This year, Parallels structured the conference around three distinct tracks — Business, Technical and Developer — to focus all of the presentations for their most relevant audiences, and as a result, Parallels Summit engaged a broader, more diverse crowd than ever before. Many of the presentations were specifically geared toward the future of the cloud and how businesses can innovate to leverage the cloud’s potential. With all of that buzz around the cloud and innovation, SoftLayer felt right at home. We were also right at home when it came to partying.

SoftLayer was a proud sponsor of the massive Parallels Summit party at PURE Nightclub in Caesar’s palace on the second night of the conference. With respect to the “What Happens in Vegas” tagline, we actually powered down our recording devices to let the crowd enjoy the jugglers, acrobats, drinks and music without fear of incriminating pictures winding up on Facebook. Don’t worry, though … We made up for that radio silence by getting a little extra coverage of the epic Server Challenge II competition.

More than one hundred attendees stepped up to reassemble our rack of Supermicro servers, and the competition was fierce. The top two times were fifty-nine hundredths of a second apart from each other, and it took a blazingly fast time of 1:25.00 to even make the leader board. As the challenge heated up, we were able to capture video of the top three competitors (to be used as study materials for all competitors at future events):

It’s pretty amazing to see the cult following that the Server Challenge is starting to form, but it’s not very surprising. Given how intense some of these contests have been, people are scouting our events page for their next opportunity to step up to the server rack, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that people are mocking up their own Server Challenge racks at home to hone their strategy. A few of our friends on Twitter hinted that they’re in training to dominate the next time they compete, so we’re preparing for the crowds to get bigger and for the times to keep dropping.

If you weren’t able to attend the show, Parallels posted video from two of the keynote presentations, and shared several of the presentation slide decks on the Parallels Summit Agenda. You might not get the full experience of networking, partying or competing in the Server Challenge, but you can still learn a lot.

Viva Las Vegas! Viva Parallels! Viva SoftLayer!

-Kevin

What’s all of this fuss about the IPv6 transition about? The simplest way to explain the situation is that the current Internet can stay working as it does, using IPv4 addresses, forever … if we’re okay with it not growing any more. If no more homes and businesses wanted to get on the Internet, and no more new phones or tablets were produced, and no more websites or applications were created. SoftLayer wouldn’t be able to keep selling new servers either. To prevent or lose that kind of organic growth would be terrible, so an alternative had to be created to break free from the limitations of IPv4.

The long-term goal is to migrate the entire Internet to the IPv6 standard in order to eliminate the stifling effect of impending and inevitable IP address shortages. It is estimated that there are roughly 2.5 billion current connections to the Internet today, so to say the transition has a lot of moving parts would be an understatement. That complexity doesn’t lessen the urgency of the need to make the change, though … In the very near future, end-users and servers will no longer be able to get IPv4 connections to the Internet, and will only connect via IPv6.

The primary transition plan is to “dual-stack” all current devices by adding IPv6 support to everything that currently has an IPv4 address. By adding native IPv6 functionality to devices using IPv4, all of that connectivity will be able to speak via IPv6 without transitional technologies like NAT (Network Address Translation). This work will take several years, and time is not a luxury we have with the dwindling IPv4 pool.

Like George mentioned in a previous post, I see World IPv6 Launch day as a call-to-action for a “game changer.” The IPv6 transition has gotten a ton of visibility from some of the most recognizable names on the Internet, but the importance and urgency of the transition can’t be overstated.

So, what does that mean for you?

To a certain extent, that depends on what your involvement is on the Internet. Here are a few steps everyone can take:

• Learn all you can about IPv6 to prepare for the work ahead. A few good books about IPv6 have been published, and resources like ARIN’s IPv6 Information Wiki are perfect places to get more information.
• If you own servers or network equipment, check them for IPv6 functionality. Upgrade or replace any software or devices to ensure that you can deliver native IPv6 connectivity end-to-end without any adverse impact to IPv6 users. If any piece of gear isn’t IPv6-capable, IPv6 traffic won’t be able to pass through your network.
• If you are a content provider, make your content available via IPv6. This starts with requesting IPv6 service from your ISP. At SoftLayer, that’s done via a zero-cost sales request to add IPv6 addresses to your VLANs. You should target 100% coverage for your services or applications — providing the same content via IPv6 as you do via IPv4. Take an inventory of all your DNS records, and after you’ve tested extensively, publish AAAA records for all hostnames to start attracting IPv6 traffic.
• If you are receiving Internet connectivity to your home or business desktops, demand IPv6 services from your upstream ISP. Also be sure to check your access routers, switches and desktops to ensure they are running the most recent code with stable IPv6 support.
• If you are running equipment such as firewalls, load balancers, IDS, etc., contact your vendors to learn about their IPv6 support and how to properly configure those devices. You want to make sure you aren’t limiting performance or exposing any vulnerabilities.

Starting now, there are no more excuses. It’s time to get IPv6 up and running if you want to play a part in tomorrow’s Internet.

-Dani

The bi-partisan Partnership for a New American Economy recently published a very interesting report — Not Coming to America: Why the US is Falling Behind in the Global Race for Talent — that speaks to a lot of the challenges plaguing the current US immigration policy. Because of those challenges, “the future of America’s position as the global magnet for the world’s most talented and hardest-working is in jeopardy.” Here are a few of the projected economic realities of not reforming immigration laws to keep up with other countries:

SHORTAGE OF WORKERS IN INNOVATION INDUSTRIES: Jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM” fields) are increasing three times faster than jobs in the rest of the economy, but American students are not entering these innovative fields in sufficient numbers. As a result, by 2018, we face a projected shortfall of 230,000 qualified advanced-degree STEM workers.

SHORTAGE OF YOUNG WORKERS: The US population is aging, baby boomers are retiring en masse, and the growth in the US labor force has slowed to historic lows of less than 1 percent. We cannot continue to produce the GDP growth the nation has come to expect without dramatic increases in productivity or welcoming more working age immigrants.

A STALLED ECONOMY: The US has faced years of stunted economic growth. History shows that new businesses are the biggest drivers of job creation, yet the most recent US Census data show that the number of business startups has hit a record low.

This concern isn’t unique to the United States. With a global focus on innovation and technology, countries around the world are actively competing for the best and the brightest. In Canada, a report a few weeks ago spoke to Canada’s need to double in size in the next few decades or risk losing relevance and becoming just another resource-rich colony. The nation’s response? It’s ready to open its doors to more immigrants.

The same applies to the United States … It just may take longer.

Go back to how this country was built, and apply that to today. The biggest difference: The “skilled trades” we talk about in the most general sense are no longer carpenters like my grandfather but highly educated programmers, engineers and researchers. The idea isn’t to replace the programmers, engineers and researchers in the US, rather it’s to meet the existing unmet needs for programmers, engineers and researchers.

In all of SoftLayer’s efforts to affect change in the US immigration policy, we have to make clear that our goal is not to drop the walls simply to add more permanent residents. It’s about lowering many of the current artificial barriers that might prevent the next Fortune 500 founder from starting his or her business in the United States. If you don’t think that’s a serious concern, I’d point to a pretty surprising stat in the “Not Coming to America” report: “Today, more than 40 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant.”

Immigration drives the economy. It’s not a drain on the economy. Every country needs more smart people because smart people create new ideas, new ideas become new businesses, and new businesses create new jobs.

Because this is a politically charged issue, it’s one I know many people don’t necessarily agree with. Along with immigration, we have to look at how the education system can empower young people like my son to become the programmers, engineers and researchers that the US will need, and we have to be intentional about not simply adding permanent residents for the sake of adding permanent residents. If you have any thoughts one way or the other, I’d encourage you to share them with us here in a blog comment or link us to any of the resources you’ve found interesting in researching and discussing the topic.

-@gkdog

Free your Website with MODX CMS

Just having a website or a blog is no longer a viable online strategy for smart businesses. Today’s interconnected world requires engaging customers — from the first impression, to developing leads, educating, selling, empowering customer service and beyond. This key shift in online interaction is known as Customer Experience Management, or CXM.

For businesses to have success with CXM, they need an efficient way to connect all facets of their communications and information together with a modern and consistent look and feel, and without long learning curves or frustrating user experiences. You don’t want a Content Management System (CMS) that restricts your ability to meet brand standards, that lives in isolation from your other systems and data, or that fails to fulfil your businesses needs.

MODX is a content management platform that gives you the creative freedom to build custom websites limited only by your imagination. It certainly can play the central role in managing your customer experience.

Freedom from Hassle & Frustration
The most productive tools are those that simply allow you get your work done. To make life easy for content editors MODX uses familiar concepts like a hierarchical tree – similar to the folders and files on your computer. This allows content editors to relate their content to the overall website structure. But, like everything else in MODX, you aren’t limited to hierarchical content and can easily employ taxonomy-, list- or category-based structures.

Similarly, editing documents should be easy. With MODX, anyone who can open a web browser and send email has the skillset to create and edit content in MODX. Most tasks are a matter of filling out simple form fields into which content is placed and is accompanied by a sensible MS Word-like editor for your main content. Furthermore, site builders and developers are able to create custom fields for custom content types and custom data allowing non-technical employees to work in an intuitive, tailored environment.

Total Creative Freedom
Your website is one of the most visible parts of your brand and you certainly don’t want it limited by your CMS. MODX makes it possible to do anything that’s on the modern web now — you don’t have to wait for a year or hack the core to launch an HTML5 or mobile optimized site. MODX can do it all now, and even what’s coming next. It outputs exactly and only what you or your site builder dictate.

MODX uses a brilliantly simple template engine that allows web designers to work with what they already know, like HTML, CSS and any JavaScript library they chose. MODX can even output things not typically associated with most content management platforms like XML, JSON or even Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that automatically download to your desktop.

Freedom to Extend
MODX provides all the requisite tools for CMS, but it also functions as a fully capable web development platform upon which you can extend functionality, employ custom applications and do just about anything you can dream up. In fact, the “X” in MODX comes from the word “extensible”. Whether you want to build a Member-only website, Client Extranet, Resort Booking and Reservations system or private Social Network, you can do it on MODX.

For developers the fully-documented Object Oriented API and xPDO, MODXs database layer, provide all you need to build almost anything with MODX, even extending or overriding its core functionality. Critically, you can do all this using the API and retain a painless upgrade path without hacking the core. The MODX API architecture provides all the flexibility you or your developer might need to make MODX your own without painting your self into a corner.

Freedom from Bottlenecks
Modern web pages are made up of many component parts – site-wide headers and footers, navigation menus, articles, products and more. At some point, all these pieces need to be put together and delivered to the visitor as a single page that users expect to load quickly or they’ll leave your site.

To deliver pages fast, top-performing sites use server-side caching to take all those pieces and pre-process them for fast delivery to a browser. The problem with many CMS applications is that they manually rebuild pages every single time someone visits your site. That’s fine if you only have a few visitors, but your site can bog down or even fail under moderate traffic. In these circumstances, it would be disastrous if your website is featured on an industry magazine or website, national media or on a popular TV show. Your site could literally grind to a halt, costing you customers, damaging your reputation and ultimately making a bad first impression.

MODX’s native page caching delivers your site quickly by default. Additionally, MODX can use high-end caching like memcache to further improve performance under load. To handle millions of pageviews daily, you need robust servers and you need to optimize your environment … That’s where scaling across multiple servers and replication with SoftLayer works perfectly with MODX.

Free Your Legacy Systems
Keeping your data, content and business information in disconnected silos is ineffective and costly. Accessing existing systems, like an Active Directory or Enterprise Content repository, makes huge difference in getting your work done headache-free. You don’t have to worry about data duplication across systems, significant extra work to make everything work or synchronization issues. A new website platform should increase your productivity and enable your employees, customers and everyone else surrounding your business to find what they need and to interact efficiently and effectively.

MODX works with the tools and technology that organizations already have in place. It can easily interact with external web services or data feeds and can drive other applications via RESTful web services.

Security and Freedom to Rest Easy
Website Security is a topic that rarely surfaces during the early stages of a web project and often never comes up until your site has been compromised.

A high-quality hosting environment like those from SoftLayer are the foundation of website security. Your web CMS and its add-ons, plugin-ins or modules should not be a liability. MODX is designed with security at its core to protect your valuable website from malicious attacks. Every input is filtered, and every database query using the API eliminates the possibility of SQL injection compromises. Most importantly, the development team rigorously and continuously audits MODX to make sure its up to date and patching any new issues that may arise.

Freedom in the Community
With MODX and the MODX Community you’re not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of websites built on MODX and we have a friendly, active and growing community of raving fans over 37,000 strong to whom you can look for assistance, support, education and camaraderie.

In fact, the MODX Community is one of our greatest assets.

They provide mentorship, assistance and help make MODX software better through active reporting of issues and feature requests and contributing improvements for integration by the core team.

If you’re not a site builder or developer, but you want your website powered by MODX, one of the best places to start is with a MODX Solution Partner. Our network of 90+ global Solution Partners enables you to get the right-fit expertise for your project and in many cases work locally. Solution Partners are experts at MODX and know how to do things right.

Get Free
There really is a cure for the all too often restrictive, unintuitive and frustrating experience of putting content on the web. Get on the road to content management freedom with MODX. It’s easy to start since MODX Revolution itself is free to download and use.

Learn more at http://modx.com/.

-Jay Gilmore, MODX

Because I wanted to make sure to document as much of the process as I could for this documentary film (I’m coming for you, The Social Network), you’re experiencing the tour as I explore the space for the first time, so I hope you find it as magical as I did. Note: I took the liberty of acquiring suitable transportation to give you the most professional “tour” experience.

You’ll note that the facility features several important characteristics of the best data center environments:

• Heightened Exterior Security
• Data Center Operations Area
• Weather Tracking Station
• Tech Support Center
• CEO Suite
• Redundant Bandwidth Providers
• Multi-phase Power
• Power Generator
• Built-in Cooling
• Crash Cart Station
• Vaulted Ceilings (for warm air circulation)

Now that I’ve got the lay of the land, it’s just a matter of drawing up some plans for server racks, plugging in some servers and getting some customers to experience the newest wave of hosting innovation!

-PHIL

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

Only people with a certain level of “crazy” can recognize opportunities for innovation, and because SoftLayer’s motto is “Innovate or Die,” to incubate innovation, we have to create an environment that enables employees to take their “crazy” and run with it. Speaking of “crazy,” meet Phil.

Phil plays guitar, tests software in non-standard ways, and has a bobble-head of himself. Some would say he marches to the beat of a different drummer – a drummer that may or may not be overdosing on caffeine.

Phil was tasked with a 12-week project: If SoftLayer is built for what our customers are going to need tomorrow, figure out what customers will need after “tomorrow.” He’d have access to people and resources up and down the organization to build his idea, and the experiment is set up to incubate his innovation:

1. Because there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, anyone helping Phil should do so without questioning the logic or “sanity” of what he asking for help with.
2. Phil can spend up to 20% of his work hours building his idea.
3. Anyone who helps Phil can spend up to 10% of his/her work hours to build his idea.
4. Phil can have space in H2 to build his idea.
5. Regardless of apparent success or failure, the project will conclude at the end of 12 weeks. From there, we’ll evaluate the “good” and “not as good” ideas from the experiment.

It’d be impossible to guarantee the success of any kind of project like this because it’s a little like catching lightning in a bottle, but I was interested to see what kinds of operational changes he came up with over the course of the three months. We might see the evolution of the next brilliant idea in hosting, or we’d see a lot of hilariously terrible ideas.

Then I saw his first installment:

By the time I got to “circumstantiate,” I had the phone in my hand to call off the project. What I didn’t expect was Phil’s tearful pleading to take the idea down a different path. They say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and despite the fact that this first impression was pretty awful, I decided to give him another shot (with a much more limited scope):

1. Apparently there are bad ideas in brainstorming, but anyone who helps Phil on his “new path” should try to be supportive.
2. Phil can spend up to 5% of his work hours building his idea.
3. Phil can’t take anyone else from SoftLayer away from their jobs during work hours.
4. Phil can have space in the Houston office to build his idea.
5. The project is scheduled to run for 12 weeks. There’s no guarantee that it’ll make it through next week.

If you have ideas for Phil, feel free to contribute. He’d probably appreciate the help.

-@lavosby

As I alluded in ISOC’s press release, SoftLayer is a hosting provider, but we aren’t going to be an effective resource for our customers if we don’t adopt the newest technologies and platforms for future growth. Because we’ve built our business around that idea, you won’t see many substantial changes when June 8 rolls around … We were a little ahead of the curve in December 2008 when we began providing native IPv6 support to our publicly available services. The point of this Internet-wide event is not about getting there first, though … It’s about everyone getting there.

What does World IPv6 day mean to you? Probably little to nothing in the short-run. While there’s a unanimous sense of urgency to be prepared, the real deadline is still a little ways into the future. If you’re a SoftLayer customer, it’s pretty easy for you to take part in your own World IPv6 Day: Provision your free IPv6 /64 on your server and start using them.

I encourage you to set goals for IPv6 functionality for the near future so you don’t find yourself scrambling for a solution when you can’t get any new IPv4 addresses. Don’t let the fact that ARIN still has 5.20 IPv4 /8s in aggregate lull you into inaction … The well will run dry, and the sooner you’re ready for it, the better. Would your business be ready to flip the switch to IPv6 on June 8?

-Will

With so many people using convenient things today, we at SoftLayer do the best we can to make things very convenient but also do our part for the globe. We only print things on paper when absolutely necessary. Not only do we save a tree, but it is much more secure. Everyone recently received a plastic cup with the SoftLayer logo on it for water or tea. We can use these instead of using so many disposable plastic cups. We have recycle bins in each break room for the recyclables; and, as we have stated in many blogs, we have contracts in place with recycling shops for the extra server packaging we receive with new shipments. We do our best to stick to the 3 R’s—reduce, reuse, and recycle.

So how does SoftLayer continue making our service so convenient without being wasteful? I am glad you asked! Instead of going out and buying home servers, or desktop servers—which seems to be the newest craze—and then having to throw away all the unused documentation and un-used packing materials, we simply choose to team up with Supermicro. They are a server manufacturer that listens to their customers needs and provides solutions as well as design flexibility, rapid order fulfillment, and superior quality. We are no longer relegated to do what the other server manufacturers force on other customers. This gives us the freedom of convenience while still being green. Does it make our competitors green with envy? Sure it does. That is why there are lower price points offered in the hosting market by our competitors still using workstations, desktop and home servers instead of enterprise class, high efficiency, and low power consuming servers. The efficiency of our servers allows us to have very dense server rooms with a smaller footprint, which saves on power consumption for cooling as well. Last but not least, by using rack mount servers instead of towers, Supermicro has worked with us to reduce the packing materials by 80%—resulting in an eight pound reduction in the total weight of each server.

At SoftLayer we take pride in making convenient, green IT; and with Supermicro as a great partner, we continue to do just that.