Posts Tagged ‘servers’

At times, the meticulous planning, logistics and execution around the SoftLayer Amsterdam data center launch has felt like a clandestine military operation. Today, the wait is over! We’re finally ready to go “LIVE” with our new state-of-the-art facility, along with network Points of Presence (PoPs) in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt.

Having a European presence not only gives us proximity to customers but a foothold into the entire continent to help drive more innovation and deliver a better end-user experience. Currently more than 50 percent of our business is done outside North America, so our continued expansion into international markets is so vital to long-term growth.

Amsterdam is our “digital gateway” into Europe, extending our capabilities so customers can deploy, scale and manage their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on SoftLayer’s private network. Here’s a quick glimpse into what the new data center offers:

• Capacity for more than 16,000 servers
• Redundant network infrastructure
• Fully-automated platform
• Unique pod design concept

And here’s an actual glimpse into the data center (taken last week as we were putting the final touches on the racks … as you can see by the unbound cables at the backs of the server and the reference labels in the front):

We now have 13 data centers and 16 PoPs worldwide. Each data center functions independently, with distinct and redundant resources, while still being fully integrated into SoftLayer’s existing facilities. The end result for our customers is maximum accessibility, security, and control.

Our goal for Europe is to deliver the BEST cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions on the continent … just like we do in North America and Asia. Ten months of painstaking research, work and preparation are done, and now our customers will get to reap the rewards.

What are you waiting for? Get your first server in Amsterdam! To celebrate the launch of the new facility, we’re offering our Triple Double special on servers provisioned in AMS01 for a limited time: Free double bandwidth, double RAM and double HDD!

Now it’s time to send our clandestine military operation’s “Go Live Crew” to an undisclosed location to start preparing for our next strategic infiltration …

-@quigleymar

Growing up, one of my heroes was Mohammad Ali. While I admired his athletic ability, with my scrappy build I was never going to be a boxer. What I liked the most about Ali was that he said whatever he wanted and backed up his words with action. That is what distinguished Ali from the others.

I’m sure you’ve been to job fairs and read companies’ websites where they talk about how their company encourages teamwork, employee empowerment and innovation … It’s usually right next to a picture of someone skydiving or kite boarding, right? Well I’ve been with SoftLayer for about a month now, and as you saw from my 3 Bars 3 Questions interview, I spent my first two weeks on the job in Dallas.

I can tell you without hesitation (and with no need for a kite boarding picture) that when you walk around the office in Dallas, you can feel a buzz in the hallways … An energy that only comes from from people who are passionate and work well together. When I made the trek back to Amsterdam, I knew the environment and culture our team in Europe would need to foster to earn our three bars.

Last week, we had our first Truck Day in the new Amsterdam data center, and it was a perfect opportunity to show off the SoftLayer spirit and work ethic to our newest AMS01 SLayers with the help of the Go Live Crew:

As soon as two large truckloads of servers were delivered, the team jumped into action. We unpacked, sorted, scanned and racked the servers in record time, and it was actually a lot fun. When I walked into the data center the next day, it felt like Christmas: new toys, flashing lights and Barbara Striesand.

It’s safe to say that SoftLayer is the Mohammed Ali of hosting. We make bold statements and can back up them up!

If you’re interested in joining the SoftLayer team in Amsterdam, we’re hiring for several different positions right now, and we’d love to have you join us. When talking to prospective employees in interviews, I always tell the SoftLayer story with Ali-like pride, and moving forward, Truck Day is going to be a perfect example to share. Where else are you going to find a company culture where everyone in the company (even the CEO) celebrates the company’s continued growth by helping to unpack and sort hardware?

Based on the conversations I’ve had since Truck Day, I can tell if they are right for the team simply by their reaction to that story. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves to help out your teammates and have fun doing it, call me.

-@jpwisler

When we last talked, I broke down the differences between features and benefits. To recap: a feature is something prominent about a person, place or thing, while a benefit is a feature that is useful to you. In that blog, I discussed our customer portal and the automation within, so with this next installment, let’s move into my favorite place: the data center … Our pride and joy!

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

Where has the time gone? We still have confetti in our hair from the party celebrating the Singapore data center going online, and all of a sudden, we’re announcing that SoftLayer servers are available in Amsterdam for presale.

If you saw the epic “SoftLayer is Coming to Town”, you may have noticed a clip of the Go Live Crew (GLC) team members in Amsterdam at around the 1:05 mark:

With pallets of wrapped equipment and a few racks constructed in the background, it’s pretty clear that as of October 1, the data center was a long way from calling itself a SoftLayer Pod. A few short weeks ago, I shared an update on the progress of our first European facility, and now we’re less than two weeks away from the first customer servers being provisioned in Amsterdam!

Mark your calendar: November 7 – The date your first SoftLayer server in Amsterdam will go live.

In addition to customer servers being provisioned when the data center officially opens its doors, our network points of presence throughout Europe will be humming along nicely. That means if you’re a SoftLayer customer in Europe, you should see some fantastic improvements in your network paths and speeds to servers in the United States (and Singapore) since you’ll be able to hop onto our network sooner and ride with SoftLayer across the Atlantic.

Amsterdam Server Special
To coincide with the launch of our Singapore facility, we brought back the Triple Double server special to reward early adopters, and we’re doing the same thing for customers in Amsterdam. Order a server in AMS with promo code TRIPLE, and you can double your RAM, bandwidth and HDD space for FREE.

The guys on the GLC in Amsterdam have worked tirelessly to ensure that everything is perfect (fueled by daily “Da Bobby G” sandwiches), and we’re all ecstatic for customers to start taking advantage of the latest addition to the stellar SoftLayer infrastructure.

What are you waiting for? Shouldn’t you be clicking through to pre-order your Amsterdam server right now?

-@quigleymar

Some of the most innovative developments on the Internet are coming from online game developers looking to push the boundaries of realism and interactivity. Developing an online gaming platform that can support a wide range of applications, including private chat, avatar chats, turn-based multiplayer games, first-person shooters, and MMORPGs, is no small feat.

Our high speed, global network significantly minimizes reliability, access, latency, lag and bandwidth issues that commonly challenge online gaming. Once users begin to experience issues of latency, reliability, they are gone and likely never to return. Our cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions enable game developers to rapidly test, deploy and manage rich interactive media on a secure platform.

Consider the success of one of our partners — Electrotank Inc. They’ve been able to support as many as 6,500 concurrent users on just ONE server in a realistic simulation of a first-person shooter game, and up to 330,000 concurrent users for a turn-based multiplayer game. Talk about server density.

This is just scratching the surface because we’re continuing to build our global footprint to reduce latency for users around the world. This means no awkward pauses, jumping around, but rather a smooth, seamless, interactive online gaming experience. The combined efforts of SoftLayer’s infrastructure and Electrotank’s performant software have produced a high-performance networking platform that delivers a highly scalable, low latency user experience to both gamers and game developers.

You can read more about how Electrotank is leveraging SoftLayer’s unique network platform in today’s press release or in the fantastic white paper they published with details about their load testing methodology and results.

We always like to hear our customers opinions so let us know what you think.

-@nday91

When I was interviewed for a job as Server Build Technician (SBT) in Dallas, I was a little concerned that I was getting in over my head. I let my potential manager know that I had very little experience with Linux but that I was willing to learn. I tried to show that I’d be a quick study, and the interview must have gone well because by the end of the day, I was offered the job. I was really excited to know that SoftLayer was willing to take give me an opportunity to finally start pursuing a career path in technology (which is what I was looking for out of school).

As it turns out, I was the only female SBT in SoftLayer’s Dallas-area data centers, so I felt a good amount of pressure to prove myself and step up my game. Luckily, my training took away a lot of those nerves, and it was also comforting to see that no matter where I was working (data center or office), I was welcomed by my coworkers. It didn’t hurt that I met some really cool people in the process, too. From day one, I realized that I’d been given an amazing opportunity to learn from some really smart folks who know their stuff when it comes to everything related to technology.

I have been here for around six months, and I can’t believe how much tech knowledge I’ve absorbed. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in Linux or a MySQL guru (yet), but if my experience here is any indication, it won’t be too long before I know everything there is to know about every technology living in our data centers. When I run into a problem or a question I don’t have the answer for, I can rely on my coworkers to have the solutions and break them down into terms I can understand if they’re overly complex.

Would I recommend this job to others? Most definitely! This has been one of the best jobs that I’ve ever had. I’ve been able to take what I learned in school and actually apply it to my daily work life while continuing my real-world on-the-job education. If you have a server in DAL02 and need someone to check out the hardware or add some RAM, I might be the one jumping to get your request fulfilled quickly.

I’m proof that SoftLayer invests in its employees, so if you’re interested in an amazing job for a company who values you, I want you to be a coworker! We have positions in all departments available in Dallas, Houston, Singapore, Amsterdam, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, D.C. (and probably more location in the near future), so keep an eye on the SoftLayer Careers page for the perfect opportunity to join our team.

-Rochelle

Over the course of about a month, you were able to follow the build-out progress of SoftLayer’s Singapore data center facility. Todd book-ended his coverage of the process with an early look on September 2 and the official “LIVE” announcement on October 3, and given the fantastic response from customers to those updates, we’re going to keep them going from Amsterdam.

If you follow SoftLayer on Twitter or keep an eye on our Flickr account, the last time you saw the Amsterdam facility, it looked pretty empty. You might assume that with all the attention on Singapore, Amsterdam wasn’t getting much attention, but you’d be wrong … Folks have been working non-stop in Europe as well, and the facility looks beautiful:

It’s pretty obvious with the racks you see pictured that our go-live team has been on the ground and working hard in the new facility. We shipped loads of gear across a different ocean to get it to Amsterdam, but things will probably look pretty familiar.

When Singapore went live on Monday, customers were ecstatic. We’ve already provisioned a few hundred servers in the new facility, and the chorus of users anxious about our European expansion has gotten louder as a result. As you can see, Amsterdam is coming along nicely, so you’ll have a SoftLayer server in Amsterdam before you know it.

SoftLayer’s growth internationally has been fueled by customer demand, so while we’re working on Amsterdam, we’d love to hear where you’d like to see us next. Leave a comment with the country/region you think could best benefit from a local SoftLayer facility … And if you agree with any of the ideas, be sure to post your agreement as well so we get an even clearer picture of customer demand.

More to come!

-@quigleymar

Are you familiar with the “slow clap” phenomenon?

It’s basically a crescendo of applause in a crowd that starts with a single hand clap. A few seconds after that first clap, you hear the second. A slow rhythm takes shape. A few people join in. The rhythm is contagious, and it starts to spread through the crowd. As more people join in, the natural tendency is for the pace to speed up as the volume increases, and within about a minute, a single hand clap becomes a huge roar of applause. In the movie Rudy, one character starts a “slow clap” on the sideline of a football game, and the cheer ends up filling the entire stadium … And that’s the visual that comes to mind when I think about the upcoming “go live” date for our Singapore data center.

Start a slow clap in your mind and think of each successive milestone getting faster and exponentially louder applause:

• In July, George Karidis posted a high-level overview of SoftLayer’s international growth.
• About a month later, I blogged with details about our network expansion into Japan.
• Three days after that post, you got your first glimpse at the Singapore data center build-out process.
• A week later, you saw updated pictures of the data center and office space.
• Last week, racks were installed and wired up by the time a press release hit the wire announcing the launch of our Asia-Pacific operations.
• From that press release, you learned that SoftLayer’s Singapore data center will go live on October 3, 2011.

If you imagined correctly, the applause in your mind should be borderline deafening … And I didn’t even mention the fact that we enabled pre-orders on select servers in Singapore last week with a Triple Double special exclusively for servers in the new SNG01 facility.

AND I haven’t said anything about the progress of our first European data center in Amsterdam. We already have a team of people there working to get that facility ready, and it’s coming together just as quickly. Don’t be surprised to see a few sneak peeks at the build-out process there in the next few weeks.

It’s almost unfathomable that we’re so close to the launch of our first facility outside the United States, and when you consider how quickly Amsterdam will come online after Singapore, you probably think you’re taking crazy pills … Or that we are. I don’t want to take any of the wind out of the sales of our launch day, so I’m just going to share a few more glimpses into the data center.

On Monday, you can light your first server at the end of this Singaporean hallway:

All of the racks are powered:

The server rails are installed:

And we thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and install a few servers:

Now all we need to do is flip the switch … Are you ready?

-@toddmitchell

The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens … Let’s look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance … which doesn’t take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, “Click to Chat” on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. The “It’s better to be safe than sorry” cliche is a cliche for a reason: It’s worth saying often.

-Greg

When you’re walking down the aisles of an expo hall at a technical conference, what do you expect to see? Stacks of collateral? Maybe a few giveaway T-shirts? A fancy switch-ball or two? How about a crowd of people watching as a fellow attendee slams hard drive trays into a server enclosure and frantically plugs in network cables as a digital clock times them?

Cynical attendees might look at the Server Challenge and think of it as a gimmicky way to draw a crowd to our booth, but when you step up to the server enclosure to compete, you’re getting a crash course in SoftLayer’s business (along with an exciting tangible experience).

Before your first attempt, you’ll learn that SoftLayer is a hosting provider and that you’ll be reassembling a miniature version of the larger server racks we have filling data centers around the country (soon to be around the world). You see that one of SoftLayer’s biggest differentiators is our network configuration: A public network, a private network and an out-of-band management network connection to every SoftLayer server for free … And when the clock starts, we can share even more of the SoftLayer story.

Our goal is to let you experience SoftLayer while you’re just hearing about other companies. As it turns out, the experience draws people in:

One of the coolest parts of pulling together that time lapse video from OSCON was seeing the reactions on the faces of the participants when they finished. The challenge sparks a surge of adrenaline, so when competitors stop the clock, they expectantly check to see how they fare against the conference’s Top 10 times.

In the last conference alone, no fewer than five other companies (who don’t even have a connection with the hosting industry) approached us to ask how they could build their own Server Challenge. Needless to say, the Server Challenge is becoming a SoftLayer conference staple … And we’re looking forward to the hottest competition ever at HostingCon 2011 next week!

Between your study of server schematics and your dissection of the winning run’s strategy from the end of the OSCON video, make sure you click through to George’s HostingCon preview so you can learn where to find SoftLayer in San Diego.

-@khazard

P.S. Space is limited for the HostingCon Party, so if you’ll be in town, make sure to let us know so we can give you a promo code for free admission!