Posts Tagged ‘software’

While a handful of SoftLayer employees made their way to Boston for HostingCon, another ragtag group of SLayers journeyed to Portland to attend OSCON &mdash: the Open Source CONvention. OSCON attracts 2,500+ passionate members of the open source community, so the conference sessions and expo hall are filled with the most creative and innovative people on the Web. That’s where we want to be.

Over the past few years, we’ve built a great reputation at OSCON as not only a great hosting provider, but also as the operator of one of the best booths on the expo hall floor. As usual, the switchballs were crowd pleasers, and we sponsored the show’s Massage Booth, so we had great traffic through our booth all conference. When attendees left our booth, they were considerably more relaxed, they had the coolest swag at the show, and they had a better understanding of where SoftLayer fits in the open source space.

In addition to the conversations on the expo hall floor, we got to share a little expertise in a conference session. Senior Software Architect Harold Hannon presented an engaging educational session about how we implemented elasticsearch, Apache-based code that allows for scalable search for all kinds of documents in near real-time. At the moment, SoftLayer uses elasticsearch internally for hardware and ticketing, and we hope to extend this feature-rich scalable searching to our customers in an upcoming release of the customer portal. Because SoftLayer has built a great reputation for executing scalability well, Harold ended up presenting to a packed house (which you can see in the last few pictures of the slide show above).

SoftLayer’s significant investment in open source platforms like OpenStack Swift Object Storage and CloudStack-based Private Clouds wound up being a big topic of discussion throughout the conference. Harold’s elasticsearch presentation was a great conversation bridge to talk about the incredible search-and-retrieve functionality we implemented in our Object Storage service, and we were able to share and demonstrate how that functionality helps our customers manage large quantities of static data in cloud environments in an automated way.

The open source community has matured significantly over the past few years, and it’s exciting to see that evolution. We aren’t just talking about the incredibly popular open source operating systems like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD and Ubuntu that customers can get on a dedicated or cloud server … We’re talking about game-changing, innovative platforms that are redefining how the Internet works.

We want to thank the OSCON team for another phenomenal show, and if you attended the show but didn’t get a switchball from us, I’m sure you’ll have another chance at OSCON 2013. If you don’t think you can wait that long, come find us at one of our other upcoming events!

-Summer

This is a guest blog from blue dog NETWORK about Hosted Sharepoint. blue dog NETWORK customers are realizing the results that every business wants from their information technology: intelligence, simplicity, and security. They get peace of mind and the agility to add or subtract users or services with just a click 24/7 at a cost savings of 30-50% over current IT services. blue dog NETWORK makes IT an operating expense, and from a financial and business management perspective, the implications are powerful.

EMPOWER your organization with Hosted SharePoint

SharePoint is the next generation of mobility and collaboration. Having access to a calendar or mailbox is one thing, empowering your organization to have all the content, communication, process management and flexibility needed to rapidly respond to business or customer needs is a goldmine … One that is a simple click away.

Managing documents, calendars and inter-office information can be difficult. Documents get lost, version control is virtually non-existent and daily business functions that can be easily managed often get out of control. The capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help your company quickly respond to changing business needs on an organizational rather than user level.

Using SharePoint 2010, your people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions without the requirement of costly technical expertise. SharePoint 2010 helps save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.

At blue dog NETWORK, we’ve found that our least technical clients quickly and with ease adopted Sharepoint as a mainstay for their diverse organizations. It really is the next generation of collaboration that has finally matured enough and is presented in a web interface whose simplicity meets end users’ needs without training and learning curves. The two biggest Sharepoint benefits for them: An incredible productivity experience and the flexibility (and visibility) to respond to business needs.

Delivering the Best Productivity Experience
SharePoint 2010 helps your people be more productive. It offers a familiar Microsoft Office experience so your team can quickly and easily access the business information they need to get their jobs done. With blue dog NETWORK, this is available on any device with Internet connectivity (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphones, etc.) on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix operating systems.

Rapidly Responding to Business Needs
SharePoint 2010 gives you out-of-the-box applications and a platform for customized solutions. You can use the features of SharePoint 2010 just as they are or quickly create secure and easy-to-use solutions for specific business needs. Because all of your information is consolidated in Sharepoint, you also have a one-stop place to track the progress of your projects, and if there are any problems, you’ll see them quickly (so you can respond quickly).

Given the success many of our customers have seen with Sharepoint, I could go on and on about the business benefits of the platform. If you want to learn more, check out the details on our listing in the Tech Partners Marketplace. If you want to see a demo of Sharepoint 2010, visit our blue dog NETWORK Sharepoint feature and click “view demo” toward the bottom of the page on the right-hand side.

As Kevin and I talked about in the video interview above, blue dog NETWORK does a lot more than Hosted Sharepoint … We offer all flavors of hosting for the end users, MSP and ISVs with White Labeling for resale. Given the demand for Sharepoint, we wanted to use this space to share a little of our expertise and experience with that platform.

Woof!

-Dana Viznea, blue dog NETWORK

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the IT industry. It is forever changing the way technology is delivered and consumed. The pay-as-you-go model for everything you need in IT is shattering the old computing paradigms, from software licensing models and hardware refresh cycles to budgeting operating costs. This change is bringing about more control and transparency to users while accelerating the commoditization of IT by making it easily available through a new model.

This new model comes in three major “flavors”: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. We incorporate and enable all three by offering a unified, fully automated platform to enable greater customer control over their IT environments. The key tenants of this emerging model for SoftLayer are innovation, empowerment, automation and integration. Here’s how we deliver against these four key tenants.

Innovation: We want to lead the industry by offering best of breed and proprietary cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions, based on our own intellectual property. Currently, we have more than 252,000 hours invested and 2.6 million lines of code developed around these solutions. Customers can take charge of every aspect of their IT operations (servers, storage, networking & services) through our fully automated platform. Our Customer Portal and fully featured APIs give customer more control by providing direct access to more than 100 back-end systems and activities — every aspect of IT operations can be managed.

Empowerment: We turn IT operations into a predictable fixed cost. Customers can stay focused on achieving their business goals, not managing IT infrastructure. We offer expert planning and support from a certified, 24/7 support staff. Customers can deploy and scale when they want with one-day and on-demand automated provisioning. They can keep it as long (or short) as needed, with monthly contracts. In addition, customers can choose what they want to manage and what they don’t, with the ability to have hybrid IT self-managed and managed environments. This speaks to the flexibility of our platform!

Automation: This is an area that makes SoftLayer stand out from the pack. We automate deployment and management of all services, accelerating provisioning time, streamlining administrative tasks, and making it all on-demand, every day and night. With automation that mitigates the risk for human error, comprehensive security practices and options, and a 24/7 team of certified engineers, we provide greater stability, a 100% Uptime Guarantee, and around the clock support for any issues or service.

Integration: This is the final ingredient to making it ALL work. We seamlessly integrate hardware, software, and networking into a unified service, all conveniently controlled through our easy-to-use Customer Portal and robust APIs. We provide full information, full-time through our Customer Portal and APIs, for every service we provide; there is no data about a system that we keep from our customers, from usage statistics to network performance and beyond. We have complete transparency.

These four key tenets are what set us apart. When SoftLayer started back in 2005, the team’s goal was not to be Go Daddy on steroids. We set our sights on being the de facto platform for mainstream businesses to run all their IT operations. This means the complete gamut of applications and workloads with no compromise of performance, security, reliability and access. We are entering into a new IT era, where “connected everything” is the norm. It reminds me of the old phrase “the network is the computer” from Sun Microsystems’ slogan. We have the foundation in place, which will make for an unforgettable journey. Let us know what you think.

-@gkdog

This is a guest blog from FaxLogic CEO Eric Lenington. The unique FaxLogic service combines the best of analog fax, Internet fax, and fax servers to create a highly reliable, secure and scalable collaborative environment.

Why the (Right) Cloud is the Best Place for Your Documents

Every business produces and consumes documents — this includes both paper and digital, both those created internally and those received from customers and business partners — all needing to be sorted and organized and most needing to be safely stored and easily retrieved (and ultimately, securely disposed of when they are no longer needed). The vast majority of companies find themselves trying to do this today in highly fragmented ways and usually with radically different approaches for paper documents than with digital ones. Often different departments, or even different groups within a department, develop their own way to deal with “their” documents, a way that “works for them.”

Digital documents are usually stored on in-house servers, on “shares” with folder structures that may only make sense to the person that originally built it — not to the person trying to find something in it. And few companies can say that they don’t have reams of paper files stored in file rooms or in “personal” file cabinets. FaxLogic helps our customers solve this problem by seamlessly integrating their paper and digital worlds.

We do this by supporting their existing network of fax machines, scanners and multi-function printers (the “gateways” to the digital world for paper documents) and by incorporating key features of current technologies that we are all familiar with – like email and search engines – into the realm of organizing, archiving, retrieving and sharing documents. FaxLogic is a cloud-based service, running on a cloud-based infrastructure, and it uses “the cloud” to safely and securely store our customer’s documents (whether paper or digital). This was no accident, and that is what I will focus on in this article, trying to “demystify” the cloud a bit, and discuss why it’s the best place for your documents.

Read the rest of FaxLogic’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from 3DCart Co-founder and CEO Gonazlo Gil. 3DCart is a technology partner with a robust eCommerce platform hosting thousands of merchants all over the world … And it’s clear they have an enduring drive for innovation and value.

5 Must-Have Features in a Hosted Ecommerce Provider

In 1997, the concept that would eventually become 3DCart came into existence. I developed 3DCart with the idea of putting every single ecommerce tool and resource at the fingertips of web entrepreneurs so anyone with a computer could start their own online store. Today, we’re still going strong, and we pride ourselves on launching new ecommerce features before the competition has a chance.

The market for shopping carts has exploded over the past decade. If you’re considering the ecommerce business, choosing a shopping cart can get overwhelming. Because not all ecommerce software solutions are created equal, we’ve put together a list of five must-have features for aspiring entrepreneurs to consider when choosing a hosted ecommerce provider.

1. PCI Compliance to Protect Customer Information
You hear about it on the web, on the television, in the magazines: cyber-theft. Recent instances of online fraud (like the hack of Playstation’s network) have caused online shoppers to stiffen up when it comes to sharing financial information. For your sake and the sake of your customers, it’s important to put the minds of shoppers at ease as soon as they discover your brand.

Born from new rules created by the Payment Card Industry, PCI compliance standards are stringent guidelines for ensuring your online store is up to code in terms of security. The last thing you need as an online storeowner is responsibility for losing sensitive personal data to fraudsters. Beyond general culpability, you run the risk of losing trust in your brand, which could sink your business entirely.

The process for reaching PCI compliance is vigorous and expensive. That’s why most ecommerce software providers undergo PCI compliance measures on their own — so online stores can offer security to their customers. It offers a little more peace of mind on both sides of the business relationship and ensures your transactions go through smoothly.

Read the rest of 3DCart’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Tim Falls of SendGrid, a technology partner that provides cloud-based email infrastructure for reliable delivery, scalability, real-time analytics and flexible APIs for customers who want to focus on driving their own growth and profitability.

Understanding the Value of [Email] Infrastructure Services

The Fall of DIY … As We Know It
Today more than ever before, businesses depend on third party services to operate efficiently and achieve their objectives. As a business leader, you have countless web applications and software as service solutions at your fingertips, which collectively address just about any problem or demand imaginable. Examples include cloud-based file storage, cloud and dedicated web hosting, recurring billing applications, online HR management portals, APIs for telephony and geo-data, and managed email infrastructure and delivery services. Startups and established corporations alike can utilize these tools quickly and simply with a credit card and a few clicks on a trackpad.

So, what does this mean, and why is it worth recognizing and appreciating? Well, it means that your life is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago. And if you fail to recognize the opportunities and advantages that these resources offer, your competitors will soon leave you in their proverbial dust … if they haven’t already.

The gist:

• You don’t have to do everything yourself anymore … So don’t!
• Be the best at what you do, and rely on other experts to help with everything outside of your realm.

The Email Puzzle
Let’s face it. Email sucks. Not email in and of itself – obviously, it is an essential part of our lives and is arguably one of the most transformative communication tools in human history. But, from a business standpoint, the implementation and maintenance of an effective and efficient email system is truly a nightmare. If there is one thing that web developers across the world can agree upon, it may be this: Successfully integrating email into a web application just ain’t fun!

Read the rest of SendGrid’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Troy Davis of Papertrail, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner that helps customers detect, resolve and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages.

Receive DB Slow Query Logs in Your Inbox

Want to wake up to important database and syslog messages with your bagel and coffee? Here’s how. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes.

Most of us run a database somewhere on our SoftLayer servers. Whether it’s MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or another relational or NoSQL sibling, a responsive data store is critical to happy users. That’s why databases send slow queries to a log file. It’s much better than no logging at all, but as an engineer, I’d wanted more. I wanted to:

• View all my query logs in one place, without SSHing to each server for tail and grep. My workload shouldn’t scale linearly as I add systems
• Share log visibility with employees who don’t have server access or command-line knowledge (and email links to specific log messages to my developers and DBAs)
• Receive log messages in my inbox – or send them to my team or monitoring service – when I know they need attention
• Examine logs for related HTTP requests, daemon output, API invocations, and other parts of our stack — I can troubleshoot faster with start-to-finish logs on a single screen.

That’s where Papertrail was born. We built Papertrail to make log aggregation and log management effortless and usable. It’s the hosted log management service that we wanted as developers, systems engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

We know the hesitation you might have when approaching this kind of service, so our goal was to enable users to have Papertrail deliver those SQL slow query logs – or any other logs – to your inbox every morning for free:

Read the rest of Papertrail’s Guest Blog! »

A lot of time has been spent talking about the advantages of the cloud. I thought it might be instructive to explore some of the pros and cons from the point of view of a software company.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. It goes without saying that not all software companies (or products for that matter) are the same. There is a significant difference between developing and supporting a complex HR package and a word processor.
2. The cloud will be viewed differently depending where a company is in its life cycle. Consider traditional software companies life Microsoft and SAP versus companies like Salesforce.com or Workday that have started life as SaaS providers.

Pros
Recurring Revenue / Cost Models – A business model based upon monthly recurring revenue has some significant advantages over the traditional license, implementation and maintain model that many vendors use. The predictability of the model makes it easier forecast revenues and costs, thus making enterprise planning easier.

Expanding the Customer Base – A recurring revenue model is also beneficial for a customer because they do not have to worry about significant upfront costs. In effect the cloud helps to expand the customer audience by potentially making a solution affordable across a broader base.

Scalability – The cloud provides that ability to scale up (or down) dependent on customer demand. This means that a vendor only pays for what it uses. Compare this to a model when Company X is dependent on forecasts to drive server / firewall / storage purchases. The end result is often stranded capital. Certainly these dollars are better put to use trying to find new customers and serve existing ones?

Infrastructure – If your cloud provider is good at what they do (like SoftLayer is!); infrastructure inside the DC (servers, memory, storage) and outside the DC (primarily network) will evolve as the market does. Company X will benefit from innovation without paying for it.

Cons
Pre-existing Business Models – Some software companies will simply be cloud-averse. While the cloud may make sense from a development and testing perspective, it may make less sense from a business model perspective. If the company’s revenue model is based on a traditional license, implementation and maintenance model, a shift to the cloud introduces challenges as pricing models and revenue recognition models (i.e. a move to recurring monthly charges) are likely to change. This is not insignificant and if the market isn’t screaming for a change, then change will not come.

Application Customization – A move to the cloud will mean that significant customization on a customer by customer basis makes less sense. It is more cost effective to service multiple customers on a single platform versus multiple customers on individual platforms, particularly if the traditional license, implementation and maintenance model disappears. At the end of the discussion, many customers may need significant customization. Of course this is dependent upon the solution being sold.

A key consideration with the challenges outlined above is that they are mostly at customer touch points. Use of the cloud still makes sense when the consideration is internalized – development and testing environments will still find a useful home in the clouds.

What do you think?

-Sean

Today, SoftLayer released an Advanced Monitoring Solution based on Nimsoft’s Monitoring software suite. In a nutshell the product will give SoftLayer visibility onto a customer’s server at the OS level. In addition to the great product benefit the customers receive, it will add tools to our sales and support staff to troubleshoot, diagnose and systems design.

The core product works through a piece of software that gets installed on a customer server called a robot. The robot in turn allows probes to be run on the server. The different probes collect various data points from the OS and applications. As the probes collect data they pass the information onto some intermediate backend servers, and eventually end up on our brand new HBase data warehouse (HBase is the massively scaled database for large amounts (petabytes) of data). This is the corner piece for the scalability of the offering. So, robot is the main software and the probes are the application watchers that run inside the robot framework.

There are additional features outside of the process mentioned called ‘Offbox Monitors’ or ‘Offbox Probes.’ These are probes that live on servers in the SoftLayer data center. The idea behind these is that we are able to let customers have network services they want to monitor from a remote location. An example would be url_reponse, which monitors if a url is active and passing data (along with some other pieces of data people might be interested in like response time).

What it can monitor? The better question might be what can’t it monitor? The SoftLayer offer comes in three packages – Basic, Advanced and Premium. Basic is a free package that monitors core hardware (CPU, memory, disk) along with simple process and services. Advanced moves into deeper system monitoring, and Premium adds more application monitoring (like databases, web services etc.). This offering is available for hardware, Monthly CCI’s and hourly CCI’s – basically for everything we sell. Customers can order the software from all order forms (external, internal, cci, server etc.) as well as add the service post deployment from the advanced monitoring portal page.

The service offering has two distinctive reporting features that we call graphing and alarms. Graphing allows customers to (yep, you guessed it) graph all the data we collect. For example, we can show a graph of CPU usage over time. Alarms are notifications that services are outside of a predetermined range. For example, you could setup an alarm when CPU usage goes above 90%. Alarms can be tracked from the customer portal, or email alerts (SoftLayer calls this list ‘Alarm Subscribers’) can be setup by the customer.

All the features of the product are accessed via the customer portal, or via SoftLayer’s internal portal. Configuration, graphing, and alarm management can all be done from one management page in the customer portal. In near real-time customers can change configurations directly on their server or cloud computing instance (CCI) for the various data points they want graph and alarm. It’s pretty slick, and it adds to the SoftLayer secret sauce. We have also added a feature that allows the customer to save configurations on a particular server and “redeploy” them on different servers or future servers they may add. This feature makes it easier to scale and customize for a particular customer’s needs.

As time goes on we will continue to add more probes and more features. This is just the beginning – make no mistake it’s pretty damn cool.

-@quigleymar

In any environment where the need for quick transfer and access of information is required, an “IT guy” is a must. Most people have a bit of a preconceived notion as to what a tech should look like. Most think of large glasses, pocket protectors, and a social anxiety that is idiosyncratic to that particular group. Fans of Saturday Night Live will recall Nick Burns, the condescending technician who fixed the computers in his little corner of TV Land.

While popular culture seems to think that the standard IT Guy fits the above criteria, allow me to be the first to dispel that rumor. For living proof, I submit to you, the SoftLayer NOC.

The technicians here are more exceptions to this seemingly universally accepted rule of what an IT Technician should be. While we possess a large wealth of knowledge, our technicians are all but condescending. To those who don’t know, we’re here to teach you. Being a server administrator has it’s challenges, but our technicians can be your eyes and ears in the datacenter, and instead of replying with “was that so hard?!”, we’ll provide as much information and assistance as we can to get you back on your feet. Our technicians are not just the geeky typecasts that one would expect. Our techs come from all walks of life. Some are self taught, some were taught in a university, while others learned their skills in the Military. Our hobbies run the gamut, including the piloting of aircraft, gaming, sports, outdoor activities, and music – Heck, we even have some former rock stars in our ranks.

Just remember, don’t be afraid to ping your IT Guy for information. A lot of us like to share some of the ninja tricks, war stories, and other anecdotes about our times in battle with hardware, software, and everything in between. Not only do we like to share our technical knowledge, but our individual stories, interests, and fun facts as well. Remember: IT guys are people too!