Have you ever seen those image-based logic puzzles where you’re given a series of images and challenged to put them in order to create a story? Here’s an example:

What story are those pictures trying to tell? A boy [6] grabs a fishing pole [4], and finds a fishing hole [5]. He baits his hook [3] and waits for the catfish to quit posing [2] and bite the hook! He takes his catch home, and his mom fries it up [1]. MMMM Good [7]!

You could probably interpret it a different way and “choose your own adventure” where the anthropomorphized fish deep fried the boy … Depends on how far outside the box you think. The answer the question was meant to have is the one above. Now that you see how it works, I have a logic puzzle for you to try and figure out about what happened during my week last week.

All ten of the pictures below were taken in the span of 56 hours … If you can come up with the correct story, I’ll send you a prize (detailed below). If you can come up with a creative story that isn’t correct, I can probably find something to send you as well. Without further ado, here are the pieces of the story [Click for Larger Version]:

If you’ve been to the SoftLayer Blog this week, you know that we have a “Kids Meal” kind of special going right now where for the next few months if you buy a server and email us, you can get an official SoftLayer Bobblehead! To piggyback on that giveaway, the first person who posts a comment with the correct order of the photos to answer the puzzle (or the funniest answer if no correct answers are posted), will get my personal FULL SET of official SLobbleheads. Yes, the full set! You won’t have to wait to place your server orders in the next month to complete your bobblehead collection (though I hope you still keep ordering servers).

So what are you waiting for? Tell me the story!

-@SKinman454

New Hosting Paradigm, New Tools

The web hosting market has changed in recent years. Website owners are now conscious of the advantages of cloud computing: its flexibility, its cost-cutting technology and its scalability … For these reasons, more and more web applications are being moved into cloud or hybrid environments.

This migration to the cloud creates the necessity for new tools that help users manage and centralize all of their resources, whether they are hosted in the cloud, in dedicated servers or shared hosting.

Internal vs External Monitoring
Internal monitoring tools like Nagios (a very popular tool for monitoring in data centers) can launch thousands of checks to servers hosted inside the data center and provide information on availability of common services. However, since the origin of these checks is the same internal network as the target servers, they lack an end user’s perspective.

We designed Alertia not only as a external monitoring service, but as a tool that gathers metrics and stores diagnosis results when a problem is detected. Alertia — with its distributed and highly available monitoring network located on strategic locations (like Brazil, West and East Coast USA, Spain, Singapore and Japan) — gives you a real perspective of your web application’s performance. External Monitoring services like Alertia can serve as the central monitoring tool or as the perfect companion to your current in-house network management applications, extending monitoring information by determining the source of global networking problems.

Alertia Monitoring is designed to give you the ability to manage availability and speed of all your assets from a centralized point of view.

SyncCheck Technology
Among all the external monitoring applications that we have been testing, we’ve found a common point of failure: The time of the checks is usually out of sync. What does this mean? It means that the monitoring application is sending multiple checks from different time frames … If we have multiple responses for our web application, they don’t line up to give us an all-encompassing view of our application’s performance. That’s why we developed SyncCheck.

With SyncCheck technology, we’ve created a fully synchronized monitoring network. Every check is done at the same second from different parts of the world, and the information is presented to you in a consolidated report with all the information you need.

If you’re interested in seeing how Alertia could work for you, we have a free version available that you can try out. If you try it out this month and decide you want to upgrade for even more functionality, we’d like to extend a special promo to our fellow SoftLayer customers: Use promo code ALESOFT before March 1, 2012, and you’ll get 35% off on an annual subscription!

-Lazaro Vicedo, Alertia

En el correcto funcionamiento de una aplicación web pueden están implicados diferentes servicios, servidores y proveedores. Es posible que un aplicación e-commerce este usando un servidor MySQL en un proveedor de cloud como Softlayer y tenga un servidor web en Amazon.

Todos sabemos la importancia de conseguir una alta disponibilidad y rendimiento en servidores web que alojan aplicaciones críticas, y damos por sentado que la mayoría de estos sitios web disponen de herramientas avanzadas de monitorización, pero en muchos casos esto no siempre se cumple.

Our company culture is no accident; it has grown organically from the day SoftLayer was born, and the executive management team has been instrumental in showing that it’s okay to have fun when you’re at work … and the company’s phenomenal growth speaks to that philosophy’s success. The latest example of tomfoolery came in the form of customized bobbleheads of many of members on the SoftLayer management team:

Because we happened to have ten extra sets of these bobbleheads, we thought some of our customers might enjoy building a collection of their very own. If you places a new order in the next few months and you’re one of the first ten SoftLayer customers to email your order information to the social media team at twitter@softlayer.com, we’ll send you that month’s “Bobblehead Bonus”:

• February 2012 – Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer
• March 2012 – Tom Blair, Senior Vice President Global Sales
• April 2012 – Nathan Day, Chief Scientist
• May 2012 – Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer
• June 2012 – Sam Flietman, Chief Operating Officer
• July 2012 – George Karidis, Chief Strategy Offcier

To keep everyone on the same page, here are the “official rules”:

1. One Bobblehead Bonus per SoftLayer account per month.
2. Order must be placed in the same month the bobblehead is requested.
3. Bobblehead Bonus request email must be sent to twitter@softlayer.com and it must include your SoftLayer account number, order number and the shipping address you’d like us to use.
4. The bobbleheads will be awarded on a first-emailed, first served basis.
5. Only 10 bobbleheads are available each month.

If the set I have in my office window is any indication, having a complete SoftLayer bobblehead collection will make you the envy of all of your friends and coworkers. The idea behind this fun little giveaway is to reward you for being an engaged, loyal SoftLayer customer.

Let’s be honest … You’ve probably been on the fence about ordering a new cloud instance or dedicated server, so what more do you need to hear than “Free SoftLayer Bobblehead” to get you to pull the trigger?

-@khazard

P.S. We’ve also got a few bobbleheads earmarked for employees who contribute to the SoftLayer Blog. If you’re a SLayer and you want your own set of bobbleheads, you better start writing!

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

The funny thing is, I don’t think SNL is too far off on how these infomercials represent real life. I can’t help but think of these parodies when I think about the effects that SOPA would have had if it passed as law:

The first business to die a slow, horrible and expensive death as a result of the legislation might have been Google. Because it’s connected to virtually every website on the planet (legitimate and non-legitimate alike), the amount of time spent severing connections to sites in any way related to a site that was merely assumed to be performing illegal activities would stall Google’s growth and innovation endeavors. This would cause thousands of people to lose their jobs … And it’s not out of the question to think one or two of those people might start a riot.

Small- and medium-sized businesses would not have escaped the legislation … Theoretically, a single anonymous comment that linked to a site with pirated versions of Pirates of the Caribbean (*fitting title as an example*) would make that site subject to being shut down if proper actions weren’t taken. All these innovative companies would spend their time playing big brother instead of creating the next new technology that will make our lives easier (or at least more fun) … And along with stifling innovation, don’t forget the riots.

To wrap up our “what if” scenario, we’d have Google failing and SMBs going out of business. The Internet would become a wasteland, and it would be like World War 10 in the streets (we skipped 3 through 9 because all of these riots would make the resulting “war” so momentous).

How’s that for a satirical worst-case scenario?

I bring this up in the wake of SOPA and PIPA being tabled because the legislators who proposed those controversial bills merely stopped pursuing their goals in the form of those bills … We can’t let the idea that “we’ve won the battle” distract us from potentially losing the war.

Many technology companies, including Google and Wikipedia, publicly spoke out against this bill by “blacking out” their sites. Due to all the negative responses from the tech community, the bills’ sponsors in Congress decided they didn’t want the blood from World War 10 on their hands.

We need to continue the momentum from the Internet’s response to SOPA and PIPA — not only to pay attention to attempts at similar legislation in the future but also to proactively help create and shape laws that protect intellectual property and copyright holders.

Also, anything we can collectively do to prevent riots in the streets is a good thing.

-Philip

Many companies leverage the cloud to take advantage of core features that enable robust, agile architectures. Elasticity (ability to quickly increase or decrease compute capacity) and flexibility (choice such as cores, memory and storage) combine to provide solutions that scale to meet the demands of modern applications.

Another widely used feature of cloud computing is image-based provisioning. Rapid provisioning of cloud resources is accomplished, in part, through the use of images. Imaging capability extends beyond the use of base images, allowing users to create customized images that preserve their software installs and configurations. The images persist in an image library, allowing users to launch new cloud instances based their images.

But why should images only be applicable to virtualized cloud resources?

Toward that end, we’re excited to introduce SoftLayer Flex Images, a new capability that allows us to capture images of physical and virtual servers, store them all in one library, and rapidly deploy those images on either platform.

Physical servers now share the core features of virtual servers—elasticity and flexibility. With Flex Images, you can move seamlessly between and environments as your needs change.

Let’s say you’re running into resource limits in a cloud server environment—your data-intensive server is I/O bound—and you want to move the instance to a more powerful dedicated server. Using Flex Images, you can create an image of your cloud server and, extending our I/O bound example, deploy it to a custom dedicated server with SSD drives.

Conversely, a dedicated environment can be quickly replicated on multiple cloud instances if you want the scaling capability of the cloud to meet increased demand. Maybe your web heads run on dedicated servers, but you’re starting to see periods of usage that stress your servers. Create a Flex Image from your dedicated server and use it to deploy cloud instances to meet demand.

Flex Image technology blurs the distinctions—and breaks down the walls—between virtual and physical computing environments.

We don’t think of Flex Images as new product. Instead—like our network, our portal, our automated platform, and our globe-spanning geographic diversity—Flex Image capability is a free resource for our customers (with the exception of standard nominal costs in storing the Flex Images).

We think Flex Images represents not only great value, but also provides a further example of how SoftLayer innovates continually to bring new capabilities and the highest possible level of customer control to our automated services platform.

To sum up, here are some of the key features and benefits of SoftLayer Flex Images:

• Universal images that can be used interchangeably on dedicated or cloud systems
• Unified image library for archiving, managing, sharing, and publishing images
• Greater flexibility and higher scalability
• Rapid provisioning of new dedicated and cloud environments
• Available via SoftLayer’s management portal and API

In public beta, Flex Images are available now. We invite you to try them out, and, as always, we want to hear what you think.

-Marc

Before I go any further, I should probably back up and talk about how unique the SoftLayer culture is. In 2010, a few of the SLayers in Dallas got SoftLayer-sponsored tattoos from an artist that visited our headquarters. We have a Facebook album of SoftLayer tattoos that features some of that ink.

I work in SoftLayer’s Seattle facility, so I wasn’t able to join in on the fun in the Dallas office, but Lance extended the offer to anyone in the company that wanted to get a tattoo. As one of the few guys in Washington that has any ink on my body, I said that if the unofficial SoftLayer tattoo artist would come to Seattle for us, I’d get it done. There wasn’t enough demand to justify a trip from Texas, but Lance said I could expense it if I wanted to join the club … The only requirement was that the tattoo had to incorporate SoftLayer in some way.

I had a few ideas, but nothing struck me as a perfect design for SoftLayer Seattle. When I was in Lahaina, I stopped by and visited Tony, a tattoo artist at Skin Deep Tattoo who did a cover up for me a few years ago. He asked me how work was going, and I started telling him about how much I loved SoftLayer’s culture and how the company has grown so substantially in just a few short years … And he was impressed that we’ve added eleven more data centers on three different continents in the four years since we expanded from Dallas into Seattle.

I told him about Lance’s tattoo offer, and we came up with this amazing SoftLayer Seattle design:

I know it’s a little crazy to get a work-inspired tattoo, but there aren’t many places where you hear people saying things like “Three Bars for Life!” as you walk through the office … I’ve just taken “Three Bars for Life” a little more literally in the form of a permanent tattoo. I’ve had a wonderful last four years, and can’t wait for the many more to come.

3BFL!

-Bill

P.S. If you don’t love the company you work for this much, you can always join the SoftLayer team. We’re growing like crazy, and we’re looking to add a lot of SLayers to the crew.

Every profession has their collection of acronyms. The little expressions serve as a verbal and written short hand for people who toil daily with the topics of their trade. I’m proud to confess that I’ve been using these minute medleys of letters for over twelve years. Given that I work on the Internet, I’ve been exposed to hundreds of acronyms in the fields of technology, business and management, and in my experience, I’ve had to break through several acronym “barriers” to get in the know. Because I happen to interact with customers every day as the manager of SoftLayer’s technical support department, I’ve encountered a few “Can you tell means?” responses, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post to clarify some of the common acronyms you may see in the SoftLayer vernacular.

Within support we have our CSTs (customer support technicians) and CSAs (customer support admins) who, with the help of SBTs (server build technicians), manage our massive fleet of servers. SBTs are the hands and eyes of our data centers, working closely with the hardware to ensure your server is online and operating in peak condition. The CSTs and CSAs are focused on the software and services that power your websites and applications.

Beyond employee title acronyms, you’ll probably see a collection of terms that describe the products and services that we manage. In support, we receive questions about accessing servers or CCIs (cloud computing instances) using KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) or IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) through our VPN (Virtual Private Network). Once connected to our back-end network through a SSL (Secure Socket Layer), PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunnel Protocol) or IPSEC (Internet Protocol Security) VPN, you have access to services such as DNS (Domain Name Service), NAS (Network Attached Storage) or iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Finally, while discussing our network, I often refer to http://www.softlayer.com/diagrams/pod-network-diagram/dal05 to show the difference between a VER (VPN Edge Router) and a BCS (Back-end Customer Switch).

If you run across an acronym you don’t understand in a ticket, please let us know so we can share its full meaning … By using these shortened terms, our team can provider faster service (and you can read their responses quicker). I know that seeing all the bold TLAs above may seem a little off-putting initially, but as you have a chance to read them in the context of some of the other acronyms you already know, I hope you have an “Aha!” moment … Like finding the Rosetta Stone or the Code of Hammurabi. Given the quick glance at the terms above, if you want to learn more about one of the TLAs in particular, leave a comment below, and we’ll respond in another comment with details.

CBNO

-Chris

Reading about the server and seeing it at the bottom of the “Quad Processor Multi-core Servers” list on our dedicated servers page is pretty interesting, but the real geeks want to see the nuts and bolts that make up such an amazing machine. I took a stroll down to the inventory room in our DAL05 data center in hopes that they had one of our E7-4850s available for a quick photo shoot to share with customers, and I was in luck.

The only way to truly admire a server is to put it through its paces in production, but getting to see a few pictures of the server might be a distance second.

When you see the 2U face of the server in a rack, it’s a little unassuming. You can load it up with six of our 3TB SATA hard drives for a total of 18TB of storage if you’re looking for a ton of space, and if you’re focused on phenomenal disk IO to go along with your unbelievable compute power, you can opt for SSDs. If you still need more space,can order a 4U version fill ten drive bays!

The real stars of the show when it comes to the E7-4850 server are nestled right underneath these heatsinks. Each of the four processors has TEN cores @ 2.00GHz, so in this single box, you have a total of forty cores! I’m not sure how Moore’s Law is going to keep up if this is the next step to jump from.

With the abundance of CPU power, you’ll probably want an abundance of RAM. Not coincidentally, we can install up to 512GB of RAM in this baby. It’s pretty unbelievable to read the specs available in the decked-out version of this server, and it’s even crazier to think that our servers going to get more and more powerful.

With all of the processing power and RAM in this box, the case fans had to get a bit of an upgrade as well. To keep enough air circulating through the server, these three case fans pull air from the cold aisle in our data center, cool the running components and exhaust the air into the data center’s “hot aisle.”

Because this machine could be used to find the last digit of pi or crunch numbers to find the cure for cancer, it’s important to have redundancy … In the picture above, you see the redundant power supplies that safeguard against a single point of failure when it comes to server power. In each of our data centers, we have N+1 power redundancy, so adding N+1 power redundancy into the server isn’t very redundant at all … It’s almost expected!

If your next project requires a ton of processing power, a lot of room for RAM, and redundant power, this server is up for the challenge! Configure your own quad-proc ten-core beast of a machine in our shopping cart or contact our SLales team for a customized quote on one: sales@softlayer.com

When you get done benchmarking it against your old infrastructure, let us know what you think!

-Summer

On the Protect IP Act (PIPA) front, Senator Harry Reid also announced late last week that he’s postponed the schedule vote on the legislation that was originally slated for today. In a statement released on Friday, Senator Reid went on to say:

“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.”

As a hosting provider, we wholeheartedly agree that counterfeiting and piracy are a primary focus, and our opposition to the bills drafted to protect copyright holders and intellectual property owners is in response to the verbiage in the legislation and the potential dangers in the proposed means of enforcement. Having SOPA pulled and PIPA put on the shelf is an important step, but it’s not exactly a time to celebrate. The Internet community needs to remain vigilant and engaged with Congress to help create legislation that reinforces the freedom of the Internet and protects the rights of intellectual property owners.

These bills have not been forgotten by the members who introduced them for consideration and vote, and they will likely evolve into new proposals with the same intent.

Our legal team and management team will maintain our steadfast opposition to these two bills in their current form, and as similar legislation is proposed, we will fill you in on what’s being considered. In the meantime, take a few minutes to visit http://savehosting.org/ and TechAmerica to learn more about what our industry is concerned about.

-@toddmitchell