Posts Tagged ‘Infrastructure’

One of the founding principles of SoftLayer is automation. Automation has enabled this company to provide our customers with a world class experience, and it enables employees to provide excellent service. It allows us to quickly deploy a variety of solutions at the click of a button, and it guarantees consistency in the products that we deliver. Automation isn’t the whole story, though. The human element plays a huge role in SoftLayer’s success.

As a Site Manager for the corporate facility, I thought I could share a unique perspective when it comes to what that human element looks like, specifically through the lens of the Server Build Team’s responsibilities. You recently heard how my colleague, Broc Chalker, became an SBT, and so I wanted take it a step further by providing a high-level breakdown of how the Server Build Team enables SoftLayer to keep up with the operational demands of a rapidly growing, global infrastructure provider.

The Server Build Team is responsible for filling all of the beautiful data center environments you see in pictures and videos of SoftLayer facilities. Every day, they are in the DC, building out new rows for inventory. It sounds pretty simple, but it’s actually a pretty involved process. When it comes to prepping new rows, our primary focus is redundancy (for power, cooling and network). Each rack is powered by dual power sources, four switches in a stacked configuration (two public network, two private network), and an additional switch that provides KVM access to the server. To make it possible to fill the rack with servers, we also have to make sure it’s organized well, and that takes a lot of time. Just watch the video of the Go Live Crew cabling a server rack in SJC01, and you can see how time- and labor-intensive the process is. And if there are any mistakes or if the cables don’t look clean, we’ll cut all the ties and start over again.

Interns working on brand new rows.

DAL05 SBTs prepping new racks.

In addition to preparing servers for new orders, SBTs also handle hardware-related requests. This can involve anything from changing out components for a build, performing upgrades / maintenance on active servers, or even troubleshooting servers. Any one of these requests has to be treated with significant urgency and detail.

Jon (SBT) working through a server build.

Working on a server in the data center.

The responsibilities do not end there. Server Build Technicians also perform a walk of the facility twice per shift. During this walk, technicians check for visual alerts on the servers and do a general facility check of all SoftLayer pods. Note: Each data center facility features one or more pods or “server rooms,” each built to the same specifications to support up to 5,000 servers.

DAL05 SBTs changing server components.

Cory on a DC walkthrough.

The DAL05 facility has a total of four pods, and at the end of the build-out, we should be running 18,000-20,000 servers in this facility alone. Over the past year, we completed the build out of SR02 and SR03 (pod 2 and 3, respectively), and we’re finishing the final pod (SR04) right now. We’ve spent countless hours building servers and monitoring operating system provisions when new orders roll in, and as our server count increases, our team has grown to continue providing the support our existing customers expect and deserve when it comes to upgrade requests and hardware-related support tickets.

Adam teaching troubleshooting techniques.

Chad and Richard working tickets.

To be successful, we have to stay ahead of the game from an operations perspective. The DAL05 crew is working hard to build out this facility’s last pod (SR04), but for the sake of this blog post, I pulled everyone together for a quick photo op to introduce you to the team.

DAL05 Day / Evening Team and SBT Interns (with the remaining racks to build out in DAL05):

DAL05 Overnight Server Build Technician Team:

Let us know if there’s ever anything we can do to help you!

-Joshua

I’ve been working in the web hosting industry for nearly five years now, and as is the case with many of the professionals of my generation, I grew up side by side with the capital-I Internet. Over those five years, the World Wide Web has evolved significantly, and it’s become a need. People need the Internet to communicate, store information, enable societal connectivity and entertain. And they need it 24 hours per day, seven days a week. To affirm that observation, you just need to look at an excerpt from a motion submitted to the Human Rights Council and recently passed by the United Nations General Assembly:

The General Session … calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the Internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries.

After a platform like the Internet revolutionizes the way we see the world, it’s culturally impossible to move backward. Its success actually inspires us to look forward for the next world-changing innovation. Even the most non-technical citizen of the Internet has come to expect those kinds of innovations as the Internet and its underlying architecture have matured and seem to be growing like Moore’s Law: Getting faster, better, and bigger all the time. The fact that SoftLayer is able to keep up with that growth (and even continue innovating in the process) is one of the things I admire most about the company.

I love that our very business model relies on our ability to enable our customers’ success. Just look at how unbelievably successful companies like Tumblr and HostGator have become, and you start to grasp how big of a deal it is that we can help their businesses. We’re talking billions of pageviews per month and hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on SoftLayer through our customers. And that’s just through two customers. Because we’re on the cutting edge, and we provide unparalleled access and functionality, we get to see a lot of the up-and-coming kickstarts that are soon to hit it big, and we get to help them keep up with their own success.

On a personal level, I love that SoftLayer provides opportunities for employees. Almost every department has a career track you can follow as you learn more about the business and get a little more experience, and you’re even able to transition into another department if you’re drawn to a new passion. I recently move to the misty northwest (Seattle) when given the opportunity by SoftLayer, and after working in the data center, I decided to pursue a role as a systems administrator. It took a lot of hard work, but I made the move. Hard work is recognized, and every opportunity I’ve taken advantage of has been fulfilled. You probably think I’m biased because I’ve done well in the organization, and that might be a fair observation, but in reality, the opportunities don’t just end with me.

One of my favorite stories to share about SoftLayer is the career path of my best friend, Goran. I knew he was a hard worker, so I referred him to the company a few years ago, and he immediately excelled as an Operations Tech. He proved himself on the Go-Live Crew in Amsterdam by playing a big role in the construction of AMS01, and he was promoted to a management position in that facility. He had been missing Europe for the better part of a decade, SoftLayer gave him a way to go back home while doing what he loves (and what he’s good at).

If that Goran’s story isn’t enough for you, I could tell you about Robert. He started at SoftLayer as a data center tech, and he worked hard to become a systems administrator, then he was named a site manager, then he was promoted to senior operations manager, and now he’s the Director of Operations. You’ll recognize him as the guy with all of the shirts in Lance’s “Earn Your Bars” blog post from December. He took every rung on the ladder hand-over-hand because no challenge could overwhelm him. He sought out what needed to be done without being asked, and he was proactive about make SoftLayer even better.

I could tell you about dozens of others in the company that have the same kinds of success stories because they approached the opportunities SoftLayer provided them with a passion and positive attitude that can’t be faked. If being successful in an organization makes you biased, we’re all biased. We love this environment. We’re presented with opportunities and surrounded by people encouraging us to take advantage of those opportunities, and as a result, we can challenge ourselves and reach our potential. No good idea is ignored, and no hard work goes unrecognized.

I’m struggling to suppress the countless “opportunity” stories I’ve seen in my tenure at SoftLayer, but I think the three stories above provide a great cross-section of what it looks like to work for SoftLayer. If you like being challenged (and being rewarded for your hard work), you might want to take this opportunity to see which SoftLayer Career could be waiting for you.

When opportunity knocks, let it in.

-Hilary

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep the parts of a relationship that you like and “move on” from the parts you don’t? You’d never have to go through the awkward “getting to know each other” phase where you accidentally order food the other person is allergic to, and you’d never have to experience a break up. As it is, we’re faced with a bit of a paradox: Relationships are a lot of work, and “Breaking up is hard to do.”

I could tell you story after story about the break ups I experienced in my youth. From the Ghostbuster-jumpsuited boyfriend I had in kindergarten who stole my heart (and my barrettes) to until it was time to take my had-to-have “My Little Pony” thermos lunchbox to another table at lunch after a dramatic recess exchange to the middle school boyfriend who took me to see Titanic in the theater four times (yes, you read that correctly), my early “romantic” relationships didn’t pan out in the “happily ever after” way I’d hoped they would. Whether the result of an me unwelcome kiss under the monkey bars or a move to a different school (which might as well have been on Mars), I had to break up with each of the boys.

Why are you reading about my lost loves on the SoftLayer Blog? Simple: Relationships with IT environments — specifically applications and data — are not much different from romantic relationships. You might want to cut ties with a high maintenance piece of equipment that you’ve been with for years because its behavior is getting erratic, and it doesn’t look like it’ll survive forever. Maybe you’ve outgrown what your existing infrastructure can provide for you, and you need to move along. Perhaps you just want some space and need to take a break from a project for six months.

If you feel like telling your infrastructure, “It’s not you, it’s me,” what are your options? Undo all of your hard work, schedule maintenance and stay up in the dead of a weeknight to migrate, backup and restore all of your data locally?

When I talk to SoftLayer customers, I get to be a relationship therapist. Because we’ve come out with some pretty innovative tools, we can help our customers avoid ever having to break up with their data again. Two of the coolest “infrastructure relationship”-saving releases: Flex Images (currently in public beta) and portable storage volumes for cloud computing instances (CCIs).

With Flex Images, customers using RedHat, CentOS or Windows systems can create and move server images between physical and virtual environments to seamlessly transition from one platform to the other. With about three clicks, a customer-created image is quickly and uniformly delivered to a new dedicated or cloud server. The idea behind Flex Images is to blur the line between physical and virtual environments so that if you feel the need to break up with one of the two, the other is able to take you in.

Portable storage volumes (PSVs) are secondary CCI volumes that can be added onto any public or private CCI. Users can detach a PSV from any CCI and have it persist in the cloud, unattached to any compute resource, for as long as necessary. When that storage volume is needed again, it can be re-attached as secondary storage on any other CCI across all of SoftLayer’s facilities. The best relationship parallel would be “baggage,” but that’s got a negative connotation, so we’ll have to come up with something else to call it … “preparedness.”

We want to help you avoid break ups and provide you easy channels to make up with your old infrastructure if you have a change of heart. The result is an infrastructure that’s much easier to manage, more fluid and less dramatic.

Now if I can only figure out a way to make Flex Images and portable storage volumes available for real-life relationships …. I’d make millions!

-Arielle

This guest blog comes to us from Cloudability, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Cloudability is a cloud budget management service that helps companies manage their cloud spending, prevent overages, reduce waste and save money. In this video we talk to Cloudability Founder and CEO Mat Ellis about how the company developed, and we hear examples of how Cloudability is supporting and businesses money.

5 Things You Need to Know to Control Variable Infrastructure Costs

If you have on premise equipment, then your costs are fixed — you paid your money and now you own a fixed amount of hardware and software. The cloud, on the other hand, has variable costs due to two important features — you only pay for the services you use and it’s scalable, providing the resources you need at any given time. By using a cloud infrastructure, you end up with what we call Variable Infrastructure Costs (VICs).

Most of SoftLayer’s services meet the criteria for a VIC. You need an extra cloud server for a few hours? No problem. More disk? Done.

With great power, comes great responsibility, and the biggest problem with VICs is that they are just like a faucet: Leave it running, and the water bill can add up fast … Not to mention all that waste! Unless you keep a close eye on VICs, you could find yourself in front of your CFO, pleading for your budget’s life.

Cloudability was created to keep those costs under control, and in the course of working with our customers, we’ve come up with a simple five-point checklist of best practices:

1. Collation

Make sure you have insight to all your costs, create a single contract database, and review it regularly. Don’t forget to include total cloud spending alongside your fixed contracts. Talk to your finance department, then drill your employees and tech teams to make sure you REALLY know the whole truth. There can be — and usually is — a disconnect in the organization about how much cloud is really being used.

2. Analysis

Get into the weeds to see why each project is spending what they are spending. Try to calculate some tangible metrics like cost per thousand web pages served or cost per new customer, and benchmark these against public data and common sense.

3. Organization and Rebalancing

Put each of your projects into one of four quadrants:

1. High Spend/Low Efficiency
2. High Spend/High Efficiency
3. Low Spend/Low Efficiency
4. Low Spend/High Efficiency.

Read the rest of Cloudability’s blog about best practices in variable cost management. »

If you read Nathan’s “A Cloud to Call Your Own” blog, and you wanted to learn a little more about private clouds in general or SoftLayer Private Clouds specifically, this post is for you. We’re going take a little time to dive deeper into the technology behind SoftLayer Private Clouds, and in the process, I’ll talk a little about why particular platforms/hardware/configurations were chosen.

The Platform: Citrix CloudPlatform

There are several cloud infrastructure frameworks to choose from these days. We have surveyed a number of them and actively work with several of them. We are active members of the happenings around OpenStack and we have working implementations of vSphere, Nimula, Eucalyptus and other stacks in our data centers. So why CloudPlatform by Citrix?

First off, it’s one of the most mature of these options. It’s been around for several years and now has the substantial backing of Citrix. That backing includes investment, support organizations and the multitude of other products managed by Citrix. There are also some futuristic ideas we have regarding how to leverage products like CloudBridge and Netscaler with Private Clouds. Second, CloudPlatform operates in accordance with how we believe a private cloud should work: It’s simple, it doesn’t have a huge management infrastructure and we can charge for it by the CPU per month, just like all of our other products. Finally, CloudPlatform has made good inroads with enterprise customers. We love the idea that an enterprise ops team could leverage CloudPlatform as the management platform for both their on-premise and their off-premise private cloud.

So, we selected CloudPlatform for a multitude of reasons; not just one.

Another huge key was our ability to integrate CloudPlatform into the SoftLayer portals/mobile apps/API. Because many SoftLayer customers manage their environments exclusively through the SoftLayer API, we knew that a seamless integration there was an absolute necessity. With the help of the SoftLayer dev team and the CloudStack folks, we’ve been able to automate private clouds the same way we did for public cloud instances and dedicated servers.

The Hardware

When it came to choosing what hardware the private clouds would use, the decision was pretty simple. Given our need for automation, SoftLayer Private Clouds would need to be indistinguishable from a standard dedicated server or CloudLayer environment. We use the latest and greatest server hardware available on the market, and every month, you can see thousands of new SuperMicro boxes being delivered to our data centers around the world. Because we know we have a reliable, powerful and consistent hardware foundation on which we can build the private clouds product, it makes the integration of the system even easier.

When it comes to the specs of the hardware provided for a private cloud environment, we provide as much transparency and flexibility as we can for a customer to build exactly what he or she needs. Let’s look into what that means…

The Hardware Configurations

A CloudPlatform environment can be broken down into these components:

• A single management server (that can manage multiple zones across layer 2 networks)
• One or more zones
• One or more clusters in a zone
• One or more hosts in a cluster
• Storage shared by a cluster (which can be a single server)

A simple diagram of a two-zone private cloud might look like this:

We’ve set a standard “management server” configuration that we know will be able to accommodate all of your needs when it comes to running CloudPlatform, and how you build and configure the rest of your private cloud infrastructure is up to you. Whether you want simple dual proc, quad core Nehalem box with a lot of local disk space for a dev cloud or an environment made up of quad proc 10-core Westmeres with SSDs, you have the freedom to choose exactly what you want.

Oh, and everything can be online in two to four hours, and it’s offered on a month-to-month contract.

The Network Configuration

When it comes to where the hardware is provisioned, you have the ability to deploy zones in multiple geographies and manage them all through a single CloudPlatform management node. Given the way the SoftLayer three-tier network is built, the management node and host nodes do not even need to be accessible by our public network. You can choose to make accessible only the IPs used by the VMs you create. If your initial private cloud infrastructure is in Dallas and you want a node online in Singapore, you can just click a few buttons, and the new node will be provisioned and configured securely by CloudPlatform in a couple of hours.

Imagine how long it would have taken you to build this kind of infrastructure in the past:

It doesn’t take days or weeks now. It takes hours.

As you can see, when we approached the challenge of bringing private clouds to the SoftLayer platform, we had to innovate. In Texas, that would be roughly translated as “Go big or go home.” Given the response we’ve seen from customers and partners since the announcement of SoftLayer Private Clouds, we know the industry has taken notice.

Will all of our customers need their own private cloud infrastructure? Probably not. But will the customers who’ve been looking for this kind of functionality be ecstatic with the CloudPlatform environment on SoftLayer’s network? Absolutely.

-Duke

This guest blog comes to us from Distil.it, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. In this video we talk to Distil CEO Rami Essaid about how the company developed, their participation in the TechStars program and most importantly, how they can help you!

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Read the rest of Distil’s blog about content scrapers and Google’s Panda update »

Citrix Synergy 2012 took over San Francisco this week. Because Citrix is one of SoftLayer’s technology partners, you know we were in the house, and I thought I’d share a few SoftLayer-specific highlights from the conference.

Before I get too far, I should probably back up give you a little context for what the show is all about if you aren’t familiar with it. In his opening keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton explained:

“We call it ‘Citrix Synergy,’ but really it’s ‘Synergy’ because this is an event that’s coordinated by us across a hundred sponsors, our ecosystem partners, companies in the industry that we work together with to bring you an amazing set of solutions around cloud, virtualization, networking and mobility.”

Given how broad of a spectrum those areas of technology represent, the short four-day agenda was jam-packed with informational sessions, workshops, demos and conversations. It goes without saying that SoftLayer had to be in the mix in a BIG WAY. We had a booth on the expo hall floor, I was lined up to lead a breakout session about how business can “learn how to build private clouds in the cloud,” and we were the proud presenting sponsor of the huge Synergy Party on Thursday night.

Our partnership with Citrix is unique. We incorporate Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenServer as part of our service offerings. Plus, Citrix is also a SoftLayer customer, using SoftLayer infrastructure to offer a hosted desktop solution. Designed and architected from the ground up to run in the cloud, the Citrix Virtual Demo Center provides a dashboard interface for managing Citrix XenDesktop demo environments that are provisioned on-demand using SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

My biggest thrill at the conference came when I was asked to speak and share a little of our expertise in a keynote address on simplifying cloud networking. I like to tell people I have a great face for radio, but that didn’t keep me off the stage. The hall was packed to capacity and after defeating a few “demo gremlins,” I got to show off how easy SoftLayer makes it for our customers to take advantage of amazing products like Citrix Netscaler VPX:

In my “Learn How to Build Private Clouds in the Cloud” breakout session, I had a little more time to speak to the larger question of how SoftLayer is approaching the shift to cloud-specific architectures and share some best practices in moving to a private cloud. Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists, so I tried to explain how businesses can leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to add scalability to a private cloud environment.

Thanks to SynergyTV, that presentation has been made available for all to see:

As I joked at the beginning of the breakout session, an attendee at Citrix Synergy was probably bombarded by “the cloud” in presentations and conversations at the show. While it’s important to demystify the key terms we use on a daily basis, a few straight days of keynotes and breakout sessions about the cloud can get you thinking, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Beyond our capabilities as a cloud infrastructure provider, SoftLayer knows how to have a good time, so after we took care of the “work” stuff in the sessions above, we did our best to help provide a little “play” as well. This year, we were the proud sponsor of the Synergy Party, featuring Lifehouse!

Citrix Synergy 2012 was a blast. As a former rocket scientist, I can say that authoritatively.

-@nday91

It’s not easy to choose a cloud hosting provider.

In the first post of this series, we talked about the three key deciding factors every cloud customer has to consider, and we set up a Venn diagram to distinguish the surprisingly broad range of unique priorities customers can have:

Because every customer will prioritize a cloud’s cost, technology and hosting provider a little differently (for completely valid reasons), we mapped out seven distinct “zones” to differentiate some of the basic market segments, or “personas,” of cloud hosting buyers. That post was intended to set the stage for a larger discussion on how customers choose their cloud providers and how cloud providers choose their customers, and we’re just scratching the surface. We’re tackling a pretty big topic here, so as Bill Cosby famously says, “I told you that story to tell you this one.”

As a hosting provider, SoftLayer can’t expect to be all things for all people. It’s impossible to offer a quad-core hex-proc dedicated server for a price that will appeal to a customer in the market for a $49/mo dedicated server.

To better illustrate SoftLayer’s vision in the cloud market, we need to take that generic cost v. technology v. hosting provider diagram and give it the “Three Bars” treatment:

We’re much more interested in living and breathing the Zone 5 “Technology” space rather than the traditional Zone 2 “Hosting Provider” space. That’s why in the past two months, you’ve seen announcements about our launch of the latest Intel Processors, HPC computing with NVidia GPUs, searchable OpenStack Object Storage, and an innovative “Flex Image” approach to bluring the lines between physical and virtual servers. We choose to pursue the cloud customers who make their buying decisions in Zone 3.

That’s a challenging pursuit … It’s expensive to push the envelope in technology, customers primarily interested in technology/performance have demanding needs and expectations, and it’s easier to make mistakes when you’re breaking new ground. The majority of the hosting industry seems to have an eye on the buyer in Zone 1 because they believe the average hosting customer is only interested in the bottom line … That hosting is more or less a commodity, so the focus should be on some unverifiable qualitative measure of support or the next big special that’ll bring in new orders.

As you may have seen recently, GigaOm posted a lovely article that references several high-profile companies in our 25,000+ customer family. We like to say that SoftLayer builds the platform on which our customers build the future, and that short post speaks volumes about the validity of that statement. Our goal is to provide the most powerful, scalable and seamlessly integrated IT infrastructure for the most innovative companies in the world. Innovate or Die isn’t just our company motto … It’s our hope for our customers, as well.

We might miss out on your business if you want a $49/mo dedicated server, but if you’re looking to change the world, we’ve got you covered.

-@khazard

If you had to order a new cloud server right now, how would choose it?

I’ve worked in the hosting industry for the better part of a decade, and I can safely say that I’ve either observed or been a part of the buying decision for a few thousand hosting customers — from small business owners getting a website online for the first time to established platforms that are now getting tens of millions of visits every day. While each of those purchasers had different requirements and priorities, I’ve noticed a few key deciding factors that are consistent in a all of those decisions:

How much will the dedicated server or cloud computing instance cost? What configuration/technology do I need (or want)? Which hosting provider should I trust with my business?

Every website administrator of every site on the Internet has had to answer those three questions, and while they seem pretty straightforward, they end up overlapping, and the buying decision starts to get a little more complicated:

The natural assumption is that everyone will choose a dedicated server or cloud computing instance that falls in the “sweet spot” where the three circles overlap, right? While that makes sense on paper, hosting decisions are not made in a vacuum, so you’ll actually see completely valid hosting decisions targeting every spot on that graph.

Why would anyone choose an option that wouldn’t fit in the sweet spot?

That’s a great question, and it’s a tough one to answer in broad strokes. Let’s break the chart down into a few distinct zones to look at why a user would choose a server in each area:

Zone 1

Buyers choosing a server in Zone 1 are easiest to understand: Their budget takes priority over everything else. They might want to host with a specific provider or have a certain kind of hardware, but their budget doesn’t allow for either. Maybe they don’t need their site to use the latest and greatest hardware or have it hosted anywhere in particular. Either way, they choose a cloud solely based on whether it fits their budget. After the initial buying decision, if another server needs to be ordered, they might become a Zone 4 buyer.

Zone 2

Just like Zone 1 buyers, Zone 2 buyers are a pretty simple bunch as well. If you’re an IT administrator at a huge enterprise that does all of your hosting in-house, your buying decision is more or less made for you. It doesn’t matter how much the solution costs, you have to choose an option in your data center, and while you might like a certain technology, you’re going to get what’s available. Enterprise users aren’t the only people deciding to order a server in Zone 2, though … It’s where you see a lot of loyal customers who have the ability to move to another provider but prefer not to — whether it’s because they want their next server to be in the same place as their current servers, they value the capabilities of a specific hosting provider (or they just like the witty, interesting blogs that hosting provider writes).

Zone 3

As with Zone 1 and Zone 2, when a zone doesn’t have any overlapping areas, the explanation is pretty easy. In Zone 3, the buying decision is being made with a priority on technology. Buyers in this area don’t care what it costs or where it’s hosted … They need the fastest, most powerful, most scalable infrastructure on the market. Similar to Zone 1 buyers, once Zone 3 buyers make their initial buying decision, they might shift to Zone 5 for their next server or cloud instance, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Zone 4

Now we’re starting to overlap. In Zone 4, a customer will be loyal to a hosting provider as long as that loyalty doesn’t take them out of their budget. This is a relatively common customer … They’ll try to compare options apples-to-apples, and they’ll make their decision based on which hosting provider they like/trust most. As we mentioned above, if a Zone 1 buyer is adding another server to their initial server order, they’ll likely look to add to their environment in one place to make it easier to manage and to get the best performance between the two servers.

Zone 5

Just like the transitional Zone 1 buyers, when Zone 3 buyers look to build on their environment, they’ll probably become Zone 5 buyers. When your initial buying decision is based entirely on technology, it’s unusual to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your next buying decision. While there are customers that will reevaluate their environment and choose a Zone 3 option irrespective of where their current infrastructure is hosted, it’s less common. Zone 5 users love having he latest and greatest technology, and they value being able to manage it through one provider.

Zone 6

A Zone 6 buyer is usually a Zone 1 buyer that has specific technology needs. With all the options on the table, a Zone 6 buyer will choose the cloud environment that provides the latest technology or best performance for their budget, regardless of the hosting provider. As with Zone 1 and Zone 3 buyers, a Zone 6 buyer will probably become a Zone 7 buyer if they need to order another server.

Zone 7

Zone 7 buyers are in the sweet spot. They know the technology they want, they know the price they want to pay, and they know the host they want to use. They’re able to value all three of their priorities equally, and they can choose an environment that meets all of their needs. After Zone 6 buyers order their first server(s), they’re going to probably become Zone 7 buyers when it comes time for them to place their next order.

As you probably noticed, a lot of transitioning happens between an initial buying decision and a follow-up buying decision, so let’s look at that quickly:

Regardless of how you make your initial buying decision, when it’s time for your next server or cloud computing instance, you have a new factor to take into account: You already have a cloud infrastructure at a hosting provider, so when it comes time to grow, you’ll probably want to grow in the same place. Why? Moving between providers can be a pain, managing environments between several providers is more difficult, and if your servers have to work together, they’re generally doing so across the public Internet, so you’re not getting the best performance.

Where does SoftLayer fit in all of this? Well beyond being a hosting provider that buyers are choosing, we have to understand buyers are making their buying decisions, and we have to position our business to appeal to the right people with the right priorities. It’s impossible to be all things for all people, so we have to choose where to invest our attention … I’ll leave that post for another day, though.

If you had to choose a zone that best describes how you made (or are currently making) your buying decision, which one would it be?

-@khazard

Sometimes it’s the little hardships and annoyances that really mold you. How do you react? Do you manage to work through them, or do you let them eat away at you to the point that you’re more paralyzed by them than you are a bigger problem?

As a new hire, I was required to take part in a Truck Day — an experience that helps everyone in the company understand (at a base level) what is involved with the actual products and services we sell. If you’ve ever had the fortune of working on one, there are certain activities that can leave you feeling weary. For me, that weariness-inducing activity was working with cage nuts.

For those of you unfamiliar with cage nuts, they’re small pieces of metal that accommodate screw-in server rails on a rack meant for slide-in server rails. Installing them is one of the most frustrating things ever … They have two little clips that fit inside the rack, and you have to bend them to get them in. Here’s a great illustration of how they work from an Oracle Sun Rack user’s guide:

I’d installed them before, but never more than eight or so at a time. After Truck Day, I now have nothing but the greatest respect for the amazing people working in the data centers who have to do them in massive volumes. I don’t think I’ve ever received as many tiny cuts on my hand as I did in the few hours I spent installing the relatively small number I managed to complete.

As a Customer Support Administrator (CSA), I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer, helping customers with their servers and doing my best to resolve issues as they are encountered. Physically installing cage nuts isn’t part of my day-to-day responsibilities (until the next Truck Day), but I realized that my job has its own “cage nuts.”

A customer wanting to lease a server from us isn’t particularly worried about the fact that cage nuts have to be meticulously installed in the rack, and they also aren’t paying any mind to the fact I might have worked with a dozen customers in my shift already — And, certainly, they shouldn’t. They’re paying for a great customer experience and helpful, friendly service, so they don’t need to take into account the context of our operations when they’re simply asking for us to help them with a server reboot to finish the installation of an OS patch upgrade.

SoftLayer, as a company, has amazed me in that everyone I’ve met is not only willing to deal with their “cage nuts,” but they will also do so without losing the smile from their face (even if there’s some good-natured grumbling every now and then). In many of the places I’ve worked, this sort of task would be met with protest, foot dragging and a tired resignation to doing the work. That simply isn’t the case here.

I’m definitely a newbie around here, and I’m still getting a feel for the culture, catching up on the inside jokes, and learning the ins and outs of the company (and the people in it). The one thing that was abundantly clear to me from the very first night, though: SLayers are truly dedicated to what they do, and the resulting work environment is one that fosters and rewards that dedication.

So in my estimation, how have the little annoyances — the cage nuts of our lives — molded SoftLayer and the people who work here? I’d say that not only do we work through them, we do so enthusiastically in the company of friends, proud of the fact that these seemingly small things are part of what has made this all possible.

I hope all of you work in environments that enable you to deal with the small things you see every day without cursing under your breath and feeling stressed. If you don’t, maybe you should look into finding a place that does. I hear we’re hiring.

-Gregory