IOPS — Input/Output Operations Per Second — measure computer storage in terms of the number of read and write operations it can perform in a second. IOPS are a primary concern for database environments where content is being written and queried constantly, and when we take those database environments to the extreme (big data), the importance of IOPS can’t be overstated: If you aren’t able perform database reads and writes quickly in a big data environment, it doesn’t matter how many gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes you have in your database … You won’t be able to efficiently access, add to or modify your data set.

As we worked with 10gen to create, test and tweak SoftLayer’s MongoDB engineered servers, our primary focus centered on performance. Since the performance of massively scalable databases is dictated by the read and write operations to that database’s data set, we invested significant resources into maximizing the IOPS for each engineered server … And that involved a lot more than just swapping hard drives out of servers until we found a configuration that worked best. Yes, “Disk I/O” — the amount of input/output operations a given disk can perform — plays a significant role in big data IOPS, but many other factors limit big data performance. How is performance impacted by network-attached storage? At what point will a given CPU become a bottleneck? How much RAM should included in a base configuration to accommodate the load we expect our users to put on each tier of server? Are there operating system changes that can optimize the performance of a platform like MongoDB?

The resulting engineered servers are a testament to the blood, sweat and tears that were shed in the name of creating a reliable, high-performance big data environment. And I can prove it.

Most shared virtual instances — the scalable infrastructure many users employ for big data — use network-attached storage for their platform’s storage. When data has to be queried over a network connection (rather than from a local disk), you introduce latency and more “moving parts” that have to work together. Disk I/O might be amazing on the enterprise SAN where your data lives, but because that data is not stored on-server with your processor or memory resources, performance can sporadically go from “Amazing” to “I Hate My Life” depending on network traffic. When I’ve tested the IOPS for network-attached storage from a large competitor’s virtual instances, I saw an average of around 400 IOPS per mount. It’s difficult to say whether that’s “not good enough” because every application will have different needs in terms of concurrent reads and writes, but it certainly could be better. We performed some internal testing of the IOPS for the hard drive configurations in our Medium and Large MongoDB engineered servers to give you an apples-to-apples comparison.

Before we get into the tests, here are the specs for the servers we’re using:

The numbers shown in the table below reflect the average number of IOPS we recorded with a 100% random read/write workload on each of these engineered servers. To measure these IOPS, we used a tool called fio with an 8k block size and iodepth at 128. Remembering that the virtual instance using network-attached storage was able to get 400 IOPS per mount, let’s look at how our “base” configurations perform:

Clearly, the 400 IOPS per mount results you’d see in SAN-based storage can’t hold a candle to the performance of a physical disk, regardless of whether it’s SAS or SSD. As you’d expect, the “Journal” reads and writes have roughly the same IOPS between all of the configurations because all four configurations use 2 x 64GB SSD drives in RAID1. In both configurations, SSD drives provide better Data mount read/write performance than the 15K SAS drives, and the results suggest that having more physical drives in a Data mount will provide higher average IOPS. To put that observation to the test, I maxed out the number of hard drives in both configurations (10 in the 2U MD server and 34 in the 4U LG server) and recorded the results:

It should come as no surprise that by adding more drives into the configuration, we get better IOPS, but you might be wondering why the results aren’t “betterer” when it comes to the IOPS in the SSD drive configurations. While the IOPS numbers improve going from four to ten drives in the medium engineered server and six to thirty-four drives in the large engineered server, they don’t increase as significantly as the IOPS differences in the SAS drives. This is what I meant when I explained that several factors contribute to and potentially limit IOPS performance. In this case, the limiting factor throttling the (ridiculously high) IOPS is the RAID card we are using in the servers. We’ve been working with our RAID card vendor to test a new card that will open a little more headroom for SSD IOPS, but that replacement card doesn’t provide the consistency and reliability we need for these servers (which is just as important as speed).

There are probably a dozen other observations I could point out about how each result compares with the others (and why), but I’ll stop here and open the floor for you. Do you notice anything interesting in the results? Does anything surprise you? What kind of IOPS performance have you seen from your server/cloud instance when running a tool like fio?

-Kelly

To really get a sense the geographic distance between Dallas and Singapore, find a globe and put one index finger on Dallas and put your other index finger on Singapore. To travel from one location to the other, you fly to the other side of the planet. Given the space considerations, our network map uses a scaled-down representative topology to show our points of presence in a single view, and you get a sense of how much artistic license was used when you actually make the trip to Singapore.

The longest currently scheduled commercial flight on the planet takes you from Singapore to Newark in a cool 19 hours, but I choose to maintain my sanity rather than set world records for amount of time spent in a metal tube. I usually hop from Dallas to Tokyo (a mere 14 hours away) where I spend a few days, and I get on another plane down to Singapore.

The break between the two legs of the trip serves a few different purposes … I get a much needed escape from the confines of an airplane, I’m able to spend time in an amazing city (where I lived 15 years ago), and I can use the opportunity to explore the market for SoftLayer. Proximity and headcount dictated that we spend most of our direct marketing and sales time focusing on the opportunities radiating from Singapore, so we haven’t been able to spend as much time as we’d like in Japan. Fortunately, we’ve been able organically grow our efforts in the country through community-based partnerships and sponsorships, and we owe a great deal of our success to our partners in the region and our new-found friends. I’ve observed from our experience in Japan that the culture breeds two contrasting business realities that create challenges and opportunities for companies like SoftLayer: Japan is insular and Japan is global.

When I say that Japan is insular, I mean that IT purchases are generally made in the realm of either Japanese firms or foreign firms that have spent decades building reputation in market. Becoming a trusted part of that market is a time-consuming (and expensive) endeavor, and it’s easy for a business to be dissuaded as an outsider. The contrasting reality that Japanese businesses also have a huge need for global reach is where SoftLayer can make an immediate impact.

Consider the Japanese electronics and the automobile industries. Both were built internally before making the leap to other geographies, and over the course of decades, they have established successful brands worldwide. Japanese gaming companies, social media companies and vibrant start-up communities follow a similar trend … only faster. The capital investment required to go global is negligible compared to their forebears because they don’t need to build factories or put elaborate logistics operations in place anymore. Today, a Japanese company with a SaaS solution, a game or a social media experience can successfully share it with the world in a matter minutes or hours at minimal cost, and that’s where SoftLayer is able to immediately serve the Japanese market.

The process of building the SoftLayer brand in Asia has been accelerated by the market’s needs, and we don’t take that for granted. We plan to continue investing in local communities and working with our partners to become a trusted and respected resource in the market, and we are grateful for the opportunities those relationships have opened for us … Or as Styx would say, “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.”

-@quigleymar

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

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

Interns working on brand new rows.

DAL05 SBTs prepping new racks.

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

Jon (SBT) working through a server build.

Working on a server in the data center.

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

DAL05 SBTs changing server components.

Cory on a DC walkthrough.

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

Adam teaching troubleshooting techniques.

Chad and Richard working tickets.

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

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

DAL05 Overnight Server Build Technician Team:

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

-Joshua

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When opportunity knocks, let it in.

-Hilary

To say that I had to “hit the ground running” when I started at SoftLayer would be an understatement. The day after I got the job, I was on a plane to SoftLayer’s Dallas headquarters to meet the team behind the company. To be honest, it was a pretty daunting task, but I was energized at the opportunity to learn about how SoftLayer became largest privately owned hosting company in the world from the people who started it. When I look back at the interview Kevin recorded with me, I’m surprised that I didn’t look like a deer in the headlights. At the time, AMS01 was still in the build-out phase, so my tours and meetings in DAL05 were both informative and awe-inspiring.

When I returned to Europe, I was energized to start playing my role in the company’s new pursuit of its global goals.

It didn’t take long before I started seeing the same awe-inspiring environment take place in our Amsterdam facility … So much so that I’m convinced that at least a few of the “Go Live Crew” members were superhuman. As it turns out, when you build identical data center pods in every location around the world, you optimize the process and figure out the best ways to efficiently use your time.

By the time the Go Live Crew started packing following the successful (and on-time) launch of AMS01, I started feeling the pressure. The first rows of server racks were already being filled by customers, but the massive data center space seemed impossibly large when I started thinking of how quickly we could fill it. Most of my contacts in Europe were not familiar with the SoftLayer name, and because my assigned region was Europe Middle East and Africa — a HUGE diverse region with many languages, cultures and currencies — I knew I had my work cut out for me.

I thought, “LET’S DO THIS!”

EMEA is home to some of the biggest hosting markets in the world, so my first-week whirlwind tour of Dallas actually set the stage quite nicely for what I’d be doing in the following months: Racking up air miles, jumping onto trains, attending countless trade shows, meeting with press, reaching out to developer communities and corresponding with my fellow SLayers in the US and Asia … All while managing the day-to-day operations of the Amsterdam office. As I look back at that list, I’m amazed how the team came together to make sure everything got done.

We have come a long way.

As I started writing this blog, BusinessReview Europe published a fantastic piece on SoftLayer in their July 2012 magazine (starting on page 172) that seems to succinctly summarize how we’ve gotten where we are today: “Innovation Never Sleeps.”

Our first pod is almost full of servers humming and flashing. When we go to tradeshows and conferences throughout Europe, people not only know SoftLayer, many of them are customers with servers in AMS01. That’s the kind of change we love.

The best part of my job right now is that our phenomenal success in the past nine months is just a glimmer of what the future holds. Come to think of it, we’re going to need some more people.

-@jpwisler

But what if we wanted to show what automation actually looks like?

It seems like a silly question to ask. If our automated platform is powered by software built by the SoftLayer development team, there’s no easy way to show what that automation looks like … At least not directly. While the bits and bytes aren’t easily visible, the operational results of automation are exceptionally photogenic. Let’s take a look at a few examples of what automation enables to get an indirect view of what it actually looks like.

Example: A New Server Order

A customer orders a dedicated server. That customer wants a specific hardware configuration with a specific suite of software in a specific data center, and it needs to be delivered within four hours. What does that usually look like from an operations perspective?

If you want to watch those blinking lights for two or three hours, you’ll have effectively watched a new server get provisioned at SoftLayer. When an order comes in, the automated provisioning system will find a server matching the order’s hardware requirements in the requested data center facility, and the software will be installed before it is handed over to the the customer.

Example: Server Reboot or Operating System Reload

A customer needs to reboot a server or install a new operating system. Whether they want a soft reboot, a hard reboot with a full power cycle or a blank operating system install, the scene in the data center will look eerily familiar:

Gone are the days of server build technicians wheeling a terminal over to every server that needs work done. From thousands of miles away, a customer can remotely “unplug” his or her server via the rack’s power strip, initiate a soft reboot or reinstall an operating system. But what if they want even more accessibility?

Example: What’s on the Screen?

When remotely rebooting or power cycling a server isn’t enough, a customer might want someone in the data center to wheel over to their server in the rack to look at any of the messages that can only be read with a monitor attached. This would generally happen behind the server, but for the sake of this example, we’ll just watch the data center technician pass in front of the servers to get to the back:

Yeah, you probably could have seen that one coming.

Because KVM over IP is included on every server, physical carts carrying “keyboard, video and mouse” are few and far between. By automating customers’ access to their server and providing as much virtual access as we possibly can, we’re able to “get out of the way” of our technical users and only step in to help when that help is needed.

I could go on and on with examples of cloud computing upgrades and downgrades, provisioning a firewall or adding a load balancers, but I’ll practice a little restraint. If you want the full effect, you can scroll up and watch the blinking lights a little while longer.

Automation looks like what you don’t see. No humanoid robots or needlessly complex machines (that I know of) … Just a data center humming along with some beautiful flashing server lights.

-Duke

P.S. If you want to be able to remotely bask in the glow of some blinking server lights, bookmark the larger-sized SoftLayer Rack animated gif … You could even title the bookmark, “Check on the Servers.”

When we launch a new data center, there’s usually a lot of fanfare. When AMS01 and SNG01 came online, we talked about the thousands of servers that are online and ready. We meet huge demand for servers on a daily basis, and that presents us with a challenge: What happens when the inventory of available servers starts dwindling?

Truck Day.

Truck Day not limited to a single day of the year (or even a single day in a given month) … It’s what we call any date our operations team sets for delivery and installation of new hardware. We communicate to all of our teams about the next Truck Day in each location so SLayers from every department can join the operations team in unboxing and preparing servers/racks for installation. The operations team gets more hands to speed up the unloading process, and every employee has an opportunity to get first-hand experience in how our data centers operate.

If you want a refresher course about what happens on a Truck Day, you can reference Sam Fleitman’s “Truck Day Operations” blog, and if you want a peek into what it looks like, you can watch Truck Day at SR02.DAL05. I don’t mean to make this post all about Truck Day, but Truck Day is instrumental in demonstrating the way SoftLayer scales our own infrastructure.

Let’s say we install 1,000 servers to officially launch a new pod. Because each pod has slots for 5,000 servers, we have space/capacity for 3,000-4,000 more servers in the server room, so as soon as more server hardware becomes available, we’ll order it and start preparing for our next Truck Day to supplement the pod’s inventory. You’d be surprised how quickly 1,000 servers can be ordered, and because it’s not very easy to overnight a pallet of servers, we have to take into account lead time and shipping speeds … To accommodate our customers’ growth, we have to stay one step ahead in our own growth.

This morning in a meeting, I saw a pretty phenomenal bullet that got me thinking about this topic:

Truck Day — 4/3 (All Sites): 2,673 Servers

In nine different data center facilities around the world, more than 2,500 servers were delivered, unboxed, racked and brought online. Last week. In one day.

Now I know the operations team wasn’t looking for any kind of recognition … They were just reporting that everything went as planned. Given the fact that an accomplishment like that is “just another day at SoftLayer” for those guys, they definitely deserve recognition for the amazing work they do. We host some of the most popular platforms, games and applications on the Internet, and the DC-Ops team plays a huge role in scaling SoftLayer so our customers can scale themselves.

-@gkdog

The Growing Small Business Example
You run a small Internet business, and you’ve been slowly growing over the years until suddenly you get your product/service mix just right and a wave of customers are beating down the door … or in your case, they’re beating down your website. The excitement of the surge in business is quickly replaced by panic, and you find yourself searching for cheap web servers that can be provisioned quickly. You find one that looks legit and you buy a dozen new dedicated servers and some cloud storage.

You alert your customers of the maintenance window and spend the weekend migrating and your now-valuable site to the new infrastructure. On Monday, you get the new site tuned and ready, and you hit the “go” button. Your customers are back, flocking to the site again, and all is golden. As the site gains more traffic over the next couple of weeks, you start to see some network lag and some interesting issues with hardware. You see a thread or two in the social media world about your new shiny site becoming slow and cumbersome, and you look at the network graphs where you notice there are some capacity issues with your provider.

Frustrated, you do a little “homework,” and you find out that the cheap service provider you chose has a sketchy history and many complaints about the quality of their network. As a result, you go on a new search for a hosting provider with good reviews, and you have to hang another maintenance sign while you do all the hard work behind the scenes once again. Not doing your homework before making the switch in this case probably cost you a good amount of sleep, some valuable business, and the quality of service you wanted to provide your customers.

The Compliance-Focused Example
I still live, eat, and breathe compliance for SoftLayer, and we had an eye-opening experience when sorting through the many compliance differences. As you probably recall (Skinson 1634AR15), I feel like everyone should agree to an all-inclusive compliance model and stick to just that one, but that feeling hasn’t caught on anywhere outside of our office.

In 2011, SoftLayer ramped up some of our compliance efforts and started planning for 2012. With all the differences in how compliance processes for things like FISMA, HIPAA, PCI Level 1 – 4, SSAE16, SOC 1 and SOC2 are measured, it was tough to work on one without affecting another. We were working with a few different vendors, if we flipped “Switch A,” Auditor #1 was happy. When we told Auditor #2 that we flipped “Switch A,” they hated it so much they almost started crying. It started to become the good ol’ “our way is not just the better way, it’s the only way” scenario.

So what did we do? Homework! We spent the last six months looking at all the compliances and mapping them against each other. Surprisingly enough, we started noticing a lot of similarities. From there, we started interviewing auditing and compliance firms and finally found one that was ahead of us in the similarity game and already had a matrix of similarities and best practices that affect most (if not all) of the compliances we wanted to focus on.

Not only did a little homework save us a ton of cash in the long run, it saved the small trees and bushes under the offices of our compliance department from the bodies that would inevitably crash down on them when we all scampered away from the chaos and confusion seemingly inherent in pursuing multiple difference compliances at the same time.

The moral of the story: Kiddos, do your homework. It really is good for something, we promise.

-@Skinman454

If you have not had a chance to visit a SoftLayer data center, you’re missing out. The number one response I get when I begin a tour through any of our facilities is, “I have been through several data centers before, and they’re pretty boring,” or my favorite, “We don’t have to go in, they all look the same.” Then they get a glimpse at the SoftLayer facility through the window in our lobby:

What makes a SoftLayer DC so different and unique?

We deploy data centers in a pod concept. A pod, or server room, is a designed to be an identical installation of balanced power, cooling and redundant best-in-class equipment in under 10,000 square feet. It will support just about 5,000 dedicated servers, and each pod is built to the same specifications as every other pod. We use the same hardware vendor for servers, the majority of our internal network is powered by Cisco gear and edge equipment is now powered by Juniper. Even the paint on the walls matches up from pod to pod, city to city and now country to country. That’s standardization!

That all sounds great, but what does that mean for you? How do all these things benefit you as the end user?

First of all, setting standards improves our efficiency in support and operations. We can pluck any of our technicians in DAL05 and drop him into SJC01, and he’ll feel right at home despite the outside world looking a bit different. No facility quirks, no learning curve. In fact, the Go Live Crews in Singapore and Amsterdam are all experienced SoftLayer technicians from our US facilities, so they help us make sure all of the details are exactly alike.

Beyond the support aspect, having data centers in multiple cities around the world is a benefit within itself: You have the option to host your solution as close or as far away from you as you wish. Taking that a step further, disaster recovery becomes much easier with our unique network-within-a-network topology.

The third biggest benefit customers get from SoftLayer’s data centers is the quality of the server chassis. Because we standardize our SuperMicro chassis in every facility, we’re able to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster when a customer contacts us. Let’s say the mainboard is having a problem, and your Linux server is in kernel panic. Instead of taking time to try and fix the part, I can hot-swap all the drives into an identical chassis and use the portal to automatically move all of your IP addresses and network configurations to a new location in the DC. The server boots right up and is back in service with minimal downtime.

Try to do that with “similar” hardware (not “identical”), and see where that gets you.

The last obvious customer benefit we’ll talk about here is the data center’s internal network performance. Powered by Cisco internal switches and Juniper routers on the edge, we can provide unmatched bandwidth capacity to our data centers as well as low latency links between servers. In one rack on the data center floor, you can see 80Gbps of bandwidth. Our automated, high-speed network allows us to provision a server anywhere in a pod and an additional server anywhere else in the same pod, and they will perform as if they are sitting right next to each other. That means you don’t need to reserve space in the same rack for a server that you think you’ll need in the future, so when your business grows, your infrastructure can grow seamlessly with you.

In the last installment of this little “SoftLayer Features and Benefits” series, we’ll talk about the global network and learn why no one in the industry can match it.

-Harold

Our “Go Live Crew” of 16 dedicated SLayers has been working ’round the clock to make sure everything is up and running on time. The biggest challenge has been building out both data centers simultaneously … With the “Go big or go home” mindset, when we decided to go international, we went all in. Our growing customer base of 23,000 won’t stand still, so we need to deliver, whether it be through innovation or expansion. In less than 60 days we’ve been able to add 31,000+ servers to our network platform, bringing our unique cloud, dedicated and managed hosting solutions closer to our customers around the world.

This accomplishment has been something of a “miracle,” and I really need to shout out to my team members on the GLC. Putting in 16-hour days and working weekends while still finding time to go out on the weekends (Jägermeister and Red Bull have been sampled at many a fine pub) has made us a pretty close-knit family. The old “work hard, play hard” saying is an understatement when it comes to the SoftLayer team.

If we’re ever dragging a bit in the morning, we can always rely on Duck Sauce to get our pulses racing again by the time we get to the data center. With such a full work schedule, we become creatures of habit, and “Barbara Streisand” is only one example of a staple for the crew. Our daily consistency has even carried over into meal time: My favorite luncheon spot in Amsterdam even named a sandwich after me – Da Bobby G Meat Sandwich. Apparently the combination of meatballs, salami, ham and (a smothering of) ketchup on a bun is not a common order at this establishment, so my innovation needed to be recognized. Nutritional considerations aside, this is one fine sandwich:

I’ve been on the road for a while now, and these are just a few memories I’m taking with me. Jumping around between three continents has definitely had its challenges, but with a great team of focused SLayers, we’ve been getting the job done. I’m proud to have had a hand in making our international aspirations a reality, and I know that even though this has already been an unbelievable adventure, we’re just getting started.

-Robert