Demo Day wasn’t the end of the fun, though. After the post-pitch celebrations (and a much-needed night of sleep), the teams had one more item on their agenda for the week: A visit to SoftLayer.

On Thursday, the teams piled into a bus and made their way from San Antonio to Dallas where we could continue the celebration of their successful completion of the program … And so many of the teams could see the actual hardware powering their businesses. After a nice little soiree on Thursday evening at the House of Blues in Dallas, we put the teams up in a hotel near our Alpha headquarters promised them an informative, interesting and fun Friday.

After a few hours of sleep, the teams were recharged on Friday morning and ready to experience some SoftLayer goodness so…

They loaded up the bus and took a 10-minute ride to our corporate headquarters.

Given our security and compliance processes, each visitor checked in at our front desk, and they were divided into smaller groups to take a quick data center tour.

I could tell that going on a data center tour wasn’t the most exciting prospect for a few of the visitors, but I asked them to forget everything they thought they knew about data centers … This is SoftLayer. Yes, that’s pretty bold, but when each team walked out of SR01.DAL05, I could see in their eyes that they agreed.

The tour started innocently enough at a window looking into Server Room 01 (the first data center pod we built in DAL05). In the picture above, Joshua Daley, our DAL05 site manager, is explaining how all of SoftLayer’s facilities are built identically to enable us to better manage the customer experience and our operational practices in any facility around the world. After a few notes about security and restrictions on what can/can’t be done in the server room the group was led through the first set of secured doors between the facility’s lobby and the data center floor.

From the next hallway, the tour group observed the generators and air conditioning units keeping DAL05 online 24×7. Josh explained the ways we safeguard the facility with n+1 redundancy and regular maintenance and load testing, and the group was led through two more stages of secured doors … the first with badge access, the second requiring fingerprint authentication. When they made it through, they were officially in SR01.DAL05.

Josh explained how our data center CRAC units work, how each server row is powered and how we measure and optimize the server room environment. While that aspect of the data center could seem like “blocking and tackling,” he talked about our continued quest to improve power efficiency as he shared a few of the innovative approaches we’ve been testing, and it was clear that the tour understood it to be easier than, “Plug in server. Turn on air conditioner.”

The teams got a chance to get up close and personal (No Touching!) with a server rack, and they learned about our unique network-with-a-network topology that features public, private and out-of-band management functionality. Many “oohs” and “ahhhs” were expressed.

The tour wrapped up outside of the data center facility in front of the Alpha HQ’s Network Operations Center. From here, the TechStars could see how our network team observes and responds to any network-related events, and they could ask questions about anything they saw during the tour (without having to shout over the air conditioning hum).

When the final tour concluded, the full group reconvened in one of our conference rooms. They’d seen the result of our hard work, and we wanted them to know where all that hard work started. Because SoftLayer was started in a Dallas living room a few short years ago, we knew our story would be interesting, inspirational and informative, and we wanted to provide as much guidance as possible to help these soon-to-grow businesses prepare for their own success. After a brief Q&A period, a few of the TechStars Cloud participants (and some of their Dallas-based Tech Wildcatters cousins) presented a little about their businesses and how they’ve grown and evolved through the TechStars program, and we got to ask our own questions to help them define their business moving forward.

After the presentations at the office, we knew we couldn’t just load the bus up to send the teams back to San Antonio … We had to bid them farewell SoftLayer style. We scheduled a quick detour to SpeedZone Dallas where a few hours of unlimited eats, drinks, games and go-kart races were waiting for them.

We couldn’t have had a better time with the participating teams, and we’re looking forward to seeing the amazing things they’ll continue doing in the near future. If you want to see even more data center coverage from Friday, be sure to check out “TechStars Cloud Visits SoftLayer” on Flickr!

-@PaulFord