Posts Tagged ‘Infrastructure’

How are we already in mid-November? Did 2011 just fly by us or what? As we approach 2012, I will be celebrating my fourth anniversary with SoftLayer in our Seattle data center. Seattle was SoftLayer’s first data center outside of the Dallas area when it opened four years ago, and since then, I’ve seen the launch of Washington D.C., the Dallas HQ + DAL05, San Jose, Singapore and Amsterdam … while adding a few data centers in Houston and Dallas after the merger with The Planet last year. We’ve gone from ~15,000 servers when I started to around 100,000 servers in 13 data centers with 16 network PoPs on three different continents around the world. It’s safe to say we’ve grown.

In the four years since our Seattle facility launched, over 60% of our original team – the folks our Dallas team trained – are still here. Being part of such a huge team and watching the SoftLayer roll out data centers around the world is exciting, and seeing our customers grow with us is even better. In the midst of all of that growth, our team is always trying to figure out new technologies and techniques to share with customers to help them meet their ever-evolving needs. The goal: Give our customers total control.

One great example of this focus was our recent launch of QuantaStor Storage Servers. We teamed up with industry leader OS Nexus to bring our customers a production-ready mass storage appliance with a combined SAN and NAS storage system built into the Ubuntu Server and provides a number of system features such as snapshots, compression, remote replication and thin provisioning. A customer could use this in a number of environments from virtualized systems to video production to web and application servers, or as a backup based server. If you’re looking for a mass storage system, I highly recommend it.

If we’ve grown this much in my first four years, I can only imagine what the business will look like four years from now. A SoftLayer data center on every corner? Maybe we can get PHIL to figure out how we can put a SoftLayer pod in the space normally occupied by a coffee shop … making sure to keep as much coffee as possible, obviously.

-Bill

Not too long ago, SoftLayer was just 10 guys with a great idea to re-invent the hosting industry. The “Original 10″ as we call them, took a huge chance by leaving the comfort and safety of their collective worlds to do something truly special. Those ten people pooled personal resources, mortgages, “Pay ya’ back (someday maybe) friends and family” loans, credit cards and pretty much all they had to make this startup company dream come true: A truly automated system to provide a next-generation Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) platform, the likes of which had never been seen.

So, when I say SoftLayer loves startups, it comes from many personal and collective experiences garnered as the startup we were not so long ago. We are, in my opinion (and at the risk of sounding grandiose), one of the great technology startup stories of the current tech era.

SoftLayer knows that startups are the lifeblood of our industry, no matter where or how they got their start. Facebook began in a dorm room in Boston and we all know how Apple got its start. If it hadn’t been for the drive, determination, luck, timing and chutzpa of those startup founders, we wouldn’t have the thriving technology economy we have today.

Today, startups have a real leg-up towards success. Incubators and Startup Accelerators are popping up all across the country and around the world. These groups are designed to not only help startups get funded, but to teach them how to be a “real” technology company, create products and services that people what to buy, and polish them up to a high-shine with the hopes that they will be attractive to investors everywhere.

This is where SoftLayer’s Community Development team comes into play. This amazing and talented team works closely with startups at famous incubators like YCombinator and TechStars during their three-month formalized programs.

In addition to those formalize programs, we also support newer Incubator and Accelerator concepts like PeopleBrowsr Labs to help startups during the most critical time of their new lives. A startup’s first year will usually make it or break it, and SoftLayer wants to help those companies power through by providing free hosting, best- and next-practices, scaling and “big data” advice, marketing and pretty much anything else we can share that could be of value to these young businesses.

As an example of the relationships we’re building with startup accelerators around the world, one need look no further than what we’ve been doing with PeopleBrowsr Labs (PBL). PBL is a unique concept in the growing world of Startup Accelerators. In the heart of San Francisco’s down town SOMA tech district, they provide a collaborative environment dedicated to “accelerating the Social Media Revolution.”

I think focusing on Social Media startups is a smart move. Trying to create another Facebook would be a daunting task, and one that I’m not sure would be “worth it.” A smarter thing is probably to figure out how to create value on top of that and other social media systems via new engagement platforms, games, and other features and functionalities that take advantage of the massive volume of social data that is created on established mediums every minute of every day. The startups who work in PBL have a huge advantage here. Not only do they get all of the SoftLayer goodness they could ask for, they also are allowed to tap in to PeopleBrowsr’s 100+ Terabytes of social media data. PeopleBrowsr has almost every tweet ever tweeted, a data store of Facebook and Blog data and more that are all accessible to startups in the Labs via APIs. In today’s “Social Evolution” this data is worth its weight in gold.

To get an idea of what a startup we’re working with look like, you can check out ModX, recently featured in our Tech Partner Marketplace. ModX is a dynamic content management platform that allows users to build highly customizable websites through an easy-to-use template engine. They’ve added all the requisite tools for CMS and turned it into a fully capable web development platform upon which users can extend functionality, employ custom applications and do just about anything they can dream up.

We gave them advice and the robust infrastructure they needed in order to scale globally and support tens of thousands of users. There are some really big new things coming soon from these guys, so stay tuned…

In the coming weeks and months, we will be starting a new feature here on the InnerLayer Blog. We’ll call it our “Startup Series,” and it will be a showcase of some of the cool and interesting startups that are building their companies, their technologies and their brands on the SoftLayer Platform. We’ll also take a more in-depth look at the Incubators and Accelerators themselves. This is just another way to give back what we’ve learned and hopefully “pay it forward” where we can. It’s great to be at SoftLayer.

SoftLayer Loves Startups!

-@gkdog

At times, the meticulous planning, logistics and execution around the SoftLayer Amsterdam data center launch has felt like a clandestine military operation. Today, the wait is over! We’re finally ready to go “LIVE” with our new state-of-the-art facility, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt.

Having a European presence not only gives us proximity to customers but a foothold into the entire continent to help drive more innovation and deliver a better end-user experience. Currently more than 50 percent of our business is done outside North America, so our continued expansion into international markets is so vital to long-term growth.

Amsterdam is our “digital gateway” into Europe, extending our capabilities so customers can deploy, scale and manage their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on SoftLayer’s private network. Here’s a quick glimpse into what the new data center offers:

• Capacity for more than 16,000 servers
• Redundant network infrastructure
• Fully-automated platform
• Unique pod design concept

And here’s an actual glimpse into the data center (taken last week as we were putting the final touches on the racks … as you can see by the unbound cables at the backs of the server and the reference labels in the front):

We now have 13 data centers and 16 PoPs worldwide. Each data center functions independently, with distinct and redundant resources, while still being fully integrated into SoftLayer’s existing facilities. The end result for our customers is maximum accessibility, security, and control.

Our goal for Europe is to deliver the BEST cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions on the continent … just like we do in North America and Asia. Ten months of painstaking research, work and preparation are done, and now our customers will get to reap the rewards.

What are you waiting for? Get your first server in Amsterdam! To celebrate the launch of the new facility, we’re offering our Triple Double special on servers provisioned in AMS01 for a limited time: Free double bandwidth, double RAM and double HDD!

Now it’s time to send our clandestine military operation’s “Go Live Crew” to an undisclosed location to start preparing for our next strategic infiltration …

-@quigleymar

At conferences and tradeshows, I have the opportunity to meet hundreds of people. While a good number of attendees at technical conferences will come up to our booth and tell me they’re already customers, we still come across a few people who glance at our collateral and our graphics with a puzzled look on their face before they say, “What’s Soft … Layer?” This is where I spring into action!

To give some context, I’ll usually explain, “SoftLayer is an on-demand data center provider. We host dedicated servers, cloud computing instances and integrated solutions for customers around the world.” When that overview sinks in and the attendee understands that we are an infrastructure provider, I get to share some of SoftLayer’s biggest differentiators along with some pretty amazing statistics about our business. With a huge sample pool of conversations to pull from, I thought it would be fun to put together a “Top 10″ list of the facts that usually impress attendees the most.

The Top 10 SoftLayer Facts

Based on “oohs” and “ahhs” from attendees

10. No Hidden Fees: Our pricing is listed on our website and is straight-forward.
9. Huge Product Catalog: SoftLayer offers load balancers, CDN, firewalls, managed services, and storage. If you need something we don’t offer, we can usually find a way to make it work.
8. No Long-Term Contracts: Dedicated servers are offered on a month-to-month basis, and cloud instances are available on a monthly or hourly basis. We have to earn your business every month.
7. Built By Geeks For Geeks: We offer a fully programmable API that gives you complete control of your server(s) from your own application or system.
6. Free Private Network Traffic: Every SoftLayer facility is interconnected via our private network. All private network traffic and inbound public network traffic is provided at no charge – We only charge for outbound public network traffic.

The Top 5 are facts that almost always amaze:

5. Global Network: We have 13 data centers in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Jose, Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and Singapore. We also operate 16 additional network Points of Presence (PoPs) around the world.
4. Our Business is Strong: SoftLayer has 24,000+ customers in more than 150 countries. We manage more than 100,000 active servers, hosting more than 20 million domains. Oh, and we’re doing about $350 million in annual revenue.
3. Infrastructure On-Demand: Our dedicated servers can be deployed in less than four hours, and cloud instances can be provisioned in less than 15 minutes.
2. Everything Works Together: Our dedicated servers and cloud instances are fully integrated. You can have a dedicated server in Seattle and a cloud instance in Singapore, and they’re both managed by a single industry-leading portal. The fact that they can communicate with each other over SoftLayer’s private network is a huge plus there as well.

And the simple fact that impresses people most: *drum roll*

1. SoftLayer is the largest privately held hosting provider in the world!

Every time I shock attendees with these facts, I can’t help but be even more proud of our accomplishments. Let’s keep up the good work! We’re taking over the world, one data center at a time.”

-Natalie

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! »

In early September I shared with you a progress report on our first international data center in Singapore. It should be no surprise that our build out has been moving at breakneck speeds. In the last couple of weeks we’ve:

1. Completed the construction of our new regional office in Singapore
2. Built out 3 network PoPs (Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore)
3. Unloaded 4 x 40 foot ocean containers
4. Received over 100 pallets of equipment and gear – with more to come
5. Assembled 220 custom server cabinets
6. Installed 120 customer facing switches (5,760 switch ports)
7. Provisioned petabytes of new shared storage waiting for your data

We’re also ecstatic to have our new Singaporean employees burning the midnight oil with us. We spent countless hours interviewing for a number of positions in Singapore and we’ve only hired the most talented, brightest stars that we could find. Everyone has fit right in, loves the culture and they’re rocking it. We still have a bunch of open positions – if you’re interested, drop us a note.

As our go-live date approaches we’re putting the final touches on the data center. One last check to ensure all cables are seated correctly in their ports, double check the configurations on our internal equipment, light the network and have our first ever international truck day – although, we might have to call it ocean container day.

I’ve included some pictures below that I took over the last couple of days showing the progress of the data center build out. Expect a full set of pictures once everything is live.

-@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

This is a guest blog from 3DCart Co-founder and CEO Gonazlo Gil. 3DCart is a technology partner with a robust eCommerce platform hosting thousands of merchants all over the world … And it’s clear they have an enduring drive for innovation and value.

5 Must-Have Features in a Hosted Ecommerce Provider

In 1997, the concept that would eventually become 3DCart came into existence. I developed 3DCart with the idea of putting every single ecommerce tool and resource at the fingertips of web entrepreneurs so anyone with a computer could start their own online store. Today, we’re still going strong, and we pride ourselves on launching new ecommerce features before the competition has a chance.

The market for shopping carts has exploded over the past decade. If you’re considering the ecommerce business, choosing a shopping cart can get overwhelming. Because not all ecommerce software solutions are created equal, we’ve put together a list of five must-have features for aspiring entrepreneurs to consider when choosing a hosted ecommerce provider.

1. PCI Compliance to Protect Customer Information
You hear about it on the web, on the television, in the magazines: cyber-theft. Recent instances of online fraud (like the hack of Playstation’s network) have caused online shoppers to stiffen up when it comes to sharing financial information. For your sake and the sake of your customers, it’s important to put the minds of shoppers at ease as soon as they discover your brand.

Born from new rules created by the Payment Card Industry, PCI compliance standards are stringent guidelines for ensuring your online store is up to code in terms of security. The last thing you need as an online storeowner is responsibility for losing sensitive personal data to fraudsters. Beyond general culpability, you run the risk of losing trust in your brand, which could sink your business entirely.

The process for reaching PCI compliance is vigorous and expensive. That’s why most ecommerce software providers undergo PCI compliance measures on their own — so online stores can offer security to their customers. It offers a little more peace of mind on both sides of the business relationship and ensures your transactions go through smoothly.

Read the rest of 3DCart’s Guest Blog! »

Based on the blog’s traffic analytics, customers are very interested in SoftLayer’s global expansion, and in my update from Tokyo, I promised a few sneak peeks into the progress of building out the Singapore data center. We’ve been talking about our move into Asia for a while now, but we haven’t showed much of the progress. The cynics in the audience will say, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” and to them, I say:

These pictures were actually taken a few weeks ago before our Server Build Technicians came on site, and it looks even more amazing now … But you’ll have to check back with us in the coming weeks to see that progress for yourself. Both the Singapore and Amsterdam facilities are on track to go live by the middle of Q4 2011, and we’re already starting to hear buzz from our customers as they prepare to snatch up their first SoftLayer server in Asia.

If you want to have a little fun, you should compare these build-out pictures with the ones we’ve posted from the completed San Jose facility and the under-construction Amsterdam data center. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, SoftLayer uses a data center pod concept to create identical hosting environments in each of our locations. Even with the data centers’ varying floor plan layouts and sizes, the server room similarities are pretty remarkable.

Stay tuned for updates on the build-out process and for information about when you can start provisioning new servers in Singapore. If you have any questions about the build-out process, leave a comment below or hit us up on Twitter: @SoftLayer.

-@toddmitchell

This is a guest blog from Verecloud, a technology partner that makes it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to shop for, select, purchase, manage and monitor the performance of their cloud services and related spending.

Cloudwrangler from Verecloud

Ubiquitous Internet access and technological advances in virtualization and IT management have caused an explosion in the availability and adoption of cloud services. Just a few years ago, it would take hours – if not days – to activate a new cloud service for a customer. SoftLayer can now perform this feat with servers in minutes, and other providers of email, CRM and accounting solutions have equally fast turn-up times.

The cloud gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to enterprise grade technology so that they can compete more effectively with little, if any, capital investment, so those SMBs are prime consumers of cloud services. By moving to cloud services, their businesses gains flexibility and affordable scalability to throttle their infrastructure and services up and down as their business grows, changes, moves locations or becomes more mobile.

Even with all of those benefits, adding a little cloud here and a little cloud there ends up making it difficult for these SMBs to manage all of the disparate services. Who is paying for what? Are they accounted for in expense reports? How can you allocate the costs to your sales, marketing, operations or support departments? Is IT aware of all of the cloud services? What happens if someone leaves the company and you need to deactivate their access and reassign all of their data to other employees?

Read the rest of Verecloud’s Guest Blog! »