Posts Tagged ‘Las Vegas’

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority says, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” but we absconded from Caesars Palace with far too many pictures and videos from Parallels Summit to adhere to their suggestion. Over the course of three days, attendees stayed busy with presentations, networking sessions, parties, cocktails and (of course) the Server Challenge II. And thanks to Alan’s astute questions in The Hangover, we didn’t have to ask if the hotel was pager-friendly, whether a payphone bank was available or if Caesar actually lived at the hotel … We could focus on the business at hand.

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

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

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

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

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

Viva Las Vegas! Viva Parallels! Viva SoftLayer!

-Kevin

I just got back in town from Las Vegas, Nevada. That town is filled with stories and you can really love it or hate it, depending on the hour (or if you are like me whether you are arriving into McCarran or departing). I had a great trip this last go around and actually made money on the tables. However, when they say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas they are really talking about your money. Never forget that the house always wins. Always. Even if you win money you’ll wind up spending it on stuff out there and perpetuating your own good time. There isn’t anything wrong with this at all. In fact I plan on coming up on the short side of the stick on both the tables and on simply spending cash when I go out that way.

I think the really interesting thing that happens when you go through “the Vegas experience” is the perceived value of a dollar. You can take it for granted that all of a sudden you are transplanted into this fantasy world that is reminiscent of Pleasure Island from the story of Pinocchio and you’ll find that you have anything and everything you could want to do, eat, drink, or experience right at your fingertips. As this begins to progress the value of a dollar plummets quickly. You start overpaying for things at a whim, tipping bigger, making bolder and even just dumber bets. I did this and I can admit that I doubled down on my 11 when the dealer was showing a 10 in blackjack. It was blind luck that I hit it and won every single time. It’s a bold and stupid bet to make, but when you are playing with house money the money doesn’t matter and it’s almost as if you are trying to give it all back. My game of choice is craps because it gives you the best odds and there is a lot of action. It’s good and bad as it can all come and go in a hurry.

I have only been to Las Vegas a handful of times, but each time there is a point where even for a second you can feel invincible – that you can’t lose. Or, that even if you do lose you won’t even care. The flight home is a completely different story. I call it the hangover flight. You may be literally hung over, but no matter what, you will start to deal with all of the actions that happened on your trip and how you will need to handle them. As soon as you touch down in your own home town things slowly start to become “real” again. Your own home can even feel somewhat foreign for a while, but you’ll quickly come to the realization that you had become a completely different person for a short time.

I have come to the conclusion that there is always risk in everything that we do. Exposing yourself to the tables of Las Vegas may carry more financial risk than your morning commute to work, but in both cases there are still risks. There are also risks that we take in setting and running a business. There are countless ways that you could be putting your business at risk without the right plan in place. From an IT perspective alone, you need to consider things like redundancy, failover, security, backups, growth, and even data loss. Knowing what is going to happen next for your business may be as likely as knowing what is going to come up on the next roll of the dice. If you know this for certain you can press your luck and come up big, but if you are not prepared you could lose everything you have on the table. It is better to be prepared.

I think of SoftLayer as the house, and remember as I said before, the house always wins. The good thing about this is that you are betting with the house. Even with this you need to bet on yourself and back up your own bet. If the bulk of your business is in your data then you need to have backups. If you absolutely need to have High Availability, then look into Clusters and Load Balancing. But remember, that you are betting with the house because SoftLayer gives you the capacity to do all of it and do it all at a very affordable price compared to trying to do it yourself and also do it without long term commitments. Long term commitments bring the most uncertainty in making moves that will positively affect your business. Imagine if a casino told you that you “had” to make 12 consecutive bets regardless of how well (or poorly) you were doing?

Coming home from Las Vegas to SoftLayer has been a very good thing and makes me thankful for where I am and what I have. There aren’t the levels of uncertainty here that are automatic with other datacenters or even other business models. SoftLayer is steady and it is very easy to get what you need here while cutting out the risk that you don’t want to deal with. SoftLayer is as much of a “sure thing” as any bet you can make!