Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

In March of 2000, Apple was set to launch the first version of Mac OS X. At the time, I was working for a company called Macromedia (creators of Flash, subsequently purchased by Adobe) on a professional illustration program called FreeHand. Part of the Mac OS X transition was a system that reimplemented the programming interfaces from Mac OS 9 on the operating system kernel of Mac OS X. That system was called Carbon and was key to the strategy that let Mac OS 9 application transition to the Mac OS X platform. We had worked very hard with Apple and FreeHand was one of the first applications to run under the new system. I was invited to demo FreeHand running on Mac OS X at the Mac OS X launch event.

The launch was held on the Apple Campus in the “Town Hall,” the same venue that recently hosted the launch of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4s. Members of The Press were across the hallway in an adjacent room while those of us who were going to present were reviewing our parts, being fitted with microphones, and anxiously milling about. At one point an Apple employee stuck her head into the room and announced that Steve Jobs would be arriving in a few minutes. Most people took the announcement in stride and continued about their business.

At some point in this process, two of the representatives from Apple’s Developer Relations team that I had been working with seated themselves about halfway up the auditorium; they were innocently waiting for the event to start.

When Steve walked into the room, he did so through a side door that was just to the left of my seat. I was standing in front of the seat, and Steve came to stop right in front of me. The moment he walked into the room, all conversation died out. The entire room held it’s breath for a few heart beats while Steve stretched and commented aloud about being “ready to do this thing.”

As the conversations around the room came back on-line, Steve turned to me, pointed at the Developer Relations folk halfway up the auditorium and forcefully asked “Who are those people?” Naturally I fumbled to find a reply and was explaining that they worked for Developer Relations. Thankfully the VP of Developer Relations was nearby. He tapped Steve on the shoulder and told him “Those are my people, Steve.” I often tell folks at that point that “The Eye of Sauron turned” as Steve went off to review his presentation.

This was my first encounter with Steve Jobs. I’ve had a couple more over the years, minor interactions that I have no doubt he would never have remembered. Still, I have been working on Apple products since I was very young. Over the years my specialization in the field of Apple development has allowed me to care for myself and my family. Apple’s products continue to be an important part of my life.

Shortly the official press event announcing Mac OS X, I was invited to the cafeteria at Apple, Caffe Macs, and heard Steve talk about how Mac OS X was going to change everything. Over 10 years later, and that operating system now powers not only the Macintosh computer, but the host of iOS devices as well. A decade away I’m now working at SoftLayer to bring some of that innovation, and excellence to our mobile products.

I am one of millions whose lives have been touched by Steve Jobs. I know that while he was here he seized life with an intensity that inspires many of us. I hope that where he has gone he will have time to relax, reflect, and rest for a time.

That is, I have no doubt, before he starts “One More Thing…”

Rest in Peace, Steve.

-Scott

I recently had the opportunity to get re-acquainted with Redis while evaluating solutions for a project on the Product Innovation team here at SoftLayer. I’d actually played with it a couple of times before, but this time it “clicked.” Or my brain broke. Either way, I see a lot of potential for Redis now.

No one product is a perfect fit for all of your data storage needs, of course. There are such fundamental tradeoffs to be made in designing storage architectures that you should be immediately suspicious of any product that claims to fit every need.

The best solutions tend to be products that actually embrace these tradeoffs. Redis, for instance, has sacrificed a small amount of data durability in exchange for being awesome.

What is it?

Redis is a key/value store, but describing it that way is sort of like calling a helicopter a “vehicle.” It’s a technically correct description, but it leaves out some important stuff.

You can think of it like a sophisticated older brother of Memcached. It presents a flat keyspace, and you can set those keys to string values. Another feature of Memcached is the ability to perform remote atomic operations, like “incr” and “append.” These are really handy, because you have the ability to modify remote data without fetching, and you have an assurance that you’re the only one performing that operation at that instant.

Redis takes this concept of remote commands on data and goes completely nuts with it. The database is aware of data structures like hashes, lists and sets in addition to simple string values. You can sort, union, intersect, slice and dice to your heart’s content without fetching any data. Redis is a data structure server. You can treat it like remote memory, and this has an awesome immediate benefit for a programmer: your code and brain are already optimized for these data types.

But it’s not just about making storage simpler. It’s fast, too. Crazy fast. If you make intelligent use of its data structures, it’s possible to serve a lot of traffic from relatively modest hardware. Redis 2.4 can easily handle ~50k list appends a second on my notebook. With batching, it can append 2 million items to a list on a remote host in about 1.28 seconds.

It allows the remote, atomic and performant manipulation of data structures. It took me a little while to realize exactly how useful that is.

What’s wrong with it?

Nothing. Move along.

OK, it’s a little short on durability. Redis uses memory as its primary store and periodically flushes to disk. A common configuration is to do so every second.

That sounds pretty reasonable. If a server goes down, you could lose a second of data. Keep in mind, however, how many operations Redis can perform in a second. If you’re in a high-volume environment, that could be a lot of data. It’s not for your financial transactions.

It also supports relatively limited availability options. Currently, it only supports master/slave replication. Clustering support is planned for an upcoming release. It’s looking pretty powerful, but it will take some real-world testing to know its performance impact.

These challenges should be taken into consideration, and it’s probably clear if you’re in a situation where the current tradeoffs aren’t a good fit.

In my experience, a lot of developers seriously overestimate the consequences of their application losing small amounts of data. Also consider whether or not the chance of losing a second (or less) of data genuinely represents a bigger threat to your application than any other compromises you might have made.

More Information
You can check out the slightly aging docs or browse the impressively simple source. There are probably already bindings for your language of choice as well.

-Tim

We love startups and entrepreneurship communities that help startups become successful. Startups are usually all about innovation and approaching existing problems in a new way … And if you’re familiar with SoftLayer’s “Innovate or Die” motto, you know that we’re cut from the same cloth. We’ve partnered with incubators like Tech Wildcatters to provide up-and-coming companies with a year of $1,000/mo hosting credits along with a little SoftLayer expertise sprinkled in for good measure, and we are happy to support community partners like non-profits and user groups where new ideas are born every day.

Given our commitment to the startup community, when we heard that a sponsorship opened up for the September 13 WebInnovatorsGroup quarterly meeting, we jumped on the chance to get involved. WebInno events are fueled by a long-standing community of Internet and mobile entrepreneurs founded by David Beisel, and while I could tell you everything I know about what they’re doing in Boston, the best person to hear from is David himself:

Boston + Entrepreneurs + Technology + Beer … It was a no-brainer for us to be a Gold Sponsor of WebInno31.

Visit WebInnovatorsGroup.com to learn more about the WebInno community or head straight to the WebInno31 registration form to reserve your spot at Royal Sonesta Cambridge on Tuesday, September 13, at 6:30pm.

-Kevin

P.S. If you have a startup community or an ongoing event like WebInno that SoftLayer can be involved with, leave a comment on this blog or let us know on Twitter: @SoftLayer

Some of the best ideas come from people who think “outside of the box.” SoftLayer was born in a living room six years ago when we decided to look at the staid hosting industry from a new perspective. We said, “We don’t want to build a company to meet customers’ current needs. We want to build a company to meet the needs our customers don’t even know they have yet,” and that’s one of the biggest reasons the SoftLayer platform has IPv6, KVM over IP, private network, out-of-band management and standardized pod-based data centers.

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

On my first day on the job at SoftLayer, I was taught the core values of the company: Innovation, empowerment, automation and integration. Initially, I wasn’t sure if this was “marketing talk” or actually the actual driving force behind SoftLayer. Now, almost a year and a half later, I see how these core values really do power SoftLayer’s success every day.

In April, I was chatting with companies at Cloud Connections in Las Vegas, and I had the chance to give them some examples of how those core values make SoftLayer so much more than just another hosting provider:

Innovation
We’re constantly bringing products to market before others in the industry realize the need for them. One example of this is our early adoption of IPv6. SoftLayer was the very first hosting provider to offer our customers IPv6 and to make sure our entire data centers were IPv6-ready.

Empowerment
We give our customers full root access to their hardware so that they are able to configure their environment exactly how they want it. Beyond that, each server comes with free KVM over IP and out-of-band management network capabilities. We give complete control to our customers so that they can create their own virtual data center experience on demand.

Automation
We’ve completely automated the provisioning process, so we can deliver fully provisioned, customized dedicated servers in 1-4 hours and fully provisioned cloud instances in 5-25 minutes. Most of SoftLayer’s competitors take a few days (sometimes even weeks) to provision what we have online in hours.

Integration
We’re the only hosting provider that can offer a truly integrated solution for dedicated servers and cloud computing instances. We offer a single portal and API to manage both of these solutions. We also offer a private network that connects your dedicated servers and cloud computing instances and allows them to communicate without going out over the public network.

If you’re familiar with SoftLayer, you know that these core values permeate our business. By innovating, empowering, automating and integrating, we’re trying to stay ahead of the game. If you would like to experience a way-better-than-average hosting experience, I am sure SLales would love to hear from you!

3B4L!

-Summer

As you may have seen earlier in the week, SoftLayer is joining ISOC‘s 24-hour IPv6 “test flight” as a part of World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011.

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

Softlayer moved into a new complex (complex sounds better than building) in July. Like everywhere else, the building has its quirks – all part of what help the place feel like home. Those quirks have extended to how we have named the conference rooms throughout the building.

Being relatively new to the place, I take a certain amount of delight in discovering how each room was named. For example, CBNO translates to Challenging But Not Overwhelming, which is a mantra SoftLayer has adopted; Muenster is not named for the cheese, but for the Germanfest in Muenster, Texas that Sam and the SoftLayer BBQ team attend each year; and Jeep has its name due to the wide variety of Jeeps that are found daily in the SoftLayer parking lot. However, I think the most appropriate name has to be Sharkbyte. The reason is simple – Softlayer is an obligate ram breather.

The room features a stuffed shark that is mounted on the wall. The fish in question is a Bull shark, it is 7 feet long and weighed 200 pounds before it was caught off the Florida coast following a momentous struggle with SoftLayer’s CSO, George.

The urban myth goes that all sharks have to keep moving in order to maintain a flow of water over their gills or they risk suffocation. In reality this is true for only about two dozen of the 400 identified shark species. The species include the Great White and the Mako Shark. These species are called obligate ram breathers.

Like the Great White, SoftLayer is an obligate ram breather. The difference is that SoftLayer needs to keep innovating to keep thriving. Without constant innovation, we lose our competitive edge and risk falling back into a pool of ‘me too’ players in the market. The true test of this theory comes when we are faced with extraordinarily challenging times. The work to merge SoftLayer and The Planet is a great example of this. Innovation keeps coming even though everyone has been spending significant time focusing on how to deliver a seamless customer experience from day one. In the past few months we have partnered with Nimsoft to deliver a unique network monitoring solution to the cloud; a new customer driven firmware update tool has been developed and launched; ‘smarter’ signup forms that will have multi server sign up forms (among other things) are available and we have given customers increased network transparency. At Softlayer we simply cannot stop.

CBNO.

-@quigleymar

Hi. My name is Mark Quigley, and I am a new Softlayer employee. In specific, I will be running the company’s analyst relations program. This is my first week with the company, and the fire hose has not yet been turned off. In fact, I think that this has been among the most intense weeks of my working life.

Softlayer moves at a pace that I am not overly familiar with given time I have spent with some very large (and inevitably slow moving) companies. It has been a pleasure to find myself in a group of ‘quick-thinking doers’ versus ‘thinkers that spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing.’ I have seen fewer PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets this week than I thought was possible. It makes for a pleasant change, and change is a good thing (My wardrobe has also undergone a SoftLayer transformation. It now features black shirts and some more black shirts).

The week began with the announcement that SoftLayer had launched its second Dallas data center. The data center (DAL05) has capacity for 15,000 servers, delivers 24×7 onsite support, and has multiple security protocols controlling entrance to the facility. The diesel generators that sit outside are massive – think of a locomotive on steroids. DAL05 is fully connected to SoftLayer’s data centers at the INFOMART in Dallas, in Seattle, Washington, and in the Washington D.C. area in addition to the company’s network Points of Presence in seven additional U.S. cities.

The reason for the expansion is simple – Softlayer continues to grow. In fact, our new office location would appear to be mostly a home for large generators and server racks in the future than it is for people (there are more of those to come, too). Current plans call for the addition of two more pods to DAL05 to come alive over the next 18 – 24 months. In addition a facility in San Jose is expected to go live early in 2011 and we are in the midst of international expansion plans. There is a lot going on around here.

I think it is interesting to step back for a second and take a look at what is driving this growth. The fact that SoftLayer is ruthlessly efficient, allowing customers to get from 0 to 60 faster than anyone else is certainly one reason. So are the fantastic support processes that are in place. The guys around here are very good at what they do. That being said this is a time when a rising tide is raising all ships. And this is a good thing. I mean, we want to beat our competition with every time we see them across the table, but we are glad that there are enjoying their share of success because it means the marketplace is booming. Even better, it is showing no sign of letting up.

The changes that we have witnessed in the past fifteen years are nothing short of staggering. I remember sending faxes to clients as the primary means of document exchange and then being thrilled at the notion of a single AOL account via dial up being shared by five people in the office. Now I have access to the internet via at least two devices in the office and one when I am not. At home I surf the net and watch content streamed via NetFlix over my iPad. My son plays the PS3 online with his pals, my daughter spends time watching Dora the Explorer on the Nick Jr. website and my wife has reopened countless friendships with high school friends that she has not seen in decades via Facebook. I don’t think that I am unusual in my habits either. None of this happened ten years ago.

The most recent wave has come with the arrival of social networking sites (which had a much different definition when I was young!) and associated applications. Companies like Twitter and Facebook has driven a terrific amount of innovation, and continues to do so. So too have companies like Apple – music downloads and application downloads are now in the billions. The net result of this has been in a terrific amount of business for companies like SoftLayer. I mean, who ever thought that on-line farming would drive as much interest, traffic and money as it has? And the really cool part of all of this is that the world my kids will occupy in ten years is going to be richer than mine by at least an order of magnitude. SoftLayer will be there to make it all work. It is going to be a fun ride.

-@quigleymar

The iPad

“A magical, revolutionary product at an incredible price” says Apple.

“It’s shiny!! I want one!” half my brain says in awe.

“It’s over $600! The economy sucks! When’s the last time you bought yourself some decent clothes? Haven’t you wanted a road bike for a while? How’s that savings account of yours holding up anyway? Doesn’t matter, it should be double that. And while you’re at it, you should spend less on food too.” So protests the other half of my brain, a side that sounds curiously like my mother.

There was going to be no impulse buying here. If I were to get one, I would need a solid justification for it. So the justification became this: I’m a web applications developer, and the iPad has the potential to influence what I do for a living. What this influence will be is not altogether clear, but I will have a much better idea of what it will be owning an iPad rather than not. So the decision was made: a shiny, 3G, 16GB iPad to call my own.

Whether the iPad is “revolutionary” will be decided only after the revolution has occurred and its effects discussed, debated, and understood. But the potential for bringing about one is very much there. The iPad is also as much a product of a revolution rather than the instigator of one: the shift to ubiquitous internet access and cloud computing.

The Revolution the iPad Could Bring About

Computers were once only attached to keyboards, where people entered memorized commands. The mouse and graphical user interface were revolutionary in their day, allowing people to interact with computers who otherwise couldn’t or wouldn’t do so. Just as importantly, the mouse and GUI allowed the creation of software that would not exist elegantly in a world with just keyboards. One notable piece of software made possible by the GUI & mouse was the web browser.

Much like the mouse before it, the multitouch screen presents a major evolution of the computer-user interface. Unlike the combination of the mouse and keyboard however, it is a complimentary evolution. Multitouch screens will not replace the mouse and keyboard, but compliment them in many areas.

Suppose you have a button on a screen. In the past, pressing that button required “aiming” a cursor with a mouse attached to your computer, or (more recently), a trackpad. In many cases, the button on the screen might be “mapped” to a key or combination of keys. But the multitouch screen bypasses all this. If there’s a button on a screen that says it does something, all you have to do is press it with your finger.

Trivial you might say? I would say “subtle,” with powerful implications:

The precision of a dedicated mouse and keyboard is no longer required for many tasks that once depended on these devices. Since the iPad is a portable device, being tethered to a traditional computer or laptop is similarly no longer required. Much like the mouse and GUI before it, new applications that were not practical for mouse-based systems will now be written and many of course have been. Few people could have predicted that the web browser and its impact on society would be one of the many advances the mouse-based GUI would bring about, and it is entirely possible that such ground-breaking applications will one day be written for the iPad, or a device similar to it.

The Revolution That Made the iPad Possible

AT&T’s coverage map shows the majority of the United States covered by their 3G or EDGE networks, and competing carriers show similar coverage. Whereas “cellphone coverage” once meant being able to make voice calls and send texts, “cellphone coverage” today is synonymous with internet access. The internet is everywhere, and it is all around us.

Imagine a device like the iPad in a world without ubiquitous internet, without wifi even. Would that iPad have a disk drive? It could have the greatest, most revolutionary interface in the world. But there’d be no argument that the device’s utility would be much more limited, to the point where the device might appeal only to technical people.

The iPad is one of the first mass produced, practical cloud computing devices, and its success is in part owed to the many advances made before it. Companies like SoftLayer helped bring about cloud computing solutions to developers such as myself where such services would otherwise be inaccessible or prohibitively expensive.

So when I look at my iPad, I no longer just see a shiny new thing. The sticker shock has been more than offset by what the iPad represents: striking innovation and an attitude toward the economy all of us would do well to adopt: Don’t complain, put your brain to work, and create something new.

Yet the iPad is not an isolated device either. Years of infrastructure investment and innovation by many companies brought us to the point where consumers and developers alike can leverage the power of the cloud. “Revolutionary” is a bold claim on Apple’s part, but in the context of what the state of technology was even a few years ago, the term “magical” isn’t far off at all.

-George

No matter what industry you are in, a key to a successful business is always being one step ahead of your competitors. Look at Blockbuster, who just filed for bankruptcy. Netflix came along then RedBox, Blockbuster couldn’t keep up. Blockbuster tried mimicking these two versions of video/game rental, but failed. Now you can order Netflix off your Xbox 360. There is a RedBox on almost every corner of the Metroplex or at least at every drug store. There is also video on-demand for almost every cable or satellite provider.

I went to a luncheon recently. The topic was “The Next Generation of IT Delivered Through Innovations.” The speaker was Scott Garvey, Director Enterprise Solutions from Microsoft. Scott brought up a good statistic; most companies only survive on “top”, nowadays, for about 12 years when the timeline used to be 75 years. He spoke about the different ways Microsoft plans to stay one step ahead of their competitors. He stated that his company spends billions of dollars on Research and Development a year. While SoftLayer is not quite to the point of spending that much, it still made me think about how we are keeping one step ahead of our competitors.

We are constantly rolling out new features, certifications, products, and partnerships. While we are not quite on top yet, we will get there. We are only three months into this year and we have already rolled out five new features, one certification, and two new partnerships. This is one reason we are growing so fast; but, even better, we are staying one step ahead of our competitors.

To register for one of these luncheons go here .