Posts Tagged ‘SoftLayer’

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Daniel Hamilton, CTO of Learntrail. Learntrail is a learning management system for creating, assigning, and tracking e-learning programs. It helps you train your employees and develop a more effective workforce.

The Power of Great People

In 1995, Peter Drucker, one of the founding fathers of modern-day management, shared a profoundly simple idea: “People are our greatest asset.” Today, almost two decades later, that quote is reiterated in one form or another by the top executives at the largest companies in the world. You can have the best product, a stellar marketing plan and the perfect vision, but without a great team of people to execute with those tools, your company isn’t going anywhere.

In an online world now driven by innovation, it’s easy to want to substitute “technology” for “people” as a business’s greatest asset, but I’d argue that Peter Drucker’s quote is as true now as it was in 1995. Think about it in terms of keeping your webiste online. Your server’s hardware — a powerful CPU, ample storage space, tons of RAM and a fast network connection — might dictate how your website runs when everything is going smoothly, but when your traffic spikes over the holidays or an article on your blog goes viral, your ability to respond quickly to keep your website operational will be dictated by the quality of your server admins and support staff.

While good companies focus on improving their products, great companies focus on improving their people. In 2010, Google approached the challenge of improving its people by creating GoogleEDU — a program designed to formalize the process of educating employees in new skills, strategies and perspectives. Beyond building a stronger team of smarter individuals, Google is clearly investing in its employees, and that investment goes a long way to engender loyalty and job satisfaction.

What if your business doesn’t happen to have Google’s resources or a $269 billion market cap? That’s the problem Learntrail set out to solve. Our platform was designed to make it easy for businesses to create stunning, full-featured multimedia courses that can be monitored and tracked in detail with a few clicks.

You can bring your new-hire orientation program online, centralize training documents for new products, or create simple lessons about company-specific procedures through a sleek, easy-to-use portal. You’ll also get real-time reports about your team’s progress, so you’ll know exactly how your training is being used by your employees. To prove how confident we are that Learntrail will meet your needs, we have a risk-free, no credit card required 14-day trial that lets you kick the tires and get a feel for how Learntrail can work for your business.

Your people are your greatest asset.

-Daniel Hamilton, Learntrail

If you want to find the Server Challenge II on an exhibit hall floor, just look for a crowd in one of the aisles and listen for cheers. When SoftLayer partnered with Supermicro to build a retro upgrade for our original Server Challenge, we knew the results would be phenomenal, and we haven’t been disappointed. Other booths are chatting with one or two attendees while we’ve got the attention of 20+ as we explain what the Server Challenge II is all about and how it relates to what we do.

About a dozen Strata Conference attendees asked where the Server Challenge II would show up next, and upon hearing that we’d have it at SXSW next week, one (semi-jokingly) begged us to let him rent the unit so he could practice beforehand. It almost seems like the competition is getting a cult following. And we love it.

Beyond the simple fact that the Server Challenge II affords us to talk about SoftLayer’s differentiators as a cloud infrastructure provider, the competition actually brings flocks of attendees to our booth at the *end* of a show when other booths are already starting to packing up to go home. At Strata, the top four times were set in the last two hours of the show, and the very last attempt (which started right when the lights were flashing to signal the end of the show) was less than five seconds for taking the top spot.

In the end, Jonathan Heyne Galli bested the competition to take home bragging rights and a MacBook Air with a speedy time of 1:04.45. To showcase the winning attempt in a unique way, I grabbed my phone and fired up Vine:

If you have twelve more seconds to watch two other attempts, the Second Place and Third Place attempts were also captured with Vine.

In the midst of all of this competition, I’ve been blown away at the sportsmanship between competitors. I know how cheesy that sounds given the fact that we’re talking about a game with a server rack in an expo hall, but it’s true. Carson, the third place finisher, actually beat Jonathan’s 1:04.45 toward the end of the show, but one of the drive tray arms wasn’t clipped closed when he stopped the timer. We explained that we couldn’t give him the top spot but that we could wipe that score and give him one more chance to replicate the result (with no errors), and he was quick to agree. He wouldn’t want someone else to win with an “incomplete” build if he were in first place, so he didn’t want to win that way.

Here was the final leader board from Strata 2013:

Given the floods of traffic to our booth wherever the Server Challenge II turns up, it’s only a matter of time until someone makes a documentary on the Server Challenge like The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I can see it now … The Server Sultan: Get in Line to Bring Servers Online.

-@khazard

HTML5 and jQuery provide mind-blowing functionality. Projects that would have taken hours of development and hundreds of lines of code a few years ago can now be completed in about the time it’ll take you to read this paragraph. If you wanted to add your own audio player on a web page in the past, what would it have involved? Complicated elements? Flash (*shudders*)? It was so complicated that most developers just linked to the audio file, and the user just downloaded the file to play it locally. With HTML5, an embedded, cross-browser audio player can be added to a page with five lines of code, and if you want to get really fancy, you can easily use jQuery to add some custom controls.

If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you know that I love when I find little code snippets that make life as a web developer easier. My go-to tools in that pursuit are HTML5 and jQuery, so when I came across this audio player, I knew I had to share. There are some great jQuery plugins to play music files on a web page, but they can be major overkill for a simple application if you have to include comprehensive controls and themes. Sometimes you just want something simple without all of that overhead:

Oooh… Ahhh…

That song — Pop Bounce by SoftLayer’s very own Chris Interrante — is written in five simple lines of HTML5 code:

<audio style="width:550px; margin: 0 auto; display:block;" controls>
  <source src="http://cdn.softlayer.com/innerlayer/Interrante-PopBounce.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
  <source src="http://cdn.softlayer.com/innerlayer/Interrante-PopBounce.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
Your browser does not support the audio element.
</audio>

If IE 9+, Chrome 6+, Firefox 3.6+, Safari 5+ and Opera 10+ would all agree on supported file formats for the <audio> tag, the code snippet would be even smaller. I completely geek out over it every time I look at it and remember the days of yore. As you can see, the HTML5 application has some simple default controls: Play, Pause, Scan to Time, etc. As a developers, I couldn’t help but look for a to spice it up a little … What if we want to fire an event when the user plays, pauses, stops or takes any other action with the audio file? jQuery!

Make sure your jQuery include is in the <head> of your page:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Now let’s use jQuery to script separate “Play” and “Pause” links … And let’s have those links fire off an alert when they are pressed:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("#play-button").click(function(){
   $("#audioplayer")[0].play();
   alert('You have played the audio file!');
  })    
 
  $("#pause-button").click(function(){
   $("#audioplayer")[0].pause();
   alert('You have paused the audio file!');
  })    
})

With that script in the <head> as well, the HTML on our page will look like this:

<div class=:"audioplayer">
  <audio id="audioplayer" name="audioplayer" controls loop>
    <source src="http://cdn.softlayer.com/innerlayer/Interrante-PopBounce.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
    <source src="http://cdn.softlayer.com/innerlayer/Interrante-PopBounce.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
  Your browser does not support the audio element.
  </audio>
 
  <a id="play-button" href="#">Play!</a>
  <a id="pause-button" href="#">Pause!</a>
</div>

Want proof that it works that simply? Boom.

You can theme it any way you like; you can add icons instead of the text … The world is your oyster. The bonus is that you’re using one of the lightest media players on the Internet! If you decide to get brave (or just more awesome), you can explore additional features. You’re using jQuery, so your possibilities are nearly limitless. If you want to implement a “Stop” feature (which returns the audio back to the beginning when “Stop” is pressed), you can get creative:

$("#stop-button").click(function(){
    $("#audioplayer")[0].currentTime = 0; // return the audio file back to the beginning
}

If you want to include some volume controls, those can be added in a snap as well:

$("#volumeUp").click(function(){
    $("#audioplayer")[0].volume +=0.1;
}
 
$("#volumeDown").click(function(){
    $("#audioplayer")[0].volume -=0.1;
}

Try it out and let me know what you think. Your homework is to come up with some unique audio player functionality and share it here!

-Cassandra

The very first client I recruited to Catalyst when I joined the CommDev team about a year ago happens to be one of Catalyst’s most interesting customer success stories … and I’m not just saying that because it was the first partner I signed on. Kickback Tickets — an online ticketing platform that utilized crowdfunding — has simplified the process of creating and funding amazing events, and as a result, they’ve made life a lot easier for the startup, developer and networking organizations that fuel Catalsyt.

Anyone who’s organized events knows that it often involves a financial risk because it’s hard to know whether the event will be well-enough attended to cover the costs of putting on the event. With Kickback Tickets, an event is listed an funded ahead of time, and when it reaches its “Tipping Point” goal of tickets ordered, it’s completely funded, the early supporters are charged, and the ticket sales continue.

The process is simple:

Event updates, guest registrations and QR-coded tickets are provided to attendees to make check-in seamless, so the hosts of each event don’t have hassle with those details. Kickback’s revenue comes from a small fee on each ticket for each successfully funded event, and they’ve got a ton of momentum. After signing on with Catalyst in March 2012, Kickback went live with an open beta in November 2012, and they launched their out-of-beta site in February 2013. They’ve successfully funded more than 20 events, and new events are added daily.

When I met the Kickback founders Jonathan Perkins and Julian Balderas, I was attending SF Beta (my first official event as a SLayer). At the time, Jonathan and Julian were a couple of bankers with an innovative idea to help organizations alleviate the financial risk of planning and putting on events by enlisting community support. I told them about my experience as the COO of a small non-profit startup up called Slavery Footprint (also a Catalyst partner), and I guess they could relate to the challenges SoftLayer helped us overcome because they were excited to join.

In their own words, Jonathan and Julian explain that their partnership with Softlayer and the Catalyst program has been extremely valuable:

SoftLayer provides a rock-solid technical foundation and allows us to focus more resources on business development. On the technical side, what Softlayer offers is impressive — super fast speeds and an intricate level of control over the hardware. On the personal side, the mentorship and networking benefits of the program have been very helpful. We’ve always found the Catalyst team to be available to chat about any questions we had, ranging from development to biz dev to fundraising.

As they continue to expand their platform, it’s going to be exciting to watch Kickback become a true force in the events space. Organize your next event with Kickback and make sure it’s a success.

Oh, and if you want to speak to Jonathan and Julian, just reach out to me and I’ll happily make the introduction.

-@JoshuaKrammes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viva Las Vegas! Viva Parallels! Viva SoftLayer!

-Kevin

Think of the many components of our cloud infrastrucutre as analogous to LEGO bricks. If our overarching vision is to help customers “Build the Future,” then our products are “building blocks” that can be purposed and repurposed to create scalable, high-performance architecture. Like LEGO bricks, each of our components is compatible with every other component in our catalog, so our customers are essentially showing off their Master Model Builder skills as they incorporate unique combinations of infrastructure and API functionality into their own product offerings. Cedexis has proven to be one of those SoftLayer “Master Model Builders.”

As you might remember from their Technology Partner Marketplace feature, Cedexis offers a content and application delivery system that helps users balance traffic based on availability, performance and cost. They’ve recently posted a blog about how they integrated the SoftLayer API into their system to detect an unresponsive server (disabled network interface), divert traffic at the DNS routing level and return it as soon as the server became available again (re-enabled the network interface) … all through the automation of their Openmix service:

They’ve taken the building blocks of SoftLayer infrastructure and API connectivity to create a feature-rich platform that improves the uptime and performance for sites and applications using Openmix. Beyond the traffic shaping around unreachable servers, Cedexis also incorporated the ability to move traffic between servers based on the amount of bandwidth you have remaining in a given month or based on the response times it sees between servers in different data centers. You can even make load balancing decisions based on SoftLayer’s server management data with Fusion — one of their newest products.

The tools and access Cedexis uses to power these Openmix features are available to all of our customers via the SoftLayer API, and if you’ve ever wondered how to combine our blocks into your environment in unique, dynamic and useful ways, Cedexis gives a perfect example. In the Product Development group, we love to see these kinds of implementations, so if you’re using SoftLayer in an innovative way, don’t keep it a secret!

-Bryce

Before joining SoftLayer, I was locked in a dark, cold room for two years. Sustained by a diet of sugar and caffeine and basking in the glow of a 27″ iMac, I was tasked with making servers dance to the tune of Ruby. The first few months were the toughest. The hours were long, and we worked through holidays. And I loved it.

If that work environment seems like torture, you probably haven’t been on the front lines of a development team. I was a member of a band of brothers at war with poorly documented vendor APIs, trying to emerge victorious from the Battle of Version 1.0. We operated (and suffered) like a startup in its early stages, so I’ve had firsthand experience with the ups and downs of creating and innovating in technology. Little did I know that those long hours and challenges were actually preparing me to help hundreds of other developers facing similar circumstances … I was training to be a Catalyst SLayer:

You probably know a lot about Catalyst by now, but one of the perks of the program that often gets overshadowed by “free hosting” is the mentorship and feedback the SoftLayer team provides every Catalyst participant. Entrepreneurs bounce ideas off of guys like Paul Ford and George Karidis to benefit from the years of experience and success we’ve experienced, and the more technical folks can enlist our help in figuring out more efficient ways to tie their platforms to their infrastructure.

When I was forging through the startup waters, I was fortunate to have been supported by financially reinforced walls and the skilled engineers of a well-established hosting company in Tokyo. Unfortunately, that kind of support is relatively uncommon. That’s where Catalyst swoops in. SoftLayer’s roots were planted in the founders’ living rooms and garages, so we’re particularly fond of other companies who are bootstrapping, learning from failure and doing whatever it takes to succeed. In my role with Catalyst, I’ve effectively become a resource for hundreds of startups around the world … and that feels good.

Five days before my official start date, I receive a call from Josh telling me that we’d be spending my first official week on the job in Seattle with Surf Incubator and Portland with Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). While the trip did not involve carving waves or stuffing our faces with baked goods (bummer), we did get to hear passionate people explain what keeps them up at night. We got to share a little bit about SoftLayer and how we can help them sleep better (or fuel them with more energy when they’re up at night … depending on which they preferred), and as I headed back to Los Angeles, I knew I made the right choice to become a SLayer. I’m surrounded by energy, creativity, passion, innovation and collaboration on a daily basis. It’s intoxicating.

TL;DR: I love my job.

-@andy_mui

Every startup dreams about entering an unowned, wide-open market … and subsequently dominating it. About a year ago, I met a couple of Aussies — Vincent and Niall — who saw a gaping hole in the world of personal finance and seized the opportunity to meet the unspoken needs of a huge demographic: People who want to be in control of their money but hate the complexity of planning and budgeting. They built Planwise — a forward-looking financial decision-making tool that shows you your future financial goals in the context of each other and your daily financial commitments.

If you look at the way people engage with their finances on a daily basis, you might think that we don’t really care about our money. Unless we’re about to run out of it, we want to do something with it, or it constrains us from doing something we want to do, we don’t spend much time managing our finances. Most of the online tools that dominate the finance space are enterprise-centric solutions that require sign-ups and API calls to categorize your historical spend. Those tools confirm that you spend too much each month on coffee and beer (in case you didn’t already know), but Planwise takes a different approach — one that focuses on the future.

Planwise is a tool that answers potentially complex financial questions quickly and clearly. “If I make one additional principal payment on my mortgage every year, what will my outstanding balance be in five years?” “How would would my long-term savings be affected if I moved to a nicer (and more expensive) apartment?” “How much money should I set aside every month if I want to travel to Europe next summer?” You shouldn’t have to dig up your old accounting textbooks or call a CPA to get a grasp on your financial future:

One of the most significant differentiators for Planwise is that you can use the tool without signing up and without any identifiable information. You just launch Planwise, add relevant numbers, and immediately see the financial impact of scenarios like paying off debt, losing your job, or changing your expenses significantly. If you find Planwise useful and you want to keep your information in the system (so you don’t have to enter it again), you can create an account to save your data by just providing your email address.

Planwise has been a SoftLayer customer since around August of last year, and I’ve gotten to work with them quite a bit via the Catalyst program. They built a remarkable hybrid infrastructure on SoftLayer’s platform where they leverage dedicated hardware, cloud instances and cutting-edge DB deployments to scale their environment up and down as their usage demands. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give them a shout-out for evangelizing Catalyst to bring some other outstanding startups onboard. You’ve met one of those referred companies already (Bright Funds), and you’ll probably hear about a few more soon.

Go make some plans with Planwise.

-@JoshuaKrammes

When I was a kid, my living room often served as a “job site” where I managed a fleet of construction vehicles. Scaled-down versions of cranes, dump trucks, bulldozers and tractor-trailers littered the floor, and I oversaw the construction (and subsequent destruction) of some pretty monumental projects. Fast-forward a few years (or decades), and not much has changed except that the “heavy machinery” has gotten a lot heavier, and I’m a lot less inclined to “destruct.” As SoftLayer’s vice president of facilities, part of my job is to coordinate the early logistics of our data center expansions, and as it turns out, that responsibility often involves overseeing some of the big rigs that my parents tripped over in my youth.

The video below documents the installation of a new Cummins two-megawatt diesel generator for a pod in our DAL05 data center. You see the crane prepare for the work by installing counter-balance weights, and work starts with the team placing a utility transformer on its pad outside our generator yard. A truck pulls up with the generator base in tow, and you watch the base get positioned and lowered into place. The base looks so large because it also serves as the generator’s 4,000 gallon “belly” fuel tank. After the base is installed, the generator is trucked in, and it is delicately picked up, moved, lined up and lowered onto its base. The last step you see is the generator housing being installed over the generator to protect it from the elements. At this point, the actual “installation” is far from over — we need to hook everything up and test it — but those steps don’t involve the nostalgia-inducing heavy machinery you probably came to this post to see:

When we talk about the “megawatt” capacity of a generator, we’re talking about the bandwidth of power available for use when the generator is operating at full capacity. One megawatt is one million watts, so a two-megawatts generator could power 20,000 100-watt light bulbs at the same time. This power can be sustained for as long as the generator has fuel, and we have service level agreements to keep us at the front of the line to get more fuel when we need it. Here are a few other interesting use-cases that could be powered by a two-megawatt generator:

• 1,000 Average Homes During Mild Weather
• 400 Homes During Extreme Weather
• 20 Fast Food Restaurants
• 3 Large Retail Stores
• 2.5 Grocery Stores
• A SoftLayer Data Center Pod Full of Servers (Most Important Example!)

Every SoftLayer facility has an n+1 power architecture. If we need three generators to provide power for three data center pods in one location, we’ll install four. This additional capacity allows us to balance the load on generators when they’re in use, and we can take individual generators offline for maintenance without jeopardizing our ability to support the power load for all of the facility’s data center pods.

Those of you who are in the fondly remember Tonka trucks and CAT crane toys are the true target audience for this post, but even if you weren’t big into construction toys when you were growing up, you’ll probably still appreciate the work we put into safeguarding our facilities from a power perspective. You don’t often see the “outside the data center” work that goes into putting a new SoftLayer data center pod online, so I thought it’d give you a glimpse. Are there an topics from an operations or facilities perspectives that you also want to see?

-Robert

Research from the Aberdeen Group shows the average website is losing 9% of its business because
 the speed of the site frustrates visitors into leaving. 9% of your traffic might be leaving your site because they feel like it’s too slow. That thought is staggering, and any site owner would be foolish not to fix the problem. SPEEDILICIOUS — one of our new Catalyst partners — has an innovative solution that optimizes website performance and helps businesses deliver content to their end users faster.

I recently had the chance to chat with SPEEDILICIOUS founders Seymour Segnit and Chip Krauskopf, and Seymour rephrased that “9%” statistic in a pretty alarming way: “Losing 9% of your business is the equivalent of simply allowing your website to go offline, down, dark, dead, 404 for over a MONTH each year!” There is ample data to back this up from high-profile sites like Amazon, Microsoft and Walmart.com, but intuitively, you know it already … A slow site (even a slightly slow site) is annoying.

The challenge many website owners have when it comes to their loading speeds is that problems might not be noticeable from their own workstations. Thanks to caching and the Internet connections most of us have, when we visit our own sites, we don’t have any trouble accessing our content quickly. Unfortunately, many of our customers don’t share that experience when they visit our sites on mobile, hotel, airports and (worst of all) conference connections. The most common approach to speeding up load times is to throw bigger servers or a CDN (content delivery network) at the problem, but while those improvements make a difference, they only address part of the problem … Even with the most powerful servers in SoftLayer’s fleet, your page can load at a crawl if your code can’t be rendered quickly by a browser.

That makes life as a website developer difficult. The process of optimizing code and tweaking settings to speed up load times can be time-consuming and frustrating. Or as Chip explained to me, “Speeding up your site is essential, it shouldn’t be be slow and complicated. We fix that problem.” Take a look:

The idea that your site performance can be sped up significantly overnight seems a little crazy, but if it works (which it clearly does), wouldn’t it be crazier not to try it? SPEEDILICIOUS offers a $1 trial for you to see the results on your own site, and they regularly host a free webinar called “How to Grow Your Business 5-15% Overnight” which covers the critical techniques for speeding up any website.

As technology continues to improve and behavioral patterns of purchasing migrate away from the mall and onto our computers and smart phones, SPEEDILICIOUS has a tremendous opportunity to capture a ripe market. So they’re clearly a great fit for Catalyst. If you’re interested in learning more or would like to speak to Seymour, Chip or anyone on their team, please let me know and I’ll make the direct introduction any time.

-@JoshuaKrammes