Posts Tagged ‘video’

It’s been a couple weeks since we last posted blog post featuring what SLayers are doing outside the office, so I thought I’d share my experience from a couple months ago when SoftLayer competed in the 2012 Annual DFW Dragon Boat Festival. As you may remember, Cassandra posted about SoftLayer’s participation in the Houston-area Dragon Boat Festival, so I’m taking it upon myself to share the Dallas experience.

Let me start off by admitting to you that I’m no expert when it comes to dragon boat racing. In fact, when I was asked to join the team, I was reluctant … I’d never done anything like a dragon boat competition before, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. It took a bit of convincing from my coworkers, but I ended up signing on to represent SoftLayer as one of the twenty people in our boat.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only rookie. In fact, this was the first year we’ve had a boat full of newbies, so we all learned the ropes (or oars) of dragon boat racing together. We had practice on Home Depot buckets in the hallway for about two weeks before we actually hit the water, and by the time our on-the-water practice came, we already had a good feel for the basics of the race. Until then, I had no idea how small the boat was and how soaked we’d get while we were paddling. What had I gotten myself into?

My son was home from college over the race weekend, so I managed to get him signed him up as a backup rower. When we got to the lake, the SLayers were all very noticeable … Our team was sporting the “Dragon SLayer” shirts, and the SoftLayer tent was abuzz with activity. There were other big companies there like AT&T, Sprint, the Dallas SWAT team, Penny’s and Samsung, but we weren’t intimidated — even when the other teams started talking smack when we broke out our Home Depot buckets to get some last-minute practice.

When we set sail — er… paddle — we were nervous. The gun sounded, and in a flurry of synchronized rowing, we found ourselves at the finish before everyone else in our heat. First race, first place. Obviously, we were excited by that outcome, so we were probably even more antsy when it came time to run the second race. We piled into the boat, made our way to the starting line, and after another flurry of activity, we won the second race! We were in the finals.

You can probably guess what happened next:

We won it all!

In the video, you can see that we started out slow but came from behind to take the victory (The video gets better at the end of the race). The eagle eyes in the audience will probably also notice that we rowed so hard that the dragon head came off of the boat.

Our practice on the Home Depot cans turned out to be pretty effective. My son Jeremy wound up playing a key role on the boat — the drummer — and he headed back to college with quite a story to tell his friends. All of the SLayers stuck around to accept our trophy, and we made sure to snap a few pictures:

I am proud to call myself a SLayer (and a Dragon SLayer)!

-Fabrienne

Hard work is nothing new to the SoftLayer staff — we strive for perfection in everything we do. We give ourselves strict deadlines, we always push ourselves to give the best support possible, and we make every effort to go above and beyond. Every now and then, we make sure to go above and beyond when it comes to having fun in the office, too.

I’m sure everyone has seen the 10,000 bouncy ball shower we gave SoftLayer COO Sam Fleitman for his birthday, and if you’ve been an avid blog reader for a while now, you’ll remember the prank retaliation when John Eaves went to Hawaii and posted a picture of himself relaxing on Facebook with the caption ‘Happy Truck Day.’ After the rest of his team finished unloading and installing the servers that were delivered, they turned their attention to his desk. As you’d probably guess, those two pranks are only the tip of the iceberg.

If you walk through the office on any given day, chances are good that you’ll see evidence of little pranks and inside jokes that we all play on each other. Sometimes it’s subtle, like when a picture of a famous Canadian pop singer (No … Not The Mitch) is posted by a coworkers desk:

Sometime it’s a little more … obvious:

Pretty recently, I returned to my desk to find my UFC fighters and Jersey Shore bobblehead action figures rearranged:

Those innocent little pranks tend to get the wheels turning in the heads of the office pranksters, though: “What could be the next big office prank?” An anonymous group of SoftLayer employees heard that DAL05 Site Manager Joshua Daley (who led this DC tour) was going out of town for a couple of weeks, so he became the next target. Out of nowhere, someone came up with the genius idea of remodeling his office in Hello Kitty style, and that got the ball rolling. Soon enough, Post-it notes were worked into the plan, and somehow, it was decided that 1,000 inflated balloons would be involved.

The prank involved a significant amount of work, and it wouldn’t have come together without an impressive group effort. Many technicians stayed after their shift and came in on their day off to help plan, decorate and blow up balloons, and the result was pretty impressive:

When Josh got back, he got a kick out the prank, and I think he had a little too much fun destroying all of our hard work:

The aftermath:

If you walk through the office and notice a few technicians with shifty eyes, they’re probably either keeping an eye out for pranksters that might be targeting them or scheming on their next prank victim. Speaking of which, I have some scheming to do …

-Timothy

If 80′s movies have taught me anything, it’s that any good story needs to have a video montage with Journey playing in the background. With that in mind, I’ll start this blog post with a glimpse of HostingCon 2012:

HostingCon brings the hosting industry together every year, and the conference winds up being surprisingly similar to classic 80′s “coming of age” movies:

• “Geeks” are among the main characters.
• There’s always a “funny guy.”
• At some point, the geeks attend a party.
• The characters learn more about themselves and others over the course of the movie.
• As the credits roll, everyone is inspired … Ready to take on the world.

With that in mind, HostingCon 2012 in Boston was a veritable John Hughes flick. There was no shortage of geeks, we hung out with one of the funniest people in the country, we threw a massive party, and we learned a ton. Without a doubt, attendees returned home with their intensity and enthusiasm cranked up to eleven (another 80′s reference).

The expo hall was abuzz with activity — albeit after a lull in the morning following the aptly named “Host Me All Night Long” party — and we enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with current partners and customers while meeting and speaking with soon-to-be partners and customers. While running a highly competitive Server Challenge, we were still able to dive deeper into partnerships, the build v. buy decision, branding, and launching a product when attendees visited our booth after hearing from our team in conference sessions and panels, and those conversations are what keep us coming back to HostingCon every year.

As a “veteran” of the hosting industry (assuming seven years of experience qualifies me), I’ve learned a great deal about the dynamics of the hosting industry from events like HostingCon over the years. On one hand, many of the attendees are “competitors,” and on the other hand, we’re all trying to make the industry better (since “a rising tide lifts all boats”). As a great example, look at the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2C), a trade association of companies with the shared goal and purpose of representing the industry in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

As it turns out, that unity flew out the door when attendees stood face-to-rack with the Server Challenge, though. Unlike our experiences at more general “technology” conferences, the components in our competition needed no introduction, and participants were particularly driven to best their peers … not only for the iPad, but for the pride of owning the Server Challenge title at HostingCon:

1. Darin Goldman – 0:59.28
2. Devon Hillard – 1:01.58
3. Ijan Kruizinga – 1:01.83
4. Jon Basha – 1:03.02
5. Sean Whitley – 1:03.06

As you saw in the video, Darin Goldman had the luxury of not needing his second attempt on the final day of the conference to secure a victory, but we were glad he let us record his “Breakfast Club” fist-pump to share with the world.

Don’t stop believing (in hosting).

-@khazard

P.S. I recorded the first few minutes of Ralphie May‘s set, but the adult language-ness of the content makes it a little more difficult to share with the world.

The highlight of any customer visit to a SoftLayer office is always the data center tour. The infrastructure in our data centers is the hardware platform on which many of our customers build and run their entire businesses, so it’s not surprising that they’d want a first-hand look at what’s happening inside the DC. Without exception, visitors to a SoftLayer data center pod are impressed when they walk out of a SoftLayer data center pod … even if they’ve been in dozens of similar facilities in the past.

What about the customers who aren’t able to visit us, though? We can post pictures, share stats, describe our architecture and show you diagrams of our facilities, but those mediums can’t replace the experience of an actual data center tour. In the interest of bridging the “data center tour” gap for customers who might not be able to visit SoftLayer in person (or who want to show off their infrastructure), we decided to record a video data center tour.

If you’ve seen “professional” video data center tours in the past, you’re probably positioning a pillow on top of your keyboard right now to protect your face if you fall asleep from boredom when you hear another baritone narrator voiceover and see CAD mock-ups of another “enterprise class” facility. Don’t worry … That’s not how we roll:

Josh Daley — whose role as site manager of DAL05 made him the ideal tour guide — did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to feedback from our customers about whether this data center tour style is helpful and/or entertaining.

If you want to see more videos like this one, “Like” it, leave comments with ideas and questions, and share it wherever you share things (Facebook, Twitter, your refrigerator, etc.).

-@khazard

This is a guest blog with Chad Morris from our partner Mandrill. Mandrill is an email delivery platform built on and managed by MailChimp. Created for developers to set up and manage with minimal coding effort, Mandrill offers advanced tracking, easy-to-understand reports and hundreds of template options. In this video interview, Chad goes into detail about the history of the company as well as the major differences between Mandrill and MailChimp. In the near future, you’ll see a separate guest blog from the Mandrill team with best practices for managing your email systems.

This guest blog features Cedexis, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Cedexis a content and application delivery system that offers strategies and solutions for multi-platform content and application delivery to companies focused on maximizing web performance. In this video we talk to Cedexis Co-Founder Julien Coulon.

A Multi-Cloud Strategy – The Key to Expansion and Conversion

Web and mobile applications have collapsed geographic barriers to business, bringing brand and commerce experiences ever-closer to increasingly far-flung customers. While web-based business models are powerful enablers for global expansion, they also create new a new challenge in managing availability and performance across diverse and distributed markets: How do you ensure consistent web performance across all markets without investing in physical infrastructure in all of those markets?

Once a business gets its core business on a consistent and reliable provider like SoftLayer, we typically recommend that they consider a multi-cloud strategy that will spread availability and performance risk across a global infrastructure of public and private data centers, delivery networks and cloud providers. Regardless of how fantastic your core SoftLayer hosting is, the reality is that single-source dependency introduces significant business risk. Fortunately, much of that business risk can be mitigated by adding a layer of multi-cloud architecture to support the application.

Recent high-profile outages speak to the problem that multi-sourcing solves, but many web-based operations remain precariously dependent on individual hosting, CDN and cloud providers. It’s a lot like having server backups: If you never need a backup that you have, that backup probably isn’t worth much to you, but if you need a backup that you don’t have, you’d probably pay anything to have it.

Read the rest of Cedexis’s blog about adopting a multi-cloud strategy. »

This guest blog comes to us from Cloudability, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Cloudability is a cloud budget management service that helps companies manage their cloud spending, prevent overages, reduce waste and save money. In this video we talk to Cloudability Founder and CEO Mat Ellis about how the company developed, and we hear examples of how Cloudability is supporting and businesses money.

5 Things You Need to Know to Control Variable Infrastructure Costs

If you have on premise equipment, then your costs are fixed — you paid your money and now you own a fixed amount of hardware and software. The cloud, on the other hand, has variable costs due to two important features — you only pay for the services you use and it’s scalable, providing the resources you need at any given time. By using a cloud infrastructure, you end up with what we call Variable Infrastructure Costs (VICs).

Most of SoftLayer’s services meet the criteria for a VIC. You need an extra cloud server for a few hours? No problem. More disk? Done.

With great power, comes great responsibility, and the biggest problem with VICs is that they are just like a faucet: Leave it running, and the water bill can add up fast … Not to mention all that waste! Unless you keep a close eye on VICs, you could find yourself in front of your CFO, pleading for your budget’s life.

Cloudability was created to keep those costs under control, and in the course of working with our customers, we’ve come up with a simple five-point checklist of best practices:

1. Collation

Make sure you have insight to all your costs, create a single contract database, and review it regularly. Don’t forget to include total cloud spending alongside your fixed contracts. Talk to your finance department, then drill your employees and tech teams to make sure you REALLY know the whole truth. There can be — and usually is — a disconnect in the organization about how much cloud is really being used.

2. Analysis

Get into the weeds to see why each project is spending what they are spending. Try to calculate some tangible metrics like cost per thousand web pages served or cost per new customer, and benchmark these against public data and common sense.

3. Organization and Rebalancing

Put each of your projects into one of four quadrants:

1. High Spend/Low Efficiency
2. High Spend/High Efficiency
3. Low Spend/Low Efficiency
4. Low Spend/High Efficiency.

Read the rest of Cloudability’s blog about best practices in variable cost management. »

This guest blog comes to us from Distil.it, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Distil is the first content protection network that helps companies identify and block malicious content scraping and data theft. In this video we talk to Distil CEO Rami Essaid about how the company developed, their participation in the TechStars program and most importantly, how they can help you!

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Read the rest of Distil’s blog about content scrapers and Google’s Panda update »

Citrix Synergy 2012 took over San Francisco this week. Because Citrix is one of SoftLayer’s technology partners, you know we were in the house, and I thought I’d share a few SoftLayer-specific highlights from the conference.

Before I get too far, I should probably back up give you a little context for what the show is all about if you aren’t familiar with it. In his opening keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton explained:

“We call it ‘Citrix Synergy,’ but really it’s ‘Synergy’ because this is an event that’s coordinated by us across a hundred sponsors, our ecosystem partners, companies in the industry that we work together with to bring you an amazing set of solutions around cloud, virtualization, networking and mobility.”

Given how broad of a spectrum those areas of technology represent, the short four-day agenda was jam-packed with informational sessions, workshops, demos and conversations. It goes without saying that SoftLayer had to be in the mix in a BIG WAY. We had a booth on the expo hall floor, I was lined up to lead a breakout session about how business can “learn how to build private clouds in the cloud,” and we were the proud presenting sponsor of the huge Synergy Party on Thursday night.

Our partnership with Citrix is unique. We incorporate Citrix NetScaler and Citrix XenServer as part of our service offerings. Plus, Citrix is also a SoftLayer customer, using SoftLayer infrastructure to offer a hosted desktop solution. Designed and architected from the ground up to run in the cloud, the Citrix Virtual Demo Center provides a dashboard interface for managing Citrix XenDesktop demo environments that are provisioned on-demand using SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

My biggest thrill at the conference came when I was asked to speak and share a little of our expertise in a keynote address on simplifying cloud networking. I like to tell people I have a great face for radio, but that didn’t keep me off the stage. The hall was packed to capacity and after defeating a few “demo gremlins,” I got to show off how easy SoftLayer makes it for our customers to take advantage of amazing products like Citrix Netscaler VPX:

In my “Learn How to Build Private Clouds in the Cloud” breakout session, I had a little more time to speak to the larger question of how SoftLayer is approaching the shift to cloud-specific architectures and share some best practices in moving to a private cloud. Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists, so I tried to explain how businesses can leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to add scalability to a private cloud environment.

Thanks to SynergyTV, that presentation has been made available for all to see:

As I joked at the beginning of the breakout session, an attendee at Citrix Synergy was probably bombarded by “the cloud” in presentations and conversations at the show. While it’s important to demystify the key terms we use on a daily basis, a few straight days of keynotes and breakout sessions about the cloud can get you thinking, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Beyond our capabilities as a cloud infrastructure provider, SoftLayer knows how to have a good time, so after we took care of the “work” stuff in the sessions above, we did our best to help provide a little “play” as well. This year, we were the proud sponsor of the Synergy Party, featuring Lifehouse!

Citrix Synergy 2012 was a blast. As a former rocket scientist, I can say that authoritatively.

-@nday91

About a month ago, Kevin Hazard visited SoftLayer Amsterdam after a conference in London, and while he was here, I invited him on a data center tour. You saw a few glimpses of the data center in his “This is Different” video, but he turned the camera around on me to give a simpler “Data Center Tour” video to show off some of the key characteristics of the server room environment in AMS01.

Given the fact that nearly everything in the data center is the same, if you’ve ever seen a SoftLayer data center, this tour will seem very familiar. The configuration and architecture of all 13 of our data centers are identical, and with the exceptions of a few Dutch words on the walls, this tour could be given (and is frequently given to customers) in all of our facilities around the world:

As we were recording this video, I started thinking about all the similarities and differences between all the entrepreneurs I have worked with during my career — which coincidentally lines up well with Clayton’s “Building. Business. SoftLayer.” blog. I cut my technology teeth in Silicon Valley during the dot-com tsunami of the late 90′s, and since then, I have collaborated on-location with entrepreneurs from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Chile, Ukraine and Italy. While these cultures often vary widely with customs, manners, food and methods of business, I would have to say that entrepreneurs have far more similarities than they do differences.

At the peak of the dot-com boom, money was raining from the sky, and anyone with a decent PowerPoint presentation containing the word “Internet,” could raise million dollars of dollars in a matter of days. After the bubble popped, funding all but dried up. Even real businesses with profitable business models couldn’t raise a cent. My neighbor went from being worth over $10M on paper and keeping company with the Queen of the Netherlands to scrambling to pay the rent and fighting for a seat at the local coffee shop.

In my opinion, that’s when the real magic happened: The creators just kept on creating. Despite all our friends making fun of us — telling us “the Internet thing” was dead — we kept building cool stuff and coming up with innovative products that pushed the limits of technology.

While entrepreneurs liked the idea of making tons of money and building a global company from a simple idea, money and fame are not the primary drivers of true entrepreneurs. They were really more interested in creating something that would impact peoples’ everyday lives and disrupt tired industries … Just look at SoftLayer. In 2005, “tired” would have been one of the nicest things you could have said about the hosting industry, and in response to that environment, our “Innovate or Die” mentality shot us to the front of the pack.

Entrepreneurs are a lot like our data centers … They may look a little different from the outside, but they are exactly the same on the inside. Ask them how they’d change the world, and take note of the wild look in their eyes. Our growth is fueled by the passions of our customers, and as long as we have brilliant customers doing amazing things, you can expect to see more and more of these “new data center” tour videos in the coming months and years.

-@jpwisler

P.S. If you don’t have time to watch the video right now, you can head to our Flickr page to see a few pictures we snapped while recording the tour: AMS01 – Amsterdam Data Center

P.P.S. Make sure you watch the video all the way to the end.