Yes! I think all companies can. From a point of branding or brand awareness the social media outlets can really give you some value. It can be additional website traffic, company transparency, or actual specials and sales but let’s face it the more people that see your name on the internet the better.

2. What is considered Social Media Spam?

To Spam you could use these tactics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_spam but don’t. You should be personable in sending your messages and don’t overdo it. Sure you can send a special or an interesting fact a few times especially if you have customers worldwide. You can always use the time zone excuse because most social media posts aren’t sticky and will be easily overlooked. The key is not using scripts to do your work for you.

3. What are some good tools to help?

I live on Hootsuite. www.hootsuite.com . This allows you to queue up tweets, Facebook status posts, and linked in conversations and I am sure there are more options on the way. Am I contradicting myself? No, because you still have to type in your updates and then schedule them according to your time zone needs. There are other great tools within Hootsuite for link clickthrough metrics and savable searches so you can keep track of what people are saying about you and also what your competitors are up to and what people think of them as well. It has a built in URL shrinking and photo uploading option also. You can have multiple users and granular security for those users. All in all, Hootsuite is a very valuable free tool for corporate social media.

4. If you get some bad feedback what should you do?

Take a deep breath, put on your big kid pants, layer on some thick skin and then think about your response and what you might say. Then take another deep breath, re-read your response 3 or 4 times and then try to make contact privately if possible. See if there is something you could have done better as sometimes constructive criticism can really help your company. If your attempts to make contact privately fail then you have to decide if a public response is necessary. Sometimes this can be a good idea and sometimes it is better to just let it fade. You have to use a little common sense on this one. If there are multiple posters on the same issue then a public response can be a great thing. If it is a single angry poster and the private requests fail then it is probably just better to let it go away on its own.

5. To support or not support?

I firmly believe that social media and social support/customer service are two very different things. The twitter account for SoftLayer is www.twitter.com/softlayer_news and I try to have a little fun, show a little transparency to our fans and customers, offer a special occasionally, but mainly try to get some traffic to our corporate website. I try to stay far away from customer support and only do light customer service. We have many other traditional ways to get support and service that our customers need to continue to use. In my book, if a customer has to resort to social media to get some attention from our sales or customer service teams, then we have already failed.

6. Have a little fun, have a personality

Now that you have the tools and know what to do and what not to do, have a little fun. Have a scavenger hunt, send out some swag, make a few friends get some followers and get to tweeting. Personality can go a long way in getting people interested in what you and your company are up to. Once you get it going it just becomes more and more fun. Look at the bright side there are much worse jobs you could have in the world.

As we walked we saw some pretty cool sights and I have attached a picture or two for you to see. Once you get past the bridge in the pictures

You round a corner and then the pacific winds hit you in the face and the sun hides behind the rock walls and trees.

I thought at first the temperature difference was about 10 degrees but as we kept walking I soon was glad I wore jeans, and not shorts, and my new comfortable shoes. At about 3 miles I was ready for a taxi but once you hit the backside of the park cars, taxis, helicopters and sea planes are hard to come by as well as “porto-potties”. But we kept walking. We saw giant cable wrapped bundles of lumber that must have fallen from their ships and washed ashore. Then we stumbled upon Kent Avery. The man can balance a rock. This picture is not faked in any way

And here is a cool video about him http://ow.ly/1M3AQ. I watched him stack two or three rocks and he just balances it and then adds another and then another. Did I mention there is a 10mph wind blowing and not one stack of rocks fell.

We made it around the park and then walked the rest of the 10 miles to get to a small restaurant on Robson hill. Yea, I said hill and yea we had to walk up it. After sitting at the restaurant for about 3 hours I could barely move. The hotel bed that night was a welcome site. The next day it was off to San Francisco for Citrix Summit and Synergy. This was a much larger show and the first thing I noticed while walking towards the convention center was the people who had already checked in were wearing branded Citrix and SoftLayer lanyards around their necks to hold their access badge. It was really cool. I can’t count how many people I talked to that noticed my SoftLayer shirt and asked what we did just because we were on the lanyard with Citrix. Overall this was a great show. Nathan Day was on a round table and then discussed Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Public and Private Clouds. The entire team of 7 stayed extremely busy for the show.

SoftLayer is becoming more and more known everywhere I go. Infrastructure as a service must be here to stay, because I don’t get to stay in one place very long at the moment. Flight 566 from San Fran to Dallas is about 20 minutes out. See you on the ground!

As you can see the word has the possibility for quite a few meanings. We use the word today for quite a few things. We do this with other words in the English language as well. Here are a couple of my favorites.

“They’re over there talking about their cars.” And “He should sell those sails while they are on sale.”

The English language can be very tricky because the same words can have different meaning or different words can sound the same when spoken. Here is my best attempt at a network sentence.

“I was on my wireless network, networking with some of my in-network physicians while watching my favorite network TV show.” Um, could I get some help diagramming this sentence over here?

According to Google Webmaster tools SoftLayer uses the word Network 1916 times on our entire site. The only other word we use more is of course the word SoftLayer (because we like our name I assume!) and it has a total of 7235. I think you will see in the coming months that these two numbers will get closer together as we have just rolled out our new network.

You can read all about it here and if you like what you see then please click our “Like” button in the upper right corner of the page. Here are a few of the fun details:

• 1,000 Gbps of connectivity between 3 data centers and 7 points of presence – It makes a great network that looks like a net!
• Increased number of transit providers and peers – more control, lower latency, improved routes – PING times will improve.
• VPN Access to all PoPs – reduces latency between you and our network.
• Enterprise Grade DNS located in all 10 PoPs – this will improve d performance and help with DDOS mitigation.
• Direct Connections to PoPs – Get a Metro WAN direct to SoftLayer private network.

Keep looking for more new announcements in the coming weeks. I would make a checklist but it would be very long and would take too much of my time to manage!

I am in flight back from Cloud Expo in New York and it was amazing how many more people understand the cloud this year than last year. All in all it was a good show. We met a few more of our customers, and once again, we had many compliments. We really like to hear them, so if we end up at a show close to you, please come see us. We will even let you complain if you need to, but we are confident you won’t have to. You can always walk away with a little piece of SoftLayer swag, ranging from a shirt or a cup, to a Frisbee or maybe even a little free computing power.

The next show on my agenda is GDC in Vancouver and then Citrix Synergy in San Francisco. Come by and see me in person! I don’t bite, but I do growl a little. Look out for the upcoming tweets with booth numbers and show times, and as always we might have something special to hand you.

While you are at it – come check us out on Facebook, flickr, twitter and the rest!

What do The Shining and redrum have to do with SoftLayer. At SoftLayer we are all about redrum but only when it comes to destroying left over customer data. What do I mean by destroying customer data you ask?

When you have a server that you spent Capex on and have it in front of you and can touch it and set coffee on it or use it for a plant stand, you know where your data is. When you replace that server or upgrade the hard drive you can then do what most people do with the old one and chunk it in the dumpster or be a little more secure and format the hard drive or even a little more secure and take the drive out and smash it into pieces. Now, that is secure.

So what do you do when you outsource your hardware to a provider like SoftLayer? You put your old data in our hands and we redrum the data and make Jack Nicholson seem like an angel.

It is a little more difficult for us to protect your old data because we are an on-demand provider. When you cancel a server we reuse that server for another customer. You probably don’t want your data in that new customers hands so we have to do a little more than format the drive and we can’t just take it outside and bash it into pieces because then we couldn’t reuse the drive. So we use a little technology to make sure your old data is safe.

When you cancel a server it sits in limbo for a bit just to make sure we can’t change your mind and make you keep it. After the waiting period we erase the data. This is a destructive process so when you do cancel a server, make sure you have the data you still require somewhere else. Our system uses algorithms developed by the Department of Defense and several independent agencies that are considered military grade as defined by the DOD 5220.22-M (sounds official right?). Utilizing this process residual drive data is destroyed. This process is monitored and logged and we can track the history of any drive. Once complete the drive is ready to be redeployed to a new customer.

I know what you are thinking, that isn’t redrum, but what do we do with a drive when it is at the end of its productive life? Either too small, not fast enough, dead and out of warranty? We redrum it for sure! We complete the steps above and then send them offsite to get destroyed and then get them back after they are destroyed for tracking and verification of redrum! Yes, we could get them shredded but then we would have no proof they were destroyed. Here is what they look like when they return.

Note the hole in the center

This is looking down from the “top”

And last but not least, a view from the bottom. Note the platters are bent and protruding through the board.

*Note – Just in case you haven’t seen The Shining (Spoiler Alert) a small boy in the movie mumbles redrum in an eerie voice in the beginning of the movie. He continues to say it more and more and finally he writes it on the bathroom wall. When you see it reversed in the bathroom mirror you then understand what he is saying.

A little background, as you may know it was really cold here last week in Texas terms and a sunny day here is usually not 20 degrees for the high. Now for the story, the person told me that he is not really adept at checking his gas gauge on a regular basis and for certain he would not think far enough ahead to get gas on the last warm day before the cold air hit. So he jumps in his car and takes off down the freeway. About 20 minutes into the drive he notices his low fuel light is on and he can’t remember the last time he filled up or approximately how many miles he has driven. He has run dry on fuel a couple of times in the past and doesn’t want to risk it in the cold weather. He has no choice but to pull into the first station he sees and fill up the tank. As he is filling up he starts to think about how much cheaper the gas is closer to his house and how much extra he will be paying for his lack of attention. He makes a mental note that in 2010 he is going to pay more attention to detail and be a little more on top of things going forward.

Has this ever happened to you? Not just with fuel, but how about in technology? How many times have you “jumped” in to a new provider and not checked the gauges? How many times has your hosting provider run out of fuel on you? How much did that down time cost you? Was it more expensive because you just had to do whatever it took to get back up and running? What if you had planned ahead and had better disaster recovery scenarios in place? Could you have same time, money and effort?

Did you know that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again the same way expecting different results? How can you stay with a failing provider if they are insane? How can you keep using CAPEX for equipment that is obsolete the minute you take it out of the box? How can you keep running your site, application or database without a good backup policy? You still haven’t added that next piece of redundancy, why not? All these bad habits that you continue to carry from year to year have to go! These are no different than eating too much chocolate! That is the habit I am giving up in 2010, what is yours?

Make 2010 different. Give us a call.

With so many people using convenient things today, we at SoftLayer do the best we can to make things very convenient but also do our part for the globe. We only print things on paper when absolutely necessary. Not only do we save a tree, but it is much more secure. Everyone recently received a plastic cup with the SoftLayer logo on it for water or tea. We can use these instead of using so many disposable plastic cups. We have recycle bins in each break room for the recyclables; and, as we have stated in many blogs, we have contracts in place with recycling shops for the extra server packaging we receive with new shipments. We do our best to stick to the 3 R’s—reduce, reuse, and recycle.

So how does SoftLayer continue making our service so convenient without being wasteful? I am glad you asked! Instead of going out and buying home servers, or desktop servers—which seems to be the newest craze—and then having to throw away all the unused documentation and un-used packing materials, we simply choose to team up with Supermicro. They are a server manufacturer that listens to their customers needs and provides solutions as well as design flexibility, rapid order fulfillment, and superior quality. We are no longer relegated to do what the other server manufacturers force on other customers. This gives us the freedom of convenience while still being green. Does it make our competitors green with envy? Sure it does. That is why there are lower price points offered in the hosting market by our competitors still using workstations, desktop and home servers instead of enterprise class, high efficiency, and low power consuming servers. The efficiency of our servers allows us to have very dense server rooms with a smaller footprint, which saves on power consumption for cooling as well. Last but not least, by using rack mount servers instead of towers, Supermicro has worked with us to reduce the packing materials by 80%—resulting in an eight pound reduction in the total weight of each server.

At SoftLayer we take pride in making convenient, green IT; and with Supermicro as a great partner, we continue to do just that.

• Level 4 – Any merchant processing fewer than 20,000 credit card e-commerce transactions in a 12 month period
• Level 3 – 20,000 up to 1 Million transactions
• Level 2 – 1 Million up to 6 Million
• Level 1 – 6 million + (or any merchant that Visa feels should meet level 1 to minimize risks) This is what we are all striving for, right?

Who cares if you are PCI compliant? For starters, YOU should! And secondly, your merchant bank will care. They will care more the larger you get. See minimize risks statement above.
Since it isn’t a federal law should I risk it, because I know my security and I am impenetrable? I wouldn’t take that risk because you can still pay fines, card replacement costs, and pay for forensic audits, etc if someone were to get in and steal data.
How can SoftLayer help? For starters and a quick level 4 fix you can go here and get free scanning on a single IP. Combine that with a “quick” questionnaire about your physical and data security policies and voila, no onsite visit needed and you are now PCI Level 4. Mcafee can help you with you higher level compliance if you would like. Don’t take the questionnaire too lightly because remember you do care about PCI!
Ok so if you have made it this far then you must like boring reading. Go read this. It might come in handy someday. It is the “do this if you get hacked” cheat sheet.
On to 2010! MasterCard stepped up in 2009 and stated that even their Level 2 merchants had to have an onsite QSA assessment by December 31, 2010. That has now been pushed to June 30, 2011. There seems to be some confusion from the other Credit Card companies and they didn’t all jump on board. One thing that they did all agree on is that you can’t put credit card info on WEP secured wireless at all after July 2010. Just don’t do it! And don’t use old un-patched payment applications because they are insecure and will not be allowed after July as well.
This could all change just like Texas weather. If you don’t like the new rules, then just wait a couple of days and they may change it more to your liking. There are still a few things they are looking at going forward that I will let you in on and then I assure you I will stop typing. PCI 1.2 is still about stopping hackers from getting in, there is a new interest in the community on addressing “internal” hackers. The current focus of PCI is aimed at card data “after” authorization but doesn’t say much about card data that is kept prior to authorization, so you can bet that will be added soon too and of course cloud infrastructure and card data has to be on everyone’s radar screen soon.

8/24/2009 11:45PM – Got the new servers setup; now I have redundancy for my app. G’nite.

9/04/2009 8:00AM – Suhweet, just passed 50K users for my app. Hitting the pool.

9/21/2009 6:42PM – Oops, app crashed too many users. Recovering now. Thank goodness for monitoring alerts.

9.21/2009 8:13PM – Sorry all, app back up. SL CloudLayer really helped. Their portal makes it all easy.

9/22/2009 3:13AM – Ok stayed up late tonight and added new functionality to the app and added a new app server, geographic load balancing baby!

10/6/2009 2:45PM – Thanks for all the support on the app, keep the new ideas coming. 450K users and growing.

10/31/2009 5:50PM – Happy Halloween! 627K users. Thank you!!

11/14/2009 6:02AM – Getting close 989K users. Party at 1 Million. Just added 2 new front end servers in each DC, adding cloud storage now for Data replication/protection.

11/21/2009 7:31AM– It’s finally here 1 Mil. Party time! Isn’t ad revenue the greatest. The in game pay to play money is fun too. Thanks all!

12/10/2009 4:42PM – Still growing. I was alerted that one server crashed. No users affected. Technology is cool.

12/18/2009 9:16PM– ‘Bout to go silent for the Holidays. Hope you all have good ones. See you at 1.5 million when I return.

12/19/2009 7:00AM – Decided to add a couple more cloud instances for good measure. App is smoking fast.

12/31/2009 10:45PM – Monitoring just hit my phone, at party will check asap.

12/31/2009 11:00PM – Found a netbook at the party. App is crashed. Looking.

12/31/2009 11:07 PM – WT? All servers down, hard down. SL up and friend app good on SL network. Investigating, sorry for outage.

12/31/2009 11:10 PM – Hackers? Not sure all servers affected. Ping only. Had very secure. No problem before.

12/31/2009 11:29PM – Portal password got hacked. Intruders OS reloaded every server with RedHat, turned off all CCI.

1/04/2009 6:00AM – Happy New Year, mine sucked – app back – 5000 daily users. Sad day.

While the above is completely fictional, it could happen to just about anyone. Don’t let it happen to you. No matter how long and how secure you think your password is, there is someone out there who can crack it. It is one thing keeping a server secure and most technical geniuses are very adept at doing just that. With all the time and effort it takes to keep your servers secure, you might find that you have slipped in other areas. SoftLayer is here to help in VIP Style.

The cutting edge SoftLayer portal now has optional Two Factor Authentication support using VeriSign’s Identity Protection. First, what is Two Factor Authentication? It is defined as, “something you know (password) and something you HAVE (pin number of sorts).” Here is how it works:

You buy a physical device in the form of a keychain token or a credit card token; or in the cool age of technology, you can simply get one of the free phone apps that do the same thing for you without the extra piece of equipment to carry. Once you get the device/app you would go to the portal and register the token’s unique ID and attach it to a username on the account. The master user gets this FREE and then if you want other users on your account to have this functionality it is $3 per user per month. If the master user does turn on this functionality no one else will be allowed into the system without using two factor authentication. Once this is setup, the user will login using their “known” password and then they will also have to enter the “code” (the thing you have) on the token device or phone app to gain access. The code changes on a fast schedule so this is extremely secure. This would have made the New Year’s celebration for the person above much more fun.

One last thing, since we partnered with VeriSign you can use the token device or phone app for different sites that use the VeriSign product. PayPal is one example. Here is a complete list.

Now that you know about it, and now that we offer it, don’t be the guy that doesn’t keep the portal secure and misses out on a Happy New Year!