The location and relative size of Europe and Asia on that map may not make them viable resources when planning travel (Seattle actually isn’t geographically closer to Tokyo than it is to San Jose), but they illustrate the connections we’ll make to extend our network advantages to Singapore and Amsterdam.

Since I’m currently on-site in Singapore, I can give you an inside look at our expansion into Asia. The data center is coming along very nicely, but before I share any of the activity from that construction process, I wanted to share a little about a stopover I had on my trip from Dallas to Singapore: Tokyo!

Last week, we began the process of installing and lighting our first Asian point of presence in Tokyo, Japan, and after a few long days of work, it’s all racked and stacked. If you’re familiar with SoftLayer, you’re probably aware that we build our data centers in a pod concept for a number of reasons, and our network points of presence are no different … One funny aspect of being so familiar with the infrastructure in all of our other locations is that when we walk out the door of the data center facility, we get inundated with culture shock all over again.

SoftLayer VP of Network Operations and Engineering Will Charnock just finished the process of building the network PoP in Hong Kong, and you might see a few (similar looking) pictures from Tokyo and Hong Kong in the near future when we’re ready to open those new PoPs to customer traffic. And don’t worry … I’ll be sure to sneak a few shots of the Singapore DC progress for you too.

Sayonara!

-@toddmitchell

The dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 – the force that gives it its unique character – is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is what I call the flat-world platform.

Columbus discovered the world wasn’t flat, we learned how to traverse that round world, and we keep making that world more and more accessible. He found out that the world was a lot bigger than everyone thought, and since his discovery, the smartest people on the planet have worked to make that huge world smaller and smaller.

The most traditional measure of globalization is how far “out” political, economical and technological changes extend. Look at the ARPANET network infrastructure in 1971 and a map of the Internet as it is today.

With every step Columbus took away from the Old World, he was one step closer to the New World. If you look at the growth of the Internet through that lens, you see that every additional node and connection added to the Internet brings connectivity closer to end-users who haven’t had it before. Those users gain access to the rest of the Internet, and the rest of the Internet gains access to the information and innovation those users will provide.

Globalization in Hosting

As technology and high speed connectivity become more available to users around the world, the hosting industry has new markets to reach and serve. As Lance explained in a keynote session, “50% of the people in the world are not on the Internet today. They will be on the Internet in the next 5-10 years.”

Understanding this global shift, SoftLayer can choose from a few different courses of action. Today, 40+% of our customers reside outside the United States of America, and we reach those customers via 2,000+ Gbps of network connectivity from transit and peering relationships with other networks around the world, and we’ve been successful. If the Internet is flattening the world, a USA-centric infrastructure may be limiting, though.

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and look at a map of the United States with a few important overlays:

The three orange circles show the rough equivalents of the areas around our data centers in Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C., that have less than 40 milliseconds of latency directly to that facility. The blue circle on the left shows the same 40ms ring around our new San Jose facility (in blue to help avoid a little confusion). If a customer can access their host’s data center directly with less than 40ms of latency, that customer will be pretty happy with their experience.

When you consider that each of the stars on the map represents a point of presence (PoP) on the SoftLayer private network, you can draw similar circles around those locations to represent the area within 40ms of the first on-ramp to our private network. While Winnipeg, Manitoba, isn’t in one of our data center’s 40ms rings, a user there would be covered by the Chicago PoP’s coverage, and once the user is on the SoftLayer network, he or she has a direct, dedicated path to all of our data centers, and we’re able to provide a stellar network experience.

If in the next 5-10 years, the half of the world that isn’t on the Internet joins the Internet, we can’t rely solely on our peering and transit providers to get those users to the SoftLayer network, so we will need to bring the SoftLayer network closer to them:

This map gives you an idea of what the first steps of SoftLayer’s international expansion will look like. As you’ve probably heard, we will have a data center location in Singapore and in Amsterdam by the end of the year, and those locations will be instrumental in helping us build our global network.

Each of the points of presence we add in Asia and Europe effectively wrap our 40ms ring around millions of users that may have previously relied on several hops on several providers to get to the SoftLayer network, and as a result, we’re able to power a faster and more consistent network experience for those users. As SoftLayer grows, our goal is to maintain the quality of service our customers expect while we extend the availability of that service quality to users around the globe.

If you’re not within 40ms of our network yet, don’t worry … We’re globalizing, and we’ll be in your neighborhood soon.

-@gkdog

As if our cutting-edge management portal and API weren’t enough, SoftLayer offers complimentary VPN access to the private network. This often-underestimated feature allows you to integrate your SoftLayer private network into your personal or corporate LAN, making it possible to access your servers with the same security and flexibility that a local network can offer.

Let’s look at a few of the many ways you can take advantage of your VPN connection:

1. Unmetered Bandwidth

Unlike the public network that connects your servers to the outside world, the traffic on your private network is unlimited. This allows you to transfer as much data as you wish from one server to another, as well as between your servers and SoftLayer’s backup and network storage devices – all for free.

When you use the VPN service to tap into the private network from your home or office, you can download and upload as much data as you want without having to worry about incurring additional charges.

2. Secure Data Transfer

Because your VPN connection is encrypted, all traffic between you and your private network is automatically secure — even when transferring data over unencrypted protocols like FTP.

3. Protect Sensitive Services

Even with strong passwords, leaving your databases and remote access services exposed to the outside world is asking for trouble. With SoftLayer, you don’t have to take these risks. Simply configure sensitive services to only listen for connections from your private network, and use your secure VPN to access them.

If you run Linux or BSD, securing your SSH daemon is as easy as adding the line ListenAddress a.b.c.d to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file (replace a.b.c.d with the IP address assigned to your private network interface)

4. Lock Down Your Server in Case of Emergency

In the unfortunate event of a security breach or major software bug, SoftLayer allows you to virtually “pull the plug” on your server, effectively cutting off all communication with the outside world.

The difference with the competition? Because you have a private network, you can still access your server over the VPN to work on the problem – all with the peace of mind that your server is completely off-limits until you’re ready to bring it back online.

5. Remote Management

SoftLayer’s dedicated servers sport a neat IP management interface (IPMI) which takes remote management to a whole new level. From reboots to power supply control to serial console and keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) access, you can do anything yourself.

Using tools like SuperMicro’s IPMIView, you can connect to your server’s management interface over the VPN to perform a multitude of low-level management tasks, even when your server is otherwise unreachable. Has your server shut itself off? You can power it back on. Frozen system? Reboot from anywhere in the world. Major crash? Feeling adventurous? Mount a CD-ROM image and use the KVM interface to install a new operating system yourself.

This list is just the beginning. Once you’ve gotten a taste of the infinite possibilities that come with having out-of-band access to your hosted environment, you’ll never want to go back.

Now, go have some fun!

-Nick

You might wonder what a person does with 10 computers and how in the world you handle that in a home environment. Well here is a basic run through our world o computers. My wife being the average joe, has a desktop and a laptop. I on the other hand cannot get by with just 1 desktop, nope I need 3. If my desk didn’t give off a healthy hum and a slight vibration I just wouldn’t be happy. So my desktops are broken down in to a Windows Vista box, generally used for gamming and 2 Linux boxes running Slackware and Gentoo respectively. You might wonder why I need 3, and my response would probably be something like “Because I can”. I do however make full use of these different desktops on a fairly regular basis so I guess I can still justify them. Of course you really could consider my laptop to be yet another desktop, but then again, it is rarely used at home.

So as you have probably noticed, that’s only 6 of the 10. Now, 2 of the computers I have are media centers connected to the TV’s in the living room and the master bedroom. If you haven’t had a media center, you just don’t know what you’re missing. This brings us to the last 2 pieces of this network. The last 2 are rather old boxes that sit in the corner of a closet being as unobtrusive as possible; however they are the backbone of my home network, the fileservers. What good would 2 media centers be if I needed to have a duplicate of all files on each one of them? In the world of computers, the 2 fileservers would be considered dinosaurs, but for what they do, they are perfect.

Now that you have all these computers, they need to be connected somehow. This entire network is connecting to 2 separate gigabit networks. Why 2 you might add? Well I took a page from the SoftLayer book on that one. I saw no reason why the fileservers or the media centers needed internet access, so rather than deal with firewalls and the like, it was easier to put in a second network linking all the computers to each other while only the desktop computers were able to connect to the internet.

Is all of this overkill? Probably, but it sure gives me something to do. Now my current project might actually cut down that number a bit, then again, what fun is that? The current project is to get a 2008 server running with Hyper-V and a domain controller up and running. I figure since I have all these computers, I should be able to log into them all without having to create a separate user account on each. This project has been an experience for sure, but that’s for another blog.

-Mathew

I always knew the monies on the web were staggering, but I was caught off guard the other day when I came across an article in Business 2.0, “The Man Who Owns the Internet“. The article is about Kevin Ham, who has built a $300 Million Dollar portfolio of domain names. $100,000 for Greeting.com, and $31,000 for Christianrock.com and so on. He’s a domain name mogul.

In a technology world, this seems to be the “day-trading” of the internet. The other portion of this article that struck me is the monetization of the typographical errors in domains, referred to as “Typo Squatting”. We have all accidentally fat-fingered a key here or there and after closing the 85 pop-ups, the monies are moving like a slot machine with triple 7’s across the board. In an article referring to the monetization of Typo Squatting, companies have built multi-million dollar producing firms on capitalizing on a misspelling here, a lack of dash there, etc. Just for reference, it seems that www.softlater.com is already taken, which means my dream of typo squatting my way to retirement has taken a drastic turn.

With the tools we have put in place through the API and the private network we have really streamlined the enablement of the monetization of the internet, which when we talk to our customers it’s at the forefront of both of our minds. The successes of our customers ensure our success, so putting these tools in place are essential. Not to give away the secrets of others, but I have peeked into the private back-end network and seen things like credit card processing gateways, server to server data transfers, licensing gateways and numerous other activities that are surely streamlining the money making processes for our customers.

So I am not sure that when the term “Digital Super Highway” was coined that we ever thought there would be toll-booths along the way, but its clear that these are here to stay.

As a side note, if anyone is interested in sharing their monetization stories, feel free to drop me a line at bizdev@softlayer.com

-Sean