It’s worth saying often.

-Greg

This is a guest blog from Chris Lantrip, CEO of CyberlinkASP, an application service provider focused on hosting, upgrading and managing the industry’s best software.

The DesktopLayer from CyberlinkASP

Hosted virtual desktops – SoftLayer style.

In early 2006, we were introduced to SoftLayer. In 2007, they brought us StorageLayer, and in 2009, CloudLayer. Each of those solutions met a different kind of need in the Application Service Provider (ASP) world, and by integrating those platforms into our offering, DesktopLayer was born: The on-demand anytime, anywhere virtual desktop hosted on SoftLayer and powered by CyberlinkASP.

CyberlinkASP was originally established to instantly web-enable software applications that were not online in the past. Starting off as a Citrix integration firm in the early days, we were approached by multiple independent software vendors asking us to host, manage and deliver their applications from a centralized database platform to their users across multiple geographic locations. With the robust capabilities of Citrix, we were able to revolutionize application delivery and management for several ISV’s.

Over time, more ISV’s starting showing up at our doorstep, and application delivery was becoming a bigger and bigger piece of our business. Our ability to provision users on a specific platform in minutes, delete them in minutes, perform updates and maintain hundreds of customers and thousands of users all at one time from a centralized platform was very attractive.

Read the rest of CyberlinkASP’s Guest Blog! »