Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

Bringing server hardware to a “Cloud Expo” is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Why would anyone care about hardware? Isn’t “the cloud” a magical land where servers and data centers cease to exist and all that matters is that your hardware-abstracted hypervisor can scale elastically on demand?

You might be surprised how many attendees at Cloud Expo Europe expressed that sentiment in one way or another when SoftLayer showed up in London with the infamous Server Challenge last week. Based on many of the conversations I had with attendees, some of the most basic distinctions and characteristics of physical and virtual environments are widely misunderstood. Luckily, we had a nice little server rack to use as a visual while talking about how SoftLayer fits in (and stands out) when it comes to “the cloud.”

When we didn’t have a line of participants waiting to try their hand at our in-booth competition, we were able to use it to “show and tell” what a cloud hardware architecture might look like and what distinguishes SoftLayer from some of the other infrastructure providers in the industry. We’re able to show our network-within-a-newtork topology, we explain the pod concept of our data centers and how that streamlines our operations, and we talk about our system automation and how that speeds up the provisioning of both physical and virtual environments. Long-term memory is aided by the use of multiple senses, so when each attendee can see and touch what they’re hearing about in our booth, they have a much better chance to remember the conversation in the midst of dozens (if not hundreds) they have before and after they talk to us.

And by the time we finish using the Server Challenge as a visual, the attendee is usually ready to compete. As you probably noticed if you caught the Cloud Expo Europe album at Facebook.com/SoftLayer, the competition was pretty intense. In fact, the winning time of 1:08.16 was set just about twenty minutes before the conference ended … In the short video below, Phil presents the winner of the Cloud Expo Europe Server Challenge with his iPad 2 and asks for some insight about how he was able to pull off the victory:

Being the international debut of the Server Challenge, we were a bit nervous that the competition wouldn’t have as much appeal as we’ve seen in the past, but given the response we received from attendees, it’s pretty safe to say it’s not the last time you’ll see the Server Challenge abroad.

To all of the participants who competed last week, thanks for stopping by our booth, and we hope you’re enjoying your “torch” (if you beat the 2:00.00 flashlight-winning time)!

-@khazard

This is a guest blog from Mike Rabb, VP of business development for CopperEgg, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. CopperEgg provides real-time insight into the speed and availability of applications and services on cloud, virtual and physical server.

Knowing Your Apps Are Up and Running = Peace of Mind

Whether you are building or managing apps in the cloud, it’s important they stay up and running optimally. With cloud performance monitoring by CopperEgg you can do just that! RevealCloud Pro takes less than 10 seconds to install and provides performance monitoring so you can rest assured and know your apps are up and running smoothly.

With RevealCloud Pro you gain real-time insight into the speed and availability of services by monitoring CPU, network load, uptime, blocked processes, memory space, disk space and more. At the first sign of trouble, RevealCloud Pro can immediately alert you email, SMS or Pagerduty when performance in one or more areas is outside of normal ranges. You can even take action via a webhook. This enables you to uncover and correct performance issues often before the system goes down. In addition, historical tracking over the last 30 days enables you to uncover trends in performance and capacity that could otherwise go unnoticed.

With a rapidly growing customer base spanning over 50 countries, we know we are on to something good! Read what they have to say…

Customer Speak
Eduardo Fernandez, president of Shuttle Cloud, is a current Softlayer customer, and he shared a little about his experience with RevealCloud Pro:

“Our business is built in the cloud so monitoring performance is critical. With RevealCloud Pro, we have an easy to install and easy to use product that gives us everything we need to monitor our instances and ensure our systems are running optimally. I like the high level view RevealCloud provides of all instances on one screen so I can see the health of our systems at-a glance. By contrast, members of my team need to know in real-time if any of our instances are either not responsive or have a very high load, memory or processing issue. By receiving alerts as soon as an issue occurs via cell or email means we can address things immediately. We also use the historical tracking to monitor trends and look at activity during the overnight hours.”

In addition to cloud performance monitoring, RevealCloud Pro also works on servers located on premise, in the data center, or in virtual environments. RevealCloud Pro makes viewing multiple systems simple, and is ideal for those who want to compare performance among their servers with no hassle.

Offer for SoftLayer Customers
Experience RevealCloud for yourself … It’s addictive! Try RevealCloud Pro for free today.

- Mike Raab, CopperEgg

This is a guest blog from ICC Global Hosting’s Mark Moeller. ICC’s Hosted Virtual Desktop delivers full-featured Windows desktop computing environments, including Microsoft Office, anti-virus, and data storage to any device, anywhere, anytime.

Accessing Desktop Apps Anytime, Anywhere, from Any Device

The computing world is changing rapidly – driven by the consumerization of applications, the demands for employees to be in an “always on” mode, and the revolution of mobile computing. End users have become App savvy and with the advent of the “there’s an app for that” generation applications that have become very easy for end users to install and run on their own. The computing platforms they use have become self-service in nature and new applications are now easy to find and no longer require IT to research, purchase, install, and manage. In fact, IT departments have lost control over what applications run on these devices posing a huge support problem and security threat.

In today’s economy organizations demand their employees to do more with smaller staffs forcing employees to be “always on” with e-mail and other work data now delivered to their desktops, smart phones, tablets, and home computers. People on average now access work data and applications from three devices with new choices of mobile devices available almost daily.

VDI Sticker Shock – With all of these changes many IT departments have considered virtual desktops as a solution to provide access to multiple platforms, remote access, and secured network stored data. Consultants and vendors have been trying to sell organizations virtual desktops as VDI, but most organizations suffer from sticker shock facing huge start-up costs and little or no economies of scale. Most organizations fail to see any potential ROI with VDI solutions and end up tabling the decision for next year’s budget.

Read the rest of ICC’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Chris Lantrip, CEO of CyberlinkASP, an application service provider focused on hosting, upgrading and managing the industry’s best software.

The DesktopLayer from CyberlinkASP

Hosted virtual desktops – SoftLayer style.

In early 2006, we were introduced to SoftLayer. In 2007, they brought us StorageLayer, and in 2009, CloudLayer. Each of those solutions met a different kind of need in the Application Service Provider (ASP) world, and by integrating those platforms into our offering, DesktopLayer was born: The on-demand anytime, anywhere virtual desktop hosted on SoftLayer and powered by CyberlinkASP.

CyberlinkASP was originally established to instantly web-enable software applications that were not online in the past. Starting off as a Citrix integration firm in the early days, we were approached by multiple independent software vendors asking us to host, manage and deliver their applications from a centralized database platform to their users across multiple geographic locations. With the robust capabilities of Citrix, we were able to revolutionize application delivery and management for several ISV’s.

Over time, more ISV’s starting showing up at our doorstep, and application delivery was becoming a bigger and bigger piece of our business. Our ability to provision users on a specific platform in minutes, delete them in minutes, perform updates and maintain hundreds of customers and thousands of users all at one time from a centralized platform was very attractive.

Read the rest of CyberlinkASP’s Guest Blog! »

By 2010, the datacenter as we know it today will be dead. Datacenters of the future will be ultra high-density geographically-dispersed IT utility centers. Datacenters will be focused on maximizing all the facets of the IT environment including floor space, HVAC, power, server form factor, security, storage, networking, bandwidth, personnel and preventive maintenance. Physically, I envision 5,000 square foot facilities installed across the globe that are relatively small, lights-out bunkers utilizing commodity infrastructures, owned or leased footprints, and housing servers at a rate of 10 per square foot.

The datacenters will be designed, built, and fully functional on day one — including the installation of all IT equipment. There will be no movement of physical components as everything will be managed virtually through a series of networks and management tools — a datacenter grid, if you will. These datacenters will only require personnel for failure-replacement or maintenance. Hardware node failures would automatically route to other nodes in the same datacenter. The failure of a datacenter would result in a re-route of data to other facilities. A series of failsafe datacenters, with all data, will be sitting on the edge near the end user for maximum performance and efficiency. Companies would select geographical regions for their installations of IT services.

The datacenter of the future is indifferent to the technology of the day. Dedicated hosting, virtualization, grid computing or the next emerging technology all work in the datacenter of the future because they will be designed as an IT utility. It’s time for the datacenter to grow up.

-@lavosby