Posts Tagged ‘hybrid’

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

A month ago, Summer talked about how SoftLayer defies the laws of physics by being in several different places at the same time. With a worldwide network and data center footprint, that’s always going to be the case, but when we have several events going on in a given week, we’re even more dispersed. As Summer mentioned in her Server Challenge blog this morning, she traveled east to New York City for ad:tech with a few SLayers, and I joined a team that headed west for Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara, California.

We set up shop on the expo floor and had the opportunity to meet with interesting and interested attendees between session. In addition to our exhibit hall presence, SoftLayer had three SLayers featured in presentations, and the response to each was phenomenal.

Our first presenter was none other than SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda. His presentation, “Not Your Grandpa’s Cloud,” was about dedicated servers and whether cloud computing may be surpassing that “grandpa” of the hosting industry. Joined by RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, Duke also announced our SoftLayer’s new relationship with RightScale. If you didn’t have a chance to join us, we have a treat for you … You can download Duke’s presentation from Sys-con!

Five minutes after Duke left the stage, SoftLayer Director of Product Innovation Marc Jones spoke to Cloud Expo attendees about “Building at Internet Scale in a Hosted Environment.” His focus was how businesses could enable technologies, design and architecture of Internet scale solutions in a hosted environment. He shared trends from SoftLayer customers and partners, explained what SoftLayer believes Internet-scale is from a technology perspective, and the products and services in the market that create a scalable solution.

On Day 3, SoftLayer Director of Corporate Analytics Francisco Romero presented a question to attendees: “How Smart is it to Build Your Own Cloud?” With concerns around security, hardware, software and flexibility, is a business better off going with a hosted solution over building its own cloud infrastructure. Spoiler alert: He showed how the hosted environment was head-and-shoulders over the in-house environment in most cases.

All in all, Cloud Expo West was an exemplary tradeshow for SoftLayer … Three fantastic speakers in two days driving traffic to our booth where we could share how SoftLayer has built our cloud and how our approach is part of a bigger effort to drive innovation in the world of hosting.

As Summer mentioned in her post, we want to see your smiling faces at our booths and in our presentations in the future, so bookmark the SoftLayer Event Calendar and start planning your trips to meet us in 2012!

-Natalie

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the IT industry. It is forever changing the way technology is delivered and consumed. The pay-as-you-go model for everything you need in IT is shattering the old computing paradigms, from software licensing models and hardware refresh cycles to budgeting operating costs. This change is bringing about more control and transparency to users while accelerating the commoditization of IT by making it easily available through a new model.

This new model comes in three major “flavors”: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. We incorporate and enable all three by offering a unified, fully automated platform to enable greater customer control over their IT environments. The key tenants of this emerging model for SoftLayer are innovation, empowerment, automation and integration. Here’s how we deliver against these four key tenants.

Innovation: We want to lead the industry by offering best of breed and proprietary cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions, based on our own intellectual property. Currently, we have more than 252,000 hours invested and 2.6 million lines of code developed around these solutions. Customers can take charge of every aspect of their IT operations (servers, storage, networking & services) through our fully automated platform. Our Customer Portal and fully featured APIs give customer more control by providing direct access to more than 100 back-end systems and activities — every aspect of IT operations can be managed.

Empowerment: We turn IT operations into a predictable fixed cost. Customers can stay focused on achieving their business goals, not managing IT infrastructure. We offer expert planning and support from a certified, 24/7 support staff. Customers can deploy and scale when they want with one-day and on-demand automated provisioning. They can keep it as long (or short) as needed, with monthly contracts. In addition, customers can choose what they want to manage and what they don’t, with the ability to have hybrid IT self-managed and managed environments. This speaks to the flexibility of our platform!

Automation: This is an area that makes SoftLayer stand out from the pack. We automate deployment and management of all services, accelerating provisioning time, streamlining administrative tasks, and making it all on-demand, every day and night. With automation that mitigates the risk for human error, comprehensive security practices and options, and a 24/7 team of certified engineers, we provide greater stability, a 100% Uptime Guarantee, and around the clock support for any issues or service.

Integration: This is the final ingredient to making it ALL work. We seamlessly integrate hardware, software, and networking into a unified service, all conveniently controlled through our easy-to-use Customer Portal and robust APIs. We provide full information, full-time through our Customer Portal and APIs, for every service we provide; there is no data about a system that we keep from our customers, from usage statistics to network performance and beyond. We have complete transparency.

These four key tenets are what set us apart. When SoftLayer started back in 2005, the team’s goal was not to be Go Daddy on steroids. We set our sights on being the de facto platform for mainstream businesses to run all their IT operations. This means the complete gamut of applications and workloads with no compromise of performance, security, reliability and access. We are entering into a new IT era, where “connected everything” is the norm. It reminds me of the old phrase “the network is the computer” from Sun Microsystems’ slogan. We have the foundation in place, which will make for an unforgettable journey. Let us know what you think.

-@gkdog

This is a guest blog from Citrusleaf’s Brian Bulkowski. Citrusleaf is a database technology company. They offers a new type of NoSQL database based on the best practices of proven database and distributed technology. The company’s NoSQL database platform, Citrusleaf 2.0, solves a key problem that challenges today’s most data intensive, mission-critical businesses: how to optimally store and access terabytes of schema free data in real-time, with high throughput, ACID compliance, and 24×7 uptime.

Citrusleaf and SoftLayer: Taking NoSQL to the Next Level

Citrusleaf is the NoSQL OLTP (transaction-oriented) database behind some of the world’s largest advertising platforms. Our record of reliability and performance is the reason our customers choose us over any other database. We specialize in low-latency transactions on terabyte sized, billion-object databases. We fit well with analytics systems such as Hadoop or SQL-based “ETL” analytics architectures. Since Citrusleaf is fully reliable like a traditional database and has the speed of a cache, complexity is greatly reduced which leads to higher reliability and substantial cost savings.

Customers store actionable data for their internet applications on our platform. A typical use case is a server-side user data store. The advertising industry has moved to server-based user information storage as end users have become concerned about “tracking cookies” and other browser-side storage. Sophisticated advertising platforms are capable of associating users even after cookies have been cleared – through logins at partner sites, IP addresses and browser fingerprints. In the case where the user has elected not to be “tracked,” session management techniques allow “frequency capping” to limit the repetition of ads.

Read the rest of Citrusleaf’s Guest Blog! »

As Chief Scientist (or Chief Boffin, if you like), I spend a significant amount of time participating in industry, partner and customer events alike. This week is a great example, as I will be speaking at both All About the Cloud and the Citrix Synergy event in San Francisco. I will be covering similar ground on both occasions: the general idea is that the world does not revolve around “the cloud.” In fact, “the cloud” tends to be good for certain things and not so good for others. The challenge is that many customers seem to think that cloud is a panacea, solving all of their problems. Often, customers come to us with a blurred idea of why they want cloud, sometimes defaulting to, “The CEO says we need some cloud.”

My presentation at the All About the Cloud event is going to focus on the cloud question by trying to understand what each tool does well and so you can deploy accordingly to ensure needs are met. I’ll provide a backdrop market growth and then dive into dedicated, virtual and hybrid (cloud + dedicated) solutions with an eye to understanding each solution in broad terms … As an aside, I wanted to show up with a drill, a nail and a chunk of 2×4 to demonstrate this: I was going to pound the nail into the board with the drill, and then I was told this would be a bad idea. I may yet show up with some tools – all I need is a Home Depot close to the Palace Hotel!

The Citrix presentation is not quite so bold – well, it did not involve props in its initial incarnation. For the Synergy crowd, I’ll speak to a few case studies that leverage hybrid solutions to best meet their needs. Specifically, I will discuss companies that have deployed cloud + dedicated, SoftLayer dedicated + someone else’s cloud (the horror!) and an enterprise example with a mix of internal data center assets and SoftLayer assets.

The enterprise example is an interesting one and it is timely given what Citrix is up to. Part of the challenge with most enterprise customers is the fact that many have invested significant capital (both dollars and the human variety) in their own infrastructure. This often means that an additional level of complexity is introduced as the enterprise must consider how to bridge the gap between their own infrastructure and another, external (hopefully a SoftLayer) environment.

Citrix is about to launch Cloud Bridge which will help to manage through some of this – the offering enables customers to transparently connect their own data centers with an off premise cloud environment. SoftLayer can make this happen in two ways. Cloud Bridge will sit within Netscaler Platinum offering that we support and customers will have the ability to deploy themselves should they choose to.

I will follow up on this blog with some depth that covers both presentations, as I think this is a conversation worth continuing. In the meantime, I am off to find a Home Depot …

-@nday91

In a new SoftLayer series, Duke Skarda sits in the hot seat to answer some hot topic hosting questions from Kevin Hazard.

This session’s topic: Hybrid Computing.

Who would you like to see in the hot seat, and what hot topics do you want to hear about?

-Duke