When the folks on the Community Development team are not working directly with the companies in the Catalyst, they’re looking for opportunities to help and serve our huge network of business incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces and startup events. As a result, we stay pretty busy. To give you an idea of what a given month looks like for us, Catalyst is supporting seventeen different startup-related events in six different countries over the course of the next thirty days. We’re lucky that we love what we do so much … Otherwise, that schedule might seem pretty daunting.

If you’ve been an avid SoftLayer Blog reader (as you should be), you know that we work closely with organizations like TechStars and 500 Startups, but you haven’t heard much about the other types of partnerships we build in the startup community. We want to provide Catalyst companies with resources outside of hosting that can make their lives easier, and that means we have to find killer partners that focus specifically on the needs and wants of startup companies. To give you an idea of what those partners look like, I’d like to introduce you to a few of them via their video interviews from SoftLayer’s Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW:

As we’ve done with the Startups Speak interviews, we’ll be adding videos from our partners to the YouTube playlist above so that you can meet them and learn more about the value they uniquely provide to the startup community.

I’d love to take more time to explain how we incorporate services from these partners in the Catalyst program, but I think I’m late for a plane to Vancouver … or Chicago … or New York … or San Francisco. In any case, I should probably head to the airport.

-@PaulFord

The Server Challenge II “Hall of Fame” was particularly competitive at Interop 2013. Only 8 seconds separated our first place finisher from tenth place:

Jim Chrapowicz recorded the competition-winning time of 58.40 seconds (after a 5-second penalty for not closing one of the latches), edging out the second place time by a razor-thin margin of less than two tenths of a second. For his Server Challenge II heroics, Jim is being rewarded with the MacBook Air grand prize, and everyone who made the top ten list will be receiving $25 iTunes gift cards. Here’s video of the winning completion:

Take a look at some of the other action from the show floor:

About the Server Challenge II

The Server Challenge II is a race to reassemble a scaled-down version of a SoftLayer server rack. Participants are tasked with repopulating the drive bays of two 2U Supermicro servers and plugging 18 network cables into network switches. The competition provides conference attendees with a fun opportunity to get hands-on with the servers and network gear that fuel SoftLayer’s global cloud infrastructure platform. For more information about the Server Challenge II, check out “Server Challenge II: How SoftLayer Saves the World.”

About SoftLayer

SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible unified platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a global network for secure, low-latency communications. With 100,000 devices under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world with a portfolio of leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, visit softlayer.com.

About Supermicro

Supermicro, the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly solutions available on the market. For more information, visit supermicro.com.

In my last blog about mentorship and meaningfulness, you heard from George Karidis and Paul Ford about the vision to make Catalyst a part of the startup ecosystem, committing to helping participating teams with more than just their hosting needs. While we attended SXSW Interactive, I ran into a few of our phenomenal customers and had the opportunity to sit down with them and talk about their businesses, their connection to SoftLayer and what the future holds:

Over the next few weeks, we’ll add video interviews to that YouTube playlist to show off all of the startups that stopped by the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW 2013. When a new video is published, it’ll be added to the embedded playlist above, and we’ll send some social media shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook.

With SoftLayer’s 7th birthday coming up on May 5, we still feel like a startup, and a lot of that has to do with how closely we work with our customers … Their energy is contagious, and it only encourages us to keep innovating and building our platform for the future. That’s why entrepreneurs like the ones you meet in these videos choose SoftLayer. The fact that we have better technology and provide a more powerful cloud infrastructure winds up being a fringe benefit.

A big “Thanks!” goes out to the folks from Epic Playground, Flowmio, Medved, Urbane, YouNoodle, KeenIO, Cloudability and Preferred Return for taking time out of their busy SXSW schedules to chat with me. We love you guys!

-@JoshuaKrammes

SoftLayer is able to offer the entrepreneurial community so much more than cloud computing instances and powerful servers. As a startup ourselves not so long ago, our team knows all about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur, and now that we’re able to give back to the startup community, we want to share battle stories and lessons learned. Mentorship is one of the most valuable commodities for entrepreneurs and business founders, and SoftLayer’s mentors are in a unique position to provide feedback about everything from infrastructure planning to hiring your first employees to engaging with your board of advisors to negotiating better terms on a round of funding.

The Catalyst team engages in these kinds discussions with our clients every day, and we’ve had some pretty remarkable success. When we better understand a client’s business, we can provide better feedback and insight into the infrastructure that will help that business succeed. In other words, we build meaningful relationships with our Catalyst clients, and as a result, those clients are able to more efficiently leverage the hosting credits we provide them.

The distinction between Catalyst and other startup programs in the hosting industry has never been so apparent than after South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year. I had the opportunity to meet with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts who have been thirsting for a program like Catalyst for years, and when they hear about what we’re doing, they know they’ve found their oasis. I had a chance to sit down with Paul Ford in the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW to talk about the program and some of the insights and feedback we’d gotten at the show:

Paul was quick to point out that being a leader in the startup community has more impact when you provide the best technology and pair that with a team that can deliver for startups what they need: meaningful support.

Later, I had an impromptu coffee with one of the world’s largest, most prestigious Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms — probably THE most respected venture capital firm in the world, actually. As we chatted about the firm’s seed-funding practices, the investment partner told me, “There is no better insurance policy for an infrastructure company than what SoftLayer is doing to ensure success for its startup clients.” And I thought that was a pretty telling insight.

That simple sentence drove home the point that success in a program like Catalyst is not guaranteed by a particular technology, no matter how innovative or industry-leading that technology may be. Success comes from creating value BEYOND that technology, and when I sat down with George Karidis, he shared a few insights how the Catalyst vision came to be along with how the program has evolved to what it is today:

Catalyst is special. The relationships we build with entrepreneurs are meaningful. We’ve made commitments to have the talented brainpower within our own walls to be accessible to the community already. After SXSW, I knew I didn’t have to compare what we were doing from what other programs are doing because that would be like comparing apples and some other fruit that doesn’t do nearly as much for you as apples do.

I was told once on the campaign trail for President Clinton in ’96 that so long as you have a rock-solid strategy, you cannot be beaten if you continue to execute on that strategy. Execute, Execute, Execute. If you waiver and react to the competition, you’re dead in the water. With that in mind, we’re going to keep executing on our strategy of being available to our Catalyst clients and actively helping them solve their problems. The only question that remains is this:

How can we help you?

-@JoshuaKrammes

To compete, or not to compete, that is the question … Or at least the question I see most conference attendees struggle with when they see me. Some people light up with excitement at the sight of me while others turn away in fear, and I’ve even noticed a few of them start shaking uncontrollably as they recount the years of toil they survived in data centers when they managed server hardware for a living. I don’t take it personally, though … which is fitting because I’m not a person.

I am just a simple server rack with an ambitious purpose. I was made to give conference attendees a tangible, server-related experience when they visit SoftLayer’s booth, and I can humbly say that I’ve served that role faithfully and successfully. As attendees step up before me, they may have never touched a server in their lives, but by the time they finish their first attempt at the competition, that naivete is completely vanquished … Some even spend hours asking questions and studying strategy about how to most effectively install drive trays and plug in network cables. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of the people reading this post are doing so in preparation for their next attempt.

When I was chosen as one of only a few server racks to don the Server Challenge II moniker, I knew my life would be difficult and dangerous. Luckily, I’ve been equipped with Supermicro servers that have proven to be even more resilient and durable than my creators would have hoped. While hard drive bays are designed to be hot-swappable, no one could have ever expected those bays would be swapped thousands of times by (often careless) conference attendees, but I haven’t needed a single server to be replaced, and my hard drive trays have also held up remarkably well. As I was sleeping last night, I had a flashback to GDC in San Francisco:

It’s dizzying to have flashbacks of time-lapse pictures, but those pictures painted a pretty accurate picture of what a single day of competition looks like for me. It’s clear that I’m serving my purpose when I see crowds of attendees looking on as competitors set amazingly fast times. As I hear the conversations about strategies and techniques that might shave tenths or hundredths of seconds off the next attempt, I stand a little taller and play my 8-bit music a little louder.

I am the Server Challenge II … Who’s next?

-The Server Challenge II

The Challenge of Sending Email Simply

You need to send email. Usually, that’s a pretty simple task, so it’s not uncommon to find users who think that sending a monthly newsletter is more or less the same task as sending a quick note to a friend about going to see a movie. In fact, those two email use-cases are completely different animals. With all of the nuances inherent in sending and managing large volumes of email, a plethora of email marketing services are positioned to help users better navigate the email marketing waters. It’s tough to differentiate which features you might need and which features are just there to be a “Check” in a comparison checklist. ActiveCampaign set out to make the decision-making process simpler … We knew that we needed the standard features like auto-responder campaigns, metrics reports and email templates, but we also knew we had to differentiate our service in a meaningful way. So we focused on automation.

Too often, the “automation” provided by a platform can be very cumbersome to set up (if it’s available at all), and when it’s actually working, there’s little confirmation that actions are being performed as expected. In response, we were intentional about ActiveCampaign’s automation features being easy to set up and manage … If automation saves time and money, it shouldn’t be intimidatingly difficult to incorporate into your campaigns. Here is a screenshot of what it takes to incorporate automation in your email campaigns with ActiveCampaign:

No complicated logic. No unnecessary options. With a only a few clicks, you can select an action to spark a meaningful response in your system. If a subscriber in your Newsletter list clicks on a link, you might want to move that subscriber to a different list. Because you might want to send a different campaign to that user as well, we provide the ability to add multiple automated actions for each subscriber action, and it’s all very clear.

One of the subscriber actions that might stand out to you if you’ve used other email service providers (or ESPs) is the “When subscriber replies to a campaign” bullet. ActiveCampaign is the first ESP (that we’re aware of) to provide users the option to send a series of follow-up campaigns (or to restrict the sending of future campaigns) to subscribers who reply to a campaign email. Replies are tracked in your campaign reports, and you have deep visibility into how many people replied, who replied, and how many times they replied. With that information, you can segment those subscribers and create automated actions for them, and the end result is that you’re connecting with your subscriber base much more effectively because you’re able to target them better … And you don’t have to break your back to do it.

SoftLayer customers know how valuable automation can be in terms of infrastructure, so it should be no surprise that email marketing campaigns can benefit so much from automation as well. Lots of ESPs provide stats, and it’s up to you to figure out meaningful ways to use that information. ActiveCampaign goes a step beyond those other providers by helping you very simply engage your subscribers with relevant and intentional actions. If you’re interested in learning more, check us out at http://www.activecampaign.com.

-Peter Evans, ActiveCampaign

If you can place any of those quotes from the video games of yore, you’ll probably love the Server Challenge II. Taking cues from classic arcade games, we’ve teamed up with Supermicro to build a worthy sequel to our original Server Challenge:

If you come across Server Challenge II at a conference, your task is clear. You step up to the full-sized server rack and perform three simple tasks:

1. Load the data.
2. Connect the network.
3. Save the world.

You’ve got two attempts per day to install twenty-four drive trays into two 2U Supermicro servers and plug eighteen network cables into their correct switches. Get all of that done in the fastest time at the conference, and you walk away with a brand new Macbook Air. During booth setup at GDC Online, we shot a quick video of what that looks like:

The new challenge is sure to garner a lot of attention, and we’re excited to see the competition heat up as the show progresses. Beyond being a fun game, the Server Challenge II is also a great visual for what SoftLayer does. When you get to touch servers in a server hosting company’s booth, you’re probably going to remember us the next time you need to order a new server. You also get to see the Cisco and Supermicro switches that you’d see in all of our thirteen data centers around the world … It’s a tech geek’s dream come true.

In honor of the launch of Server Challenge II, we’re going to offer some “live” coverage of the competition at GDC Online this week. If you want to watch the Server Challenge II GDC Online 2012 remotely via “challenge-cast,” bookmark this blog post and refresh frequently. We’ll update the leader board every hour or two so that you can keep track of how the times are progressing throughout the show:

Game on.

**UPDATE** GDC Online has officially wrapped, and after some last-minute heroics, Derek Manns grabbed the top spot (and the MacBook Air) for his Server Challenge II efforts! If you’ve been watching the leader board throughout the conference, you saw the top attendee time fall from 1:59.30 all the way down to 1:09.48. We hope you’ve enjoyed the “challenge-cast” … Keep an eye on SoftLayer’s event schedule to prepare for your next chance to take on the Server Challenge II.

-@khazard

The Three Most Common PCI Compliance Myths

As a hosting provider that specializes in Oracle ATG Commerce, Spark::red has extensive experience and expertise when it comes to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). If you’re not familiar with PCI DSS, they are standards imposed on companies that process payment data, and they are designed to protect the company and its customers.

We’ve been helping online businesses maintain PCI Compliance for several years now, and in that time, we’ve encountered a great deal of confusion and misinformation when it comes to compliance. Despite numerous documents and articles available on this topic, we’ve found that three myths seem to persist when it comes to PCI DSS compliance. Consider us the PCI DSS compliance mythbusters.

Myth 1: Only large enterprise-level businesses are required to be PCI Compliant.

According to PCI DSS, every company involved in payment card processing online or offline should be PCI Compliant. The list of those companies includes e-commerce businesses of all sizes, banks and web hosting providers. It’s important to note that I said, “should be PCI Compliant” here. There is no federal law that makes PCI compliance a legal requirement. However, a business IS required to be PCI compliant technically in order to take and process Visa or MasterCard payments. Failure to operate in with PCI compliance could mean huge fees if you’re found in violation after a breach.

Payment card data security is the most significant concern for cardholders, and it should be a priority for your business, whether you have two hundred customers or two million customers. If you’re processing ANY credit card payments, you should make sure you are PCI-compliant.

There are four levels of PCI compliance based on the number of credit card transactions your business processes a year, so the PCI compliance process is going to look different for small, medium-sized and large businesses. Visit the PCI Security Standards Council website to check which level of PCI compliance your business needs.

Myth 1: Busted.

Myth 2: A business that uses a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider automatically becomes PCI-compliant.

Multiple parties are involved in processing payment data, and each of them needs to meet certain standards to guarantee cardholders’ data security. From a managed hosting provider perspective, we’re responsible for things like proper firewall installation and maintenance, updating anti-virus programs of our servers, providing a unique ID for each person with computer access to restrict access to the most sensitive data, regular system scanning for vulnerabilities. Our customer — an online retailer, for example — would need to develop its software applications in accordance with PCI DSS, keep cardholders data storage to a minimum, and perform application-layer penetration tests that are out of their hosting provider’s control.

If you’re pursuing PCI compliance, you have a significant advantage if you start with a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider. Many security questions are already answered by your PCI-compliant host, so there is a shorter list of things for you to be worry about. You save money, time and effort in the process of completing PCI certification.

Myth 2: Busted.

Myth 3: A business that uses SSL certificates is PCI compliant.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates allow secure data transmission to and from the server through data encryption that significantly decreases the network vulnerabilities from IP spoofing, IP source rooting, DNS spoofing, man-in-the-middle attacks and other threats from hackers. However, SSL cannot protect cardholder data from attacks using cross-site scripting or SQL injection, and they don’t provide secure audit trails or event monitoring. SSL certificates are an important part of secure transactions, but they’re only part of PCI DSS compliance.

Myth 3: Busted.

If you have questions about PCI compliance or you’re interested in Oracle ATG Hosting, visit Spark::red, give us a call or send us an email, and we’ll do what we can to help. When PCI compliance doesn’t seem like a scary monster in your closet, it’s easier to start the process and get it done quickly.

-Elena Rybalchenko, Spark::red

I’ve observed that at most tech conferences, attendees will wander up and down the aisles, avoiding eye contact and looking preoccupied with emails or Angry Birds on their phones. When they walk by the SoftLayer booth, something changes. They stop. They pay attention. They get engaged. It’s hard to passively navigate around a crowd of people cheering on a Server Challenge competitor, and if you see another attendee your peripheral vision “wowing” us with his/her three-switch-ball juggling skills, you’re going to get distracted from your Angry Birds game. The SoftLayer booth is a snapshot of SoftLayer’s culture, and SoftLayer’s culture is magnetic.

When we catch the eye of that previously disinterested attendee, we get to tell the SoftLayer story: “Oh this? It’s a small version of a SoftLayer server rack with five SuperMicro servers in it. We’ve got more than 100,000 servers like these in 13 data centers around the world. Want to try and race to put it back together?” “This is called a switch-ball … SoftLayer is an infrastructure as a service provider, so it doesn’t really have a direct tie-in with SoftLayer’s business, but it’s the coolest giveaway you’ll see at the conference.” Whether the attendee is interested in the competition, hosting, servers or cool swag, we’ve started a conversation that we might not have had if we were just shaking hands and passing out brochures.

As the conference goes on, most booths see traffic decline. That’s when the Server Challenge is usually getting the most competitive. Several of our competitions have been decided by tenths or even hundredths of seconds, and a few have been won by the last competitor on the last day as the PA announcement notifies attendees that the expo hall is closing. At Cloud Connect Chicago, I recorded three competitors who each had the potential to walk away victorious:

All three of those competitors had fun in the SoftLayer booth. The other attendees who stepped up to the Server Challenge enjoyed themselves, too. That’s huge. That’s extremely rare. That’s why I love being a part of the rag-tag group SLayers who have the opportunity to spread the word about SoftLayer.

As I put together the quick video to show the competition from Cloud Connect Chicago, I wondered how the times compared with the other shows that have featured the Server Challenge this year. My “wondering” wound up becoming “researching,” and this is what I found:

Every conference seems to be competitive, and it’s amazing to see how close the times are between all of the conference winners in 2012. Server Challenge World Championship? While I start drawing up plans to try and make that a reality, I recommend you all print out blueprints and start training for the next time you come across a SoftLayer booth at an event.

-@khazard

Meet SoftLayer Message Queue.

As the name would suggest, Message Queue allows you to create one or more “queues” or containers which contain “messages” — strings of text that you can assign attributes to. The queues pass along messages in first-in-first-out order, and in doing so, they allow for parallel processing of high-volume workflows.

That all sounds pretty complex and “out there,” but you might be surprised to learn that you’re probably using a form of message queuing right now. Message queuing allows for discrete threads or applications to share information with one another without needing to be directly integrated or even operating concurrently. That functionality is at the heart of many of the most common operating systems and applications on the market.

What does it mean in a cloud computing context? Well, Message Queue facilitates more efficient interaction between different pieces of your application or independent software systems. The easiest way demonstrate how that happens is by sharing a quick example:

Creating a Video-Sharing Site

Let’s say we have a mobile application providing the ability to upload video content to your website: sharevideoswith.phil. The problem we have is that our webserver and CMS can only share videos in a specific format from a specific location on a CDN. Transcoding the videos on the mobile device before it uploads proves to be far too taxing, what with all of the games left to complete from the last Humble Bundle release. Having the videos transcoded on our webserver would require a lot of time/funds/patience/knowledge, and we don’t want to add infrastructure to our deployment for transcoding app servers, so we’re faced with a conundrum. A conundrum that’s pretty easily answered with Message Queue and SoftLayer’s (free) video transcoding service.

What We Need

• Our Video Site
• The SoftLayer API Transcoding Service
• SoftLayer Object Storage
• A “New Videos” Container
• A “Transcoded Videos” Container with CDN Enabled
• SoftLayer Message Queue
• “New Videos” Queue
• “Transcoding Jobs” Queue

The Process

1. Your user uploads the video to sharevideoswith.phil. Your web app creates a page for the video and populates the content with a “processing” message.
2. The web application saves the video file into the “New Vidoes” container on object storage.
3. When the video is saved into that container, it creates a new message in the “New Videos” message queue with the video file name as the body.
4. From here, we have two worker functions. These workers work independently of each other and can be run at any comfortable interval via cron or any scheduling agent:

Each step in the process is handled by an independent component. This allows us to scale or substitute each piece as necessary without needing to refactor the other portions. As long as each piece receives and sends the expected message, its colleague components will keep doing their jobs.

Video transcoding is a simple use-case that shows some of the capabilities of Message Queue. If you check out the Message Queue page on our website, you can see a few other examples — from online banking to real-time stock, score and weather services.

Message Queue leverages Cloudant as the highly scalable low latency data layer for storing and distributing messages, and SoftLayer customers get their first 100,000 messages free every month (with additional messages priced at $0.01 for every 10,000).

What are you waiting for? Go get started with Message Queue!

-Phil (@SoftLayerDevs)