Posts Tagged ‘news’

It’s already December 18, so you’ve probably read a few dozen “Best of 2012″ and “Looking Back on 2012″ articles around the web by now. I hope that you indulge me as I add one more tally to that list … I can’t suppress the urge to take a nostalgic look back on all of SoftLayer’s successes this year.

As Director of Communications, the easiest milestones for me to use as I look back are our product announcements and press releases, so I’ll use those as landmarks to help tell the story of SoftLayer in 2012. Instead of listing those points chronologically, it might make a little more sense to categorize them topically so you can see the bigger picture of what’s happening at the company when it comes to product innovation, growth, the startup community and industry recognition.

Driving Product Innovation

When your company motto is “Innovate or Die,” there’s a lot of pressure to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. In this calendar year alone, we launched some pretty amazing products and capabilities that have the potential of reshaping the competitive landscape:

• Flex Images – In February, we announced Flex Images — an amazing tool that blurs the line between “cloud” and “dedicated.” Users can easily replicate servers and move them between physical and virtual platforms to quickly meet their changing requirements. None of our competitors can match that level of flexibility.
• High Performance Computing – In April, we launched high-performance computing (HPC) options powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUS to provide an on-demand, consumption-based platform for users with the most compute-intensive environments.
• SoftLayer Private Clouds – In June, we unveiled Private Clouds based on CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform. A Private Cloud is a an optimized environment that enables quick provisioning of cloud instances on dedicated infrastructure, and because we’ve automated the provisioning and expansion of the Private Cloud architecture, customers can order and configure full private cloud deployments on demand.
• Big Data: MongoDB – Our most recent product release, an optimized MongoDB environment, was the amazing result of a strategic partnership with the team at 10gen. This flexible pay-as-you-go solution simplifies the big data buying process and enables organizations to swiftly deploy highly scalable and available production-grade systems. Big data developers don’t have to settle for lower-performance virtualized platforms, and they don’t have to hassle with building, configuring and tweaking their own dedicated environments (since we did all the work for them).

Expanding in Key Vertical Markets

Beyond the pure “product innovation” milestones we’ve hit this year, we’ve also seen a few key vertical markets do their own innovating on our platform. With a paintbrush and a little creativity, Pablo Picasso popularized Cubism, so when our creative customers are provided with a truly scalable platform that delivers unparalleled performance and control across both physical and virtual devices, they do their own world changing. Several top online gaming providers and cutting-edge tech companies chose SoftLayer to do their “painting” this year, and their stories have been pretty amazing:

• Broken Bulb Studios – This social gaming developer uses SoftLayer’s public and private cloud infrastructure with RightScale cloud management to easily deploy, automate and manage its rapidly expanding computing workloads across the globe.
• KIXEYE, Storm8, and East Side Games – These online gaming companies rely on SoftLayer to provide a platform of dedicated, virtualized and managed servers from which they can develop, test, launch and run their latest games.
• AppFirst, Cloudant and Struq – These hot tech companies moved to SoftLayer to achieve the scalability, performance and the time-to-market they need to continue meeting global market demand for their services.
• Huge Wins in Europe, Middle East and Africa – Companies like Binweevils, Boxed Ice, Crazymist, Exit Games, Ganymede, Hotwire Financial, Mangrove, Multiplay, Peak Games and Zamzar are just some of organizations that choose SoftLayer to deliver the cloud infrastructure for their killer applications and games.

Supporting the Startup Community

2012 was the first full year of activity for the Catalyst Startup Program. Catalyst is geared toward furthering innovation by investing time and hosting resources in helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, and as an extension of that program, we also supported several high-profile incubators, accelerators and startup-related events this year:

• Catalyst Launched – We provide startups with free infrastructure and hosting services, as well as strategic product, market and operating advice from senior-level employees.
• We sponsored fantastic startup communities like MassChallenge, Techstars and Seedcamp Europe.
• MODX, SpotRight Inc. and Epic Playground – In October, we shared success stories from a few of the companies participating in Catalyst.

Earning Industry Recognition

All of this innovation and effort didn’t go unnoticed in 2012. SoftLayer’s growth and accomplishments throughout the year resulted in some high-profile recognition:

• SoftLayer won the Red Herring “Top 100 North America Tech Award,” a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. With this award, we join the ranks of past recipients like Facebook, Twitter and Google.
• SoftLayer was listed in the Top 10 on Business Insider‘s Digital 100 list of 2012′s Most Valuable Private Tech Companies in the world, alongside Twitter, Square and Dropbox.

Beyond that “official” recognition of what we’re doing to shake up the market, the best barometer for our success is our customer base. According to an amazing hosting infographic from HostCabi.net, we’re the most popular hosting provider among the 100,000 most visited websites in the world. We easily beat out all other service providers — almost doubling the number of sites hosted by the second-place competitor — and we’re not slowing down. We’re using the momentum we’ve continued building in 2012 to propel us into 2013, and we encourage you to watch this space for even more activity next year.

-Andre

In the last couple of days, there’s been a bit of buzz about “open DNS resolvers” and DNS amplification DDoS attacks, and SoftLayer’s name has been brought up a few times. In a blog post on October 30, CloudFlare explained DNS Amplification DDoS attacks and reported the geographic and network sources of open DNS resolvers that were contributing to a 20Gbps attack on their network. SoftLayer’s AS numbers (SOFTLAYER and the legacy THEPLANET-AS number) show up on the top ten “worst offenders” list, and Dan Goodin contacted us to get a comment for a follow-up piece on Ars Technica — Meet the network operators helping to fuel the spike in big DDoS attacks.

While the content of that article is less sensationalized than the title, there are still a few gaps to fill about when it comes to how SoftLayer is actually involved in the big picture (*SPOILER ALERT* We aren’t “helping to fuel the spike in big DDoS attacks”). The CloudFlare blog and the Ars Technica post presuppose that the presence of open recursive DNS resolvers is a sign of negligence on the part of the network provider at best and maliciousness at worst, and that’s not the case.

The majority of SoftLayer’s infrastructure is made up of self-managed dedicated and cloud servers. Customers who rent those servers on a monthly basis have unrestricted access to operate their servers in any way they’d like as long as that activity meets our acceptable use policy. Some of our largest customers are hosting resellers who provide that control to their customers who can then provide that control to their own customers. And if 23 million hostnames reside on the SoftLayer network, you can bet that we’ve got a lot of users hosting their DNS on SoftLayer infrastructure. Unfortunately, it’s easier for those customers and customers-of-customers and customers-of-customers-of-customers to use “defaults” instead of looking for, learning and implementing “best practices.”

It’s all too common to find those DNS resolvers open and ultimately vulnerable to DNS amplification attacks, and whenever our team is alerted to that vulnerability on our network, we make our customers aware of it. In turn, they may pass the word down the customer-of-customer chain to get to the DNS owner. It’s usually not a philosophical question about whether DNS resolvers should be open for the greater good of the Internet … It’s a question of whether the DNS owner has any idea that their “configuration” is vulnerable to be abused in this way.

SoftLayer’s network operations, abuse and support teams have tools that flag irregular and potentially abusive traffic coming from any server on our network, and we take immediate action when we find a problem or are alerted to one by someone who sends details to abuse@softlayer.com. The challenge we run into is that flagging obvious abusive behavior from an active DNS server is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game … Attackers cloak their activity in normal traffic. Instead of sending a huge amount of traffic from a single domain, they send a marginal amount of traffic from a large number of machines, and the “abusive” traffic is nearly impossible for even the DNS owner to differentiate from “regular” traffic.

CloudFlare effectively became a honeypot, and they caught a distributed DNS amplification DoS attack. The results they gathered are extremely valuable to teams like mine at SoftLayer, so if they go the next step to actively contact the abuse channel for each of the network providers in their list, I hope that each of the other providers will jump on that information as I know my team will.

If you have a DNS server on the SoftLayer network, and you’re not sure whether it’s configured to prevent it from being used for these types of attacks, our support team is happy to help you out. For those of you interested in doing a little DNS homework to learn more, Google’s Developer Network has an awesome overview of DNS security threats and mitigations which gives an overview of potential attacks and preventative measures you can take. If you’re just looking for an easy way to close an open recursor, scroll to the bottom of CloudFlare’s post, and follow their quick guide.

If, on the other hand, you have your own DNS server and you don’t want to worry about all of this configuration or administration, SoftLayer operates private DNS resolvers that are limited to our announced IP space. Feel free to use ours instead!

-Ryan

Those of us who’ve been in this industry for years have seen computing evolve pretty significantly, especially recently. We started with dedicated servers running a single operating system, and we were floored by innovations that allowed dedicated servers to run a hypervisor with many operating systems. The next big leap brought virtual machine “cloud” instances into the spotlight … And the resulting marketing shenanigans have been a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, the approachable “cloud” term is a lot easier to talk about with a nontechnical audience, but on the negative side, we see uninformative TV commercials that leverage cloud as a marketing term, and we see products that further obfuscate what cloud technology actually means:

To make sure we’re all on the same page, as we continue to talk about “cloud,” our definition is pretty straightforward:

• It’s an operations model.
• It provides capacity on demand.
• It offers consumption-based pricing.
• It features self-service provisioning.
• It can be accessed and managed via an API.

Understanding those characteristics, when you hear about cloud in the hosting industry, you’re usually hearing about cloud computing instances in a public cloud environment. An instance in a public cloud is one of many instances operating on a shared cloud infrastructure alongside other similar instances that aren’t managed by you. Your data is still secure, and you can still get good performance in a public cloud environment, but you’re not managing the cloud infrastructure on which your instance resides … You’re using a piece of a cloud.

What we announced at Cloud Expo East is the next step in the evolution of technology in our industry … We’re providing a turnkey, on-demand way for our customers to provision their own Private Clouds with Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

You don’t get a piece of the cloud. You have your own cloud, provisioned in a matter of hours on a month-to-month contract.

For those who have looked into building a private cloud for their business in the past, it’s probably worth reiterating: With SoftLayer and CloudStack, you can have a geographically distributed, secure, private cloud environment provisioned in a matter of hours (not months). Given the complexity of a private cloud environment — involving a management server, private cloud zones, host servers and object storage — this is no small feat.

Those unbelievable provisioning times are only part of the story … When that cloud infrastructure is deployed quickly, it’s fully integrated into the SoftLayer platform, so it leverages our global private network alongside your existing bare metal, dedicated and virtual servers. Want to add public cloud instances to your private cloud as web heads? You’ll log into one portal or use a singular API to have that done in an instant.

Your own cloud infrastructure, fully integrated into SoftLayer’s global infrastructure. If you’re chomping at the bit to try it out for yourself, email us at privateclouds@softlayer.com, and we’ll get you on the “early access” list.

Before I sign off, I want to be sure to thank everyone at SoftLayer and Citrix who worked so hard to make SoftLayer Private Clouds such an amazing new addition to our platform.

-@nday91

Last week, I had the privilege of attending Red Herring‘s Top 100 North America Tech Award ceremony in Santa Monica. If you’re not familiar with Red Herring, it harkens back to the headier days of the of the dot-com era in the late 90′s and early 00′s. While the markets have fluctuated quite a bit in the last dozen years, the startup scene has survived, and the optimism of the dot-com boom is still alive and well, albeit via more focused entrepreneurs that intentionally practice cold hard pragmatism and have bootstrap mentalities.

Today, the Red Herring Top 100 still serves as a great barometer for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. The publication’s editors are quick to point out that they were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay would change the way we live and work. That’s the start to a pretty nice little “alumni” list if you ask me.

How does a company make the cut?

The Top 100 were judged on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, IP creation, CAGR, execution of strategy, and disruption in their respective industries.

Before the Top 100 are selected, each finalist has an opportunity to pitch their business model and share why they think they should be included. I heard one entrepreneur say, “I have over a million dollars invested from my family and friends, so this can’t fail.” These businesses may have started as simple ideas, but they’re fueled by an entrepreneurial passion that have pushed them to become truly remarkable. Many of the finalists had already reached a certain level of success and were trying to build and scale-out their ideas — everything from new mobile apps, open source and storage offerings to cloud and big data optimized solutions.

While preparing a little bit of information for SoftLayer’s presentation, I was pleasantly surprised to see that more than 20 finalists for Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas Award were active SoftLayer customers!

After the editors made the tough decisions to narrow down the finalists to the Top 100 winners, SoftLayer was honored and excited to join 10gen, Backupify, Cloudera, CVision Technologies, MedAvante, PageFreezer Software, RingRevenue, VigLink and Zencoder. At least 10% of the 2012 Red Herring Americas Top 100 companies are using SoftLayer.

Early in my tenure at SoftLayer, a colleague told me, “We aren’t looking to be the next big thing, we are looking to enable it.” That’s probably not going to stop us from throwing our hat in the ring to be considered for the Global 100 this fall, though.

-Andre

We’ve always set our sights globally at SoftLayer and this week we’ve certainly achieved some key milestones. With our data center in Singapore going LIVE, we now have a “digital gateway” for providing our unique cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions to the Asia-Pacific region.

What is even more remarkable is the speed at which we are deploying our new international data centers. In only a few months, all the meticulous planning, logistics and execution were done and customers could place orders. And we’re not slowing down. The trajectory path we’re on has us expanding faster and farther than we ever thought possible.

Next month we’re opening a new data center in Amsterdam, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt. Each of these facilities is built and maintained by SoftLayer, and that organic growth is a huge differentiator. We didn’t go out and acquire a company to expand our capabilities, and because we’re doing the work on the ground, we’re able to guarantee the most consistent, best possible service. Every data center – whether it’s Singapore or San Jose – is exactly the same. Because of that consistency, our customers don’t have to worry about whether the services in the new facilities meet their expectations, and based on the phenomenal provisioning statistics we saw on day one in Singapore, they aren’t hesitating to order more.

International Expansion: Currency

Because our global expansion enables us to perform even better for the SoftLayer customers located outside of North America, we wanted to make it easier for those customers to do business with us. As of 8:01 a.m. Central Time today, we support and accept payment in 60+ currencies! This currency support allows our customers to price SoftLayer services in their native currency, and it lets them avoid those pesky exchange fees from their credit card.

Our BYOC (Cloud) and Dedicated Server order forms have been updated with a currency selection on their first page, so once you select a currency, your order form will reload with all pricing displayed in that currency. Existing customers are also able to pay for their existing servers with one-time or recurring payments in our customer portal.

Currencies Supported

It’s amazing to say that we are truly a global company operating on three continents. Our success and future growth are tied to these new international capabilities. We will move aggressively and open more data centers, so stay tuned. With our global aspirations taking flight, I’m reminded of the saying that, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

Speaking of flights, I’ve got to get to the airport … My flight to Amsterdam is leaving in a few hours.

-@gkdog

Once again the Dallas Cowboys let a game they weren’t supposed to win slip away from them in the 4th quarter. Again it was Tony “oops” Romo that had a hand (or “didn’t have hands”) in the loss. I can’t blame it all on him as I saw many problems that led up to the defeat. I, as a master football coach of 4-6 year-old flag football, could write multiple paragraphs on that subject, but because this is a social media blog, I will get back on topic.

After last night’s “4th quarter of doom” that probably led to crazy nightmares for my sleeping kids (I may have been yelling loudly and often), I decided to open Twitter to see what everyone in the world thought about the game. I have to admit I was a little shocked at how many Cowboy haters are out in the wild. Of course the game was trending, and the conversation was … diverse: You had your die-hard Cowboy fans that were saying, “Shake it off, you weren’t supposed to win anyway.” You had your fair weather fans that were saying, “Great, another season opener loss, I guess I’ll follow the Texans instead.” You had the fans of other teams that were saying, “Haha, the Cowboys lost again – Go (Insert your team here)!” And, of course you had the pure Cowboy haters who were saying, “#$%^#$%^#$ the Cowboys they #$%#$% and #$%# and then #$%#$%. Eat it!” I would say most were Cowboy haters, and most of the tweets were not even close to being rated PG-13.

Stay with me now … I’m finally onto the real topic.

Social Media
What I saw on Twitter last night was real Social Media to me. It was current, real time, opinionated, cool and sad all at the same time. It encapsulated the thoughts and reactions of the public to something that was happening or just happened. Why is social media cool? A couple of weeks ago when the earthquake struck the northeast, people were saying that they received tweet updates of the ground shaking and notifications that an earthquake hit seconds before they felt the tremors in their area. Think about that and how many possible uses that has in lots of different industries. X happens, Y needs to know about it right away, Z tweets it or posts it on Facebook (or any of the 2000 other social apps out there), and like magic you have the information almost before you are supposed to. That’s viral social media.

Social Marketing
Social Marketing isn’t nearly as sexy. It’s only and exactly what it sounds like. We do it at SoftLayer: You see tweets from us talking about press releases, new products, our new website, our new international locations and some of the other value we provide to customers because we know how easy it is to miss some of the best stuff in the noisy social sphere. It helps us build our brand and helps with awareness by getting our name in front of people who may not have seen it otherwise. It drives traffic to our website and straight to our order form. It is significant to our bottom line.

The challenge with this kind of engagement is that the volume of content can seem overwhelming to some. Some customers only want to hear the viral social media kind of stuff with up to the minute news (which is our vision for @SoftLayerNotify), but it’s tough to abandon the social marketing piece because it’s been so measurably successful for us.

With that being said, we want to hear from you about what you like and don’t like about our social engagement. What you would like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Do you like it? Do you hate it? We’re definitely listening … Well as long as we’re not busy getting ready for the next flash mob.

-@skinman454

When we designed the CloudLayer Computing platform, our goal was to create an offering where customers would be able to customize and build cloud computing instances that specifically meet their needs: If you go to our site, you’re even presented with an opportunity to “Build Your Own Cloud.” The idea was to let users choose where they wanted their instance to reside as well as their own perfect mix of processor power, RAM and storage. Today, we’re taking the BYOC mantra one step farther by unveiling the local disk storage option for CloudLayer computing instances!

For those of you familiar with the CloudLayer platform, you might already understand the value of a local disk storage option, but for the uninitiated, this news presents a perfect opportunity to talk about the dynamics of the cloud and how we approach the cloud around here.

As the resident “tech guy” in my social circle, I often find myself helping friends and family understand everything from why their printer isn’t working to what value they can get from the latest and greatest buzzed-about technology. As you’d probably guess, the majority of the questions I’ve been getting recently revolve around ‘the cloud’ (thanks especially to huge marketing campaigns out of Redmond and Cupertino). That abstract term effectively conveys the intentional sentiment that users shouldn’t have to worry about the mechanics of how the cloud works … just that it works. The problem is that as the world of technology has pursued that sentiment, the generalization of the cloud has abstracted it to the point where this is how large companies are depicting the cloud:

As it turns out, that image doesn’t exactly illicit the, “Aha! Now I get it!” epiphany of users actually understanding how clouds (in the technology sense) work. See how I pluralized “clouds” in that last sentence? ‘The Cloud’ at SoftLayer isn’t the same as ‘The Cloud’ in Redmond or ‘The Cloud’ in Cupertino. They may all be similar in the sense that each cloud technology incorporates hardware abstraction, on-demand scalability and utility billing, but they’re not created in the same way.

If only there were a cloud-specific Declaration of Independence …

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all clouds are not equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain distinct characteristics, that among these are storage, processing power and the ability to serve content. That to secure these characteristics, information should be given to users, expressed clearly to meet the the cloud’s users;

The Ability to Serve Content
Let’s unpack that Jeffersonian statement a little by looking at the distinct characteristics of every cloud, starting with the third (“the ability to serve content”) and working backwards. Every cloud lives on hardware. The extent to which a given cloud relies on that hardware can vary, but at the end of the day, you &nash; as a user – are not simply connecting to water droplets in the ether. I’ll use SoftLayer’s CloudLayer platform as a specific example of that a cloud actually looks like: We have racks of uniform servers – designated as part of our cloud infrastructure – installed in rows in our data centers. All of those servers are networked together, and we worked with our friends at Citrix to use the XenServer platform to tie all of those servers together and virtualize the resources (or more simply: to make each piece of hardware accessible independently of the rest of the physical server it might be built into). With that infrastructure as a foundation, ordering a cloud server on the CloudLayer platform simply involves reserving a small piece of that cloud where you can install your own operating system and manage it like an independent server or instance to serve your content.

Processing Power
Understanding the hardware architecture upon which a cloud is built, the second distinct characteristic of every cloud (“processing power”) is fairly logical: The more powerful the hardware used for a given cloud, the better processing performance you’ll get in an instance using a piece of that hardware.

You can argue about what software uses the least resources in the process of virtualizing, but apples-to-apples, processing power is going to be determined by the power of the underlying hardware. Some providers try to obfuscate the types of servers/processors available to their cloud users (sometimes because they are using legacy hardware that they wouldn’t be able to sell/rent otherwise), but because we know how important consistent power is to users, we guarantee that CloudLayer instances are based on 2.0GHz (or faster) processors.

Storage
We walked backward through the distinct characteristics included in my cloud-specific Declaration of Independence because of today’s CloudLayer Computing storage announcement, but before I get into the details of that new option, let’s talk about storage in general.

If the primary goal of a cloud platform is to give users the ability to scale instantly from 1 CPU of power to 16 CPUs of power, the underlying architecture has to be as flexible as possible. Let’s say your cloud computing instance resides on a server with only 10 CPUs available, so when you upgrade to a 16-CPU instance, your instance will be moved to a server with enough available resources to meet your need. To make that kind of quick change possible, most cloud platforms are connected to a SAN (storage area network) or other storage device via a back-end network to the cloud servers. The biggest pro of having this setup is that upgrading and downgrading CPU and RAM for a given cloud instance is relatively easy, but it introduces a challenge: The data lives on another device that is connected via switches and cables and is being used by other customers as well. Because your data has to be moved to your server to be processed when you call it, it’s a little slower than if a hard disk was sitting in the same server as the instance’s processor and RAM. For that reason, many users don’t feel comfortable moving to the cloud.

In response to the call for better-performing storage, there has been a push toward incorporating local disk storage for cloud computing instances. Because local disk storage is physically available to the CPU and RAM, the transfer of data is almost immediate and I/O (input/output) rates are generally much higher. The obvious benefit of this setup is that the storage will perform much better for I/O-intensive applications, while the tradeoff is that the setup loses the inherent redundancy of having the data replicated across multiple drives in a SAN (which, is almost like its own cloud … but I won’t confuse you with that right now).

The CloudLayer Computing platform has always been built to take advantage of the immediate scalability enabled by storing files in a network storage device. We heard from users who want to use the cloud for other applications that they wanted us to incorporate another option, so today we’re happy to announce the availability of local disk storage for CloudLayer Computing! We’re looking forward to seeing how our customers are going to incorporate cloud computing instances with local disk storage into their existing environments with dedicated servers and cloud computing instances using SAN storage.

If you have questions about whether the SAN or local disk storage option would fit your application best, click the Live Chat icon on SoftLayer.com and consult with one of our sales reps about the benefits and trade-offs of each.

We want you to know exactly what you’re getting from SoftLayer, so we try to be as transparent as we can when rolling out new products. If you have any questions about CloudLayer or any of our other offerings, please let us know!

-@nday91

Skinson’s 1634AR15 Competency Controlled Certification of Compliance
New Compliance structure makes a compliance officer’s life much easier.

Dallas — In a world where auditor to auditor reports are out of control and we have a mountain of complex compliances to worry about, one competent compliancy controlled certification of compliance finally comes forth (and not a minute too soon).

“This new groundbreaking idea will change the lives of many competing auditing firms, law firms, accounting firms and so on,” says Steve Kinman. “I spend countless hours reading controls for one report and different controls for another report, and the only difference is the verbiage and format.”

The new Skinson 1634AR15 Certification combines your SAS70, SSAE16, ROC, VOC, SOC, NIST, SARBOX, PCI, OMB, ACART, CFDA, HIPAA and SAFE HARBOR compliance into a single report using a set framework that automorphs based upon which auditor is touching the report or viewing it in the state of the art Skinson Portal.

“The Skinson portal is mind-blowing,” says Val Stinson. “The automorph feature is something straight out of the movies. It knows who is reading and can change the wording on the fly. This keeps auditors from scratching their heads when the words in the report don’t match the words their instruction book.”

The introductory price for full Skinson 1634AR15 Compliance Certification is $1,000,000 USD. This is all-inclusive and will sufficiently cover all of your compliance needs.

Contact:
Steve Kinman
skinman@softlayer.com

About Skinson
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Skinson is a fictional company that likes to poke fun at the difficult job of compliance in the world. While we find that it can be overwhelming at times, we understand that compliance is a necessary evil. We would like to note that something like we dream about above would be very nice and would save the world a ton of work and cut down on our carbon footprint considerably. If you are in a position of control and can make the above happen please help us!!

On a side note, SoftLayer will do everything we can to help you with any compliance you need. Just ask your local sales team for help, and they will find the right person and get you in contact.

-@skinman454

P.S. The actual reason for this blog post is that we just announced that the control procedures and compliance for our 11 data centers have been verified in a Service Organization Control Report (SOC 1) prepared under the terms of the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16 (SSAE 16) by independent auditing firm Weaver.

One of SoftLayer’s driving principles is innovation — Our mantra is ‘Innovate or Die.’ We don’t focus on offering the lowest cost solutions; we strive to offer the most innovative solutions, which in turn brings customers the greatest value.

Take as an example SoftLayer Managed Hosting, a new service we’re launching this week.

A quick survey of the market tells us a number of key things about managed hosting in terms of the value proposition offered, as well as the challenges that it can present. The value proposition seems clear: Organizations that need their infrastructure managed and don’t have the internal resources to do so can either expand their IT capabilities or look externally to a service provider to take on the work. Many choose the second option because it is much faster and more cost effective than building an internal function. Elimination of infrastructure management responsibilities combined with a lower price would seem to deliver significant value.

So where’s the downside?

A typical managed services deal comes with a 3-5 year contract, often accompanied by an early termination fee. The end result: customer lock-in. If the service is not up to snuff, it is difficult to move to another provider.

This is great for the provider, but not so great for the customer. To make matters even less customer-centric, these deals tend to be “all or none” affairs. The service provider wants to add management fees to everything versus just those pieces that the customer wants managed. In addition to that, provisioning time can be horrendous. A managed environment typically takes anywhere from 10-15 business days before the customer can access the environment. That’s a painful length of time when you compare it with the five minutes it takes to provision a SoftLayer cloud instance and the 2-4 hours it takes to get a dedicated box online and ready for you.

Understanding the competitive landscape, we decided to take a different approach with our Managed Hosting: The innovative approach.

Instead of a 10-15 day provisioning window, we’ll have your managed environment up and running within one (1) business day of ordering.

From a contract perspective, we are confident enough in our service to offer a month-to-month terms. If you don’t like the service or if we can’t deliver, you should be free to find a provider that meets your needs — no penalties incurred. Isn’t it time to expect a provider to earn your business each month? This arrangement also makes managed hosting feasible for short-term needs and applications.

Additionally, SoftLayer Managed Hosting is not “all or none.” We’ll manage only the pieces of the solution that you want managed.

And to top everything off, it just so happens that we can deliver these solutions at a price point lower than anyone else in the market because of the platform’s flexibility.

In this case, innovation brings customers the greatest service value AND the best price!

CBNO

-@nday91

P.S. Neovise prepared a detailed report on our managed hosting offering: A New Breed of Managed Hosting for the Cloud Computing Age. If you like white papers (and who doesn’t?), it’ll be right up your alley.

Social unrest can affect our ability to serve our customers. In Egypt, the government recently cut off nearly all access to the Internet, so customers trying to access our servers from Egyptian IP space have been largely unsuccessful. How unsuccessful?

I gathered all the netblocks assigned to Egypt (currently around 5.8 million unique IPv4 IP addresses), and I queried our customer portal access logs and API for records of those IPs. We saw a massive drop on 1/28/2011. This coincides with reports on most major news networks that Egypt’s Internet access had been crippled. Prior to the January 28, the traffic was fairly typical.

Then this happened:

Between January 28 and February 2, about 0.2% of the traffic we normally see from Egypt reached our network. That means 99.8% of traffic was stifled by the network shutdowns.

As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the Egyptian government restored Internet service, and our logs clearly corroborate that report.

-Jason