Posts Tagged ‘expansion’

We’ve always set our sights globally at SoftLayer and this week we’ve certainly achieved some key milestones. With our data center in Singapore going LIVE, we now have a “digital gateway” for providing our unique cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions to the Asia-Pacific region.

What is even more remarkable is the speed at which we are deploying our new international data centers. In only a few months, all the meticulous planning, logistics and execution were done and customers could place orders. And we’re not slowing down. The trajectory path we’re on has us expanding faster and farther than we ever thought possible.

Next month we’re opening a new data center in Amsterdam, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt. Each of these facilities is built and maintained by SoftLayer, and that organic growth is a huge differentiator. We didn’t go out and acquire a company to expand our capabilities, and because we’re doing the work on the ground, we’re able to guarantee the most consistent, best possible service. Every data center – whether it’s Singapore or San Jose – is exactly the same. Because of that consistency, our customers don’t have to worry about whether the services in the new facilities meet their expectations, and based on the phenomenal provisioning statistics we saw on day one in Singapore, they aren’t hesitating to order more.

International Expansion: Currency

Because our global expansion enables us to perform even better for the SoftLayer customers located outside of North America, we wanted to make it easier for those customers to do business with us. As of 8:01 a.m. Central Time today, we support and accept payment in 60+ currencies! This currency support allows our customers to price SoftLayer services in their native currency, and it lets them avoid those pesky exchange fees from their credit card.

Our BYOC (Cloud) and Dedicated Server order forms have been updated with a currency selection on their first page, so once you select a currency, your order form will reload with all pricing displayed in that currency. Existing customers are also able to pay for their existing servers with one-time or recurring payments in our customer portal.

Currencies Supported

It’s amazing to say that we are truly a global company operating on three continents. Our success and future growth are tied to these new international capabilities. We will move aggressively and open more data centers, so stay tuned. With our global aspirations taking flight, I’m reminded of the saying that, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

Speaking of flights, I’ve got to get to the airport … My flight to Amsterdam is leaving in a few hours.

-@gkdog

I write this message while overlooking the International Business Park in Singapore. The desk I sit at faces east; the sun is now on the opposite side of the building and our new Singapore office is starting to cool off, but it’s eerily quiet here on the 6th floor.

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

As many of you know SoftLayer is going global. Our Singapore DC goes live TOMORROW, and Amsterdam will follow suit shortly, so we put together a little “jingle” that I think you might know. It might be September, but if the stores are already putting out holiday items, Christmas songs should be fair game in October … And since we are entering that last stretch of work before those great end-of-the-year national holidays that give us a few days off, we can use a classic tune to help us power through.

To those of you who love the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” you may not want to play the video below. To those who want to rubberneck at our goofiness and join us in a little fun … play away:

If you want to sing along at home (because who wouldn’t?), here are the lyrics for your karaoke pleasure:

Shout-outs go to all the SLayers who indulged us in this little song. We hope it’s less embarrassing than you expected … And if it’s more embarrassing, we hope it’s as terrible and catchy as “Friday.”

Tip: If the song is stuck in your head now, one great way to distract yourself from it is to go and order a server in Singapore!

-@SKinman454

Are you familiar with the “slow clap” phenomenon?

It’s basically a crescendo of applause in a crowd that starts with a single hand clap. A few seconds after that first clap, you hear the second. A slow rhythm takes shape. A few people join in. The rhythm is contagious, and it starts to spread through the crowd. As more people join in, the natural tendency is for the pace to speed up as the volume increases, and within about a minute, a single hand clap becomes a huge roar of applause. In the movie Rudy, one character starts a “slow clap” on the sideline of a football game, and the cheer ends up filling the entire stadium … And that’s the visual that comes to mind when I think about the upcoming “go live” date for our Singapore data center.

Start a slow clap in your mind and think of each successive milestone getting faster and exponentially louder applause:

• In July, George Karidis posted a high-level overview of SoftLayer’s international growth.
• About a month later, I blogged with details about our network expansion into Japan.
• Three days after that post, you got your first glimpse at the Singapore data center build-out process.
• A week later, you saw updated pictures of the data center and office space.
• Last week, racks were installed and wired up by the time a press release hit the wire announcing the launch of our Asia-Pacific operations.
• From that press release, you learned that SoftLayer’s Singapore data center will go live on October 3, 2011.

If you imagined correctly, the applause in your mind should be borderline deafening … And I didn’t even mention the fact that we enabled pre-orders on select servers in Singapore last week with a Triple Double special exclusively for servers in the new SNG01 facility.

AND I haven’t said anything about the progress of our first European data center in Amsterdam. We already have a team of people there working to get that facility ready, and it’s coming together just as quickly. Don’t be surprised to see a few sneak peeks at the build-out process there in the next few weeks.

It’s almost unfathomable that we’re so close to the launch of our first facility outside the United States, and when you consider how quickly Amsterdam will come online after Singapore, you probably think you’re taking crazy pills … Or that we are. I don’t want to take any of the wind out of the sales of our launch day, so I’m just going to share a few more glimpses into the data center.

On Monday, you can light your first server at the end of this Singaporean hallway:

All of the racks are powered:

The server rails are installed:

And we thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and install a few servers:

Now all we need to do is flip the switch … Are you ready?

-@toddmitchell

Last week, I shared an early glimpse of our Singapore data center pods and office space. What a difference a week makes. A week after the first batch of pictures were taken, I made my way back through the facility to document some of the progress, and you’ll be amazed by how quickly everything is coming together.

You’d probably be even more amazed if you knew how many people (literally) around the world were working hard every day to keep the build-out moving forward so quickly … Some of the most visible folks in the process are the guys we have on the ground in Singapore:

We weren’t able to use SoftLayer’s fancy new truck to get our gear to the Singapore facility. I think it had something about having to travel over the Pacific Ocean … I guess there weren’t enough gas stations? We had all of our DC gear shipped down (literally) in ocean containers, and when the skids were all moved into the storage area, it was almost like Christmas.

I say “almost like Christmas” because we happened to know everything we’d be unwrapping, and if we were surprised by anything we opened, it probably wouldn’t be a good surprise. Luckily, we got exactly what we needed. Meanwhile, the Singapore data center pods have been coming along nicely. Here’s a look inside Pod 1.

And while we do our best to mirror the build-out of our data center pods regardless of their location, you can see that a few exceptions are made. In the pods we’re building in the United States, we have at least two fewer languages on signs like the ones you see here:

If we walk next door to Pod 1, you’ll see the progress we’re making in Pod 2. I know the pictures look similar … But that’s the point. Given the demand we’ve heard from customers, we’re building both pods at the same time, hoping to keep up with demand while we start building our next facilities.

While the pod progress is impressive, the progress on the office space is almost unbelievable. Where you previously saw ladders and cement, you now see desks, chairs and carpet. We’ve been hiring in Singapore for a few weeks now, and when we officially get the keys to move in, this place will be abuzz with new SLayers.

We’ve posted a few more pictures in our Singapore DC Construction Flickr photo album, enjoy them! Soon after these pictures were taken, the team started assembling the racks in the DC, so the next update you’ll see from me will probably include a lot more server goodness.

If you happen to live in Singapore and want to join our team, be sure to visit SoftLayer Careers for our current opportunities. As of right now, we have positions available in inventory, channel development, inside sales, enterprise account management, network engineering, sales engineering, systems administration and server building … And if you don’t fit in any of those positions, we can probably find another role for you to fill!

-@toddmitchell

By the end of the year, SoftLayer’s global network will include points of presence (PoPs) and data centers throughout Europe and Asia. As George explained in Globalization and Hosting: The World Wide Web is Flat, the goal is to bring SoftLayer’s network within 40ms of everyone on the planet. One of the first steps in reaching that goal is to cross both of the “ponds” between our US facilities and our soon-to-open international facilities.

The location and relative size of Europe and Asia on that map may not make them viable resources when planning travel (Seattle actually isn’t geographically closer to Tokyo than it is to San Jose), but they illustrate the connections we’ll make to extend our network advantages to Singapore and Amsterdam.

Since I’m currently on-site in Singapore, I can give you an inside look at our expansion into Asia. The data center is coming along very nicely, but before I share any of the activity from that construction process, I wanted to share a little about a stopover I had on my trip from Dallas to Singapore: Tokyo!

Last week, we began the process of installing and lighting our first Asian point of presence in Tokyo, Japan, and after a few long days of work, it’s all racked and stacked. If you’re familiar with SoftLayer, you’re probably aware that we build our data centers in a pod concept for a number of reasons, and our network points of presence are no different … One funny aspect of being so familiar with the infrastructure in all of our other locations is that when we walk out the door of the data center facility, we get inundated with culture shock all over again.

SoftLayer VP of Network Operations and Engineering Will Charnock just finished the process of building the network PoP in Hong Kong, and you might see a few (similar looking) pictures from Tokyo and Hong Kong in the near future when we’re ready to open those new PoPs to customer traffic. And don’t worry … I’ll be sure to sneak a few shots of the Singapore DC progress for you too.

Sayonara!

-@toddmitchell

Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with the goal of reaching the East Indies by traveling West. He fortuitously failed by stumbling across the New World and the discovery that the world was round – a globe. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman calls this discovery “Globalization 1.0,” or an era of “countries globalizing.” As transportation and technology grew and evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Globalization 2.0″ brought an era of “companies globalizing,” and around the year 2000, we moved into “Globalization 3.0″:

The dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 – the force that gives it its unique character – is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is what I call the flat-world platform.

Columbus discovered the world wasn’t flat, we learned how to traverse that round world, and we keep making that world more and more accessible. He found out that the world was a lot bigger than everyone thought, and since his discovery, the smartest people on the planet have worked to make that huge world smaller and smaller.

The most traditional measure of globalization is how far “out” political, economical and technological changes extend. Look at the ARPANET network infrastructure in 1971 and a map of the Internet as it is today.

With every step Columbus took away from the Old World, he was one step closer to the New World. If you look at the growth of the Internet through that lens, you see that every additional node and connection added to the Internet brings connectivity closer to end-users who haven’t had it before. Those users gain access to the rest of the Internet, and the rest of the Internet gains access to the information and innovation those users will provide.

Globalization in Hosting

As technology and high speed connectivity become more available to users around the world, the hosting industry has new markets to reach and serve. As Lance explained in a keynote session, “50% of the people in the world are not on the Internet today. They will be on the Internet in the next 5-10 years.”

Understanding this global shift, SoftLayer can choose from a few different courses of action. Today, 40+% of our customers reside outside the United States of America, and we reach those customers via 2,000+ Gbps of network connectivity from transit and peering relationships with other networks around the world, and we’ve been successful. If the Internet is flattening the world, a USA-centric infrastructure may be limiting, though.

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and look at a map of the United States with a few important overlays:

The three orange circles show the rough equivalents of the areas around our data centers in Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C., that have less than 40 milliseconds of latency directly to that facility. The blue circle on the left shows the same 40ms ring around our new San Jose facility (in blue to help avoid a little confusion). If a customer can access their host’s data center directly with less than 40ms of latency, that customer will be pretty happy with their experience.

When you consider that each of the stars on the map represents a point of presence (PoP) on the SoftLayer private network, you can draw similar circles around those locations to represent the area within 40ms of the first on-ramp to our private network. While Winnipeg, Manitoba, isn’t in one of our data center’s 40ms rings, a user there would be covered by the Chicago PoP’s coverage, and once the user is on the SoftLayer network, he or she has a direct, dedicated path to all of our data centers, and we’re able to provide a stellar network experience.

If in the next 5-10 years, the half of the world that isn’t on the Internet joins the Internet, we can’t rely solely on our peering and transit providers to get those users to the SoftLayer network, so we will need to bring the SoftLayer network closer to them:

This map gives you an idea of what the first steps of SoftLayer’s international expansion will look like. As you’ve probably heard, we will have a data center location in Singapore and in Amsterdam by the end of the year, and those locations will be instrumental in helping us build our global network.

Each of the points of presence we add in Asia and Europe effectively wrap our 40ms ring around millions of users that may have previously relied on several hops on several providers to get to the SoftLayer network, and as a result, we’re able to power a faster and more consistent network experience for those users. As SoftLayer grows, our goal is to maintain the quality of service our customers expect while we extend the availability of that service quality to users around the globe.

If you’re not within 40ms of our network yet, don’t worry … We’re globalizing, and we’ll be in your neighborhood soon.

-@gkdog

When Lance opened the floor for SoftLayer employees to present their ideas for “innovative” approaches to the Internet, I put together a pretty ambitious proposal. As it turns out, the idea wasn’t as fully baked as I may have wanted it to be, but I came to the decision to change gears a little and take a different approach.

Completely unrelated to that personal decision to adjust the direction of the project, I had a nice little chat with Lance on the phone. We decided that the world was underready for a revolution and that a more traditional nontraditional approach was in order:

The Internet needs data centers to hold all of your pictures. SoftLayer does a great job at being a data center, but I feel like there’s still an opportunity for a revolution in data center design. I have a few ideas about how the world of web hosting can be completely redefined, and with the unique resources Lance has put at my disposal, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to create a stellar hosting platform with an unbeatable discount price structure. PHIL’s DC is the future of web hosting.

- PHIL

SoftLayer isn’t a publicly traded company, but in the interest of transparency, we do our best to share as much information about the business as we can with our customers. Earlier this week, we released our revenue and operations growth for the first quarter of 2011, and while we’re happy to reach so many amazing milestones, we can’t take any time to rest on our laurels.

It’s no secret that we’ve gotten to where we are today because our 26,000+ customers trust us with their businesses. We can quantify success with revenue numbers and server counts, but at the end of the day, our business will be successful when we provide a platform for our customers to be successful. The growth of our customer base is a testament to the hard work the team has put in behind the scenes, and it also presents an interesting challenge: We need to continue to meet the needs of 26,000+ different businesses in 140+ countries around the world.

Given the amount of hair-pulling you might encounter by something as simple as setting up dinner with a group of friends, it’s a pretty daunting task to incorporate thousands of disparate perspectives in our road map as we move forward, but with that challenge comes great opportunity to build SoftLayer into an even better business. Whether the request is for something as straightforward as a hardware product or as complex as geographic expansion into specific international markets, the feedback we get from our customers shapes our internal conversations (and ultimately our long-term plans).

Understanding that need for constant feedback, we’re doing our best to listen to what our customers have to say. We’re listening to conversations on our forums, watching updates from our customers on various social media platforms, and monitoring our sales and support customer experiences to ensure we’re moving in the right direction. Recently, we incorporated a Get Satisfaction widget on our site to give our customers a platform to share their ideas, questions, problems and praises. Additionally, users can vote on existing suggestions to give us a sense of our customer base’s priorities.

To all of our customers, thank you for trusting SoftLayer with your business. In response to your past requests, we’ve opened a new data center in San Jose, christened new pods in Dallas and Washington, D.C., launched our managed hosting service and released servers powered by the latest and greatest Intel Xeon “Sandy Bridge” and “Westmere EX” processors … And all of those accomplishments have come since we closed the books on the success we shared from Q1.

As we continue to improve our feedback loops, you’re going to see even more impressive numbers from SoftLayer, and that success will fuel our ability to continue growing the business to meet more of our customers’ requests. Because we officially completed our integration with The Planet in Q1, we’re able to shift our focus completely to maintaining and growing the combined business. By the end of the year, you’ll see SoftLayer data centers in Europe and Asia, and as new products and technologies are released, you’ll see them first from SoftLayer.

What else can we do for you? (And no, that’s not a rhetorical question.)

-@gkdog

Ever wonder what a SoftLayer data center looked like before it became a SoftLayer data center? Each one of our facilities is built from a “pod” concept: You can walk into any of our server rooms in any of our facilities around the country (soon to be “around the world”), and you’ll see same basic layout, control infrastructure and servers. By building our data center space in this way, we’re able to provide an unparalleled customer experience. Nearly every aspect of our business benefits from this practice, many in surprising ways.

From an operations perspective, our staff can work in any facility without having to be retrained and the data center construction process becomes a science that can be replicated quicker with each subsequent build-out. From a sales perspective, every product and technology can be made available from all of our locations. From a network perspective, the network architecture doesn’t deviate significantly from place to place. From a finance perspective, if we’re buying the same gear from the same vendors, we get better volume pricing. From a marketing perspective … I guess we have a lot of really pretty data center space to show off.

We try to keep our customers in the loop when it comes to our growth and expansion plans by posting pictures and updates as we build new pods, and with our newest facility in San Jose, CA, we’ve been snapping photos throughout the construction progress. If you’ve been patiently reading this part of the blog before scrolling down to the pictures, you get bonus points … If you looked at the pictures before coming back up to this content, you already know that I’ve included several snapshots that show some of the steps we take when outfitting new DC space.

The first look at our soon-to-be data center is not the flashiest, but it shows you how early we get involved in the build-out process. The San Jose facility is brand new, so we have a fresh canvas for our work of art. If I were to start talking your ear off about the specifics of the space, this post would probably go into next week, so I’ll just show you some of the most obvious steps in the evolution of the space.

The time gap between the first picture and the second picture is pretty evident, but the drastic change is pretty impressive. Raised floor, marked aisles, PDUs … But no racks.

Have no fear, the racks are being assembled.

They’re not going to do much good sitting in the facility’s office space, though. Something tells me the next picture will have them in a different setting.

Lucky guess, huh? You can see in this picture that the racks are installed in front of perforated tiles (on the cold aisle side) and on top of special tiles that allow for us to snake cabling from under the floor to the rack without leaving open space for the cold air to sneak out where it’s not needed.

The next step in the process requires five very expensive network switches in each rack. Two of the switches are for public network traffic, two are for private network traffic and one is for out-of-band management network traffic.

Those switches won’t do much good for the servers if the servers can’t be easily connected to them, so the next step is to attach and bind all of the network cable from the switches to where the servers will be. As you’ll see in the next pictures, the cabling and binding is done with extreme precision … If any of the bundles aren’t tightly wound, the zip ties are cut and the process has to be restarted.

While the cables are being installed, we also work to prepare our control row with servers, switches, routers and appliances that mirror the configurations we have in our other pods.

When the network cables are all installed, it’s a pretty amazing sight. When the cables are plugged into the servers, it’s even more impressive … Each cable is pre-measured and ready to be attached to its server with enough length to get it to the port but not too much to leave much slack.

One of the last steps before we actually get the servers installed is to install the server rails (which make installing the server a piece of cake).

The servers tend to need power, so the power strips are installed on each rack, and each power strip is fed from the row’s PDU.

Every network and power cable in the data center is labeled and positioned exactly where it needs to be. The numbers on the cables correspond with ports on our switches, spots in the rack and plugs on the power strip so we can immediately track down and replace any problem cables we find.

If you’ve hung around with me for this long, I want to introduce you to a few of the team members that have been working night and day to get this facility ready for you. While I’d like to say I could have done all of this stuff myself, that would be a tremendous lie, and without the tireless efforts of all of these amazing SoftLayer folks, this post would be a whole lot less interesting.

A funny realization you might come to is that in this entire “data center” post, there’s not a single picture of a customer server … Is it a data center if it doesn’t have data yet?

-SamF