Man, was this a weekend for me and backups! The first one I needed was for my second advance free fall course at skydive101.com on Friday (My Saturday). I jumped out of the plane a little early and one of my two instructors was not ready and did not jump on my call. Thank god I had a backup. Once my shoot deploys, being this is only my second jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I look up to check my slider and make sure my parachute is deployed and everything is correct I did not see my brake handles, I said some curse words I won’t put in this blog, and then was like it is OK I have a backup. I was still at 4000 ft at this time, still having another 1500 feet to decide if I want to release my main and pull the backup, luckily I found my brake handles pulled down twice and they worked and everything was OK.

So I get home after a day of skydiving and having fun in the sun (it is rather rare in Seattle, though not this summer) and I notice my trusty old Windows XP terminal has multiple errors on it. I do the first thing I always do with my personal Microsoft machines and reboot it. Ouch no operating system found, bad hard drive! Thank god I ghosted that machine 2 weeks ago as I figured the old IDE drives had been on their last legs. Saturday morning comes around, which is a big day for me, as I am hosting a party that night at a local night club. I notice I have a few (8900) email messages on my blackberry, so I decided it is about time to delete some. I tell it to delete, look back at it and 4 minutes later it says APP ERR. PLEASE RESTART. Needless to say, you guessed it. It wouldn’t boot back up and I had to force an OS onto it, and restore from my backup of a month ago, which reminded me that I need to start backup my blackberry more often.

So the moral of the story is, it is always good to have a backup, and we have plenty of backup options for you, so if you don’t have one, I would suggest contacting SLales. I would also suggest everyone trying to skydive at least once in their lifetime.

I can easily define myself as the crazy one up in the Seattle Datacenter. I like to ride dirt bikes, street bikes, go fast on the water, ride in small airplanes, I could go on and on how my co-workers (and friends/family) may think I am crazy when it comes to Adventures.

What can I say, I like a challenging experience.

One of those challenging experiences is working at SoftLayer, always preparing to be ahead of the rest in this industry, we’re constantly learning new technologies and taking leaps and bounds. That is the reason why I love my job so much, we’re always working with the latest and greatest, learning new stuff. Speaking of leaps and bounds, I finally did something the other day I have always wanted too. I signed up for an Advance Free Fall Skydive class and jumped out of a Cessna at 13,000 feet. Free falling at terminal speeds towards the earth, At 12,000 feet I mock pulled my parachute 3 times, so the instructors who where both holding onto me by their hands only could see I learned what to do. 6000 ft came, I locked onto my altimeter, 5500 I waived hands off to the instructors and they deployed below me, and I pulled my rip cord. That all happened in about 50 seconds after leaping out of the plane. For the next 8 minutes I saw the best view in Western Washington I have ever seen. One of the thoughts that came to my mind is the only thing to relate to how I have ever thought something was this nice, was the first time I walked into a SoftLayer Datacenter and admired how well thought out and nice it was.

I’m glad to say 19 months into this job and being part of the Operations team in Seattle, I walk in each day to the datacenter and can say the same thing day in and day out. Let’s hope I can say the same thing about my second jump in a few weeks.

Fourth of July – Independence Day is more than just a day for us to hang out with friends and family across the United States and gather around the BBQ and watching fireworks and bombs blow up. It is a day that we celebrate our founding fathers courage and bravery in the pursuit of liberty and freedom.

If it wasn’t for these men and their dreams, I would not be sitting here at SoftLayer writing this blog for a company that loves us to share our words and views with others. I have been amazed how over the last few weeks how Twitter and other sites have helped the country of Iran speak their voice and let the world know what is going on over there. We would never know what is going on as their government would not allow it to be voiced on the state ran television.

So, as I am camping this Fourth of July in the San Juan Islands, fishing on the lake and watching the skies over Friday Harbor light up, I will be thankful for what our founding fathers accomplished on that day in 1776.

So there I was after work today, sitting in my favorite watering hole drinking my Jagerbomb, when Caira, my bartender asked what was on my mind. I told her that I had been working with clouds and elephants all day at work and neither of those things are little. She laughed and asked if I had stopped anywhere to get a drink prior to her bar. I replied no, I’m serious I had to make some large clouds and a stampede of elephants work together. I then explained to her what Hadoop was. Hadoop is a popular open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce. It allows transformation and extensive analysis of large data sets using thousands of nodes while processing peta-bytes of data. It is used by websites such as Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, and China’s best search engine Baidu. I explained to her what cloud computing was (multiple computing nodes working together) hence my reference to the clouds, and how Hadoop was named after the stuffed elephant that belonged to one of the founders – Doug Cutting – child. Now she doesn’t think I am as crazy.

Quite often my friends who are not really that internet savvy ask me what I do at work, I think back to the time in the first grade when my teacher Mrs. Hyde told me: “ Bill you’re going to be a great problem solver when you get older, your problem solving skills are already at a fourth grade level.” Now you’re probably reading this wondering how problem solving problems in the first grade have anything to do with my job. It is, as she told me, all about how you think. She told me I was an outside the box thinker.

My co-workers and I deal with a network of 20,000+ servers, and 5500+ customers, in over 110 different countries, and support over 15 different operating systems. That leads to an almost infinite combination of language, hardware, and software options. When our customers submit an issue for us to work on, it is always different than the time before – whether that is a ticket from the same customer or a ticket on a similar topic. We have a very diverse range of customers using our servers for a number of things, so not every server in here is doing the same thing. In order to be good at supporting our customers, SoftLayer’s management, in my opinion, has hired some of the best problem solvers around the world to address all of our customer issues. So that is what I am: I am a problem solver! Otherwise known as a Customer Systems Administrator. We’re required to know a broad range of technologies and have the passion to learn the new ones as they come along. I think that is why I chose to work in the field that I work in, it is always changing. I tried moving over to telecommunications engineering a few years ago, but got bored with is as it was the same issues day in and day out on the equipment. Working here at SoftLayer is wonderful as there is never a dull moment.

Over the years I have had many motorized toys, including boats, cars, trucks, dirt bikes, quads, riding lawn mowers and others. I got my first mini bike when I was about 6 years old. That thing was powerful – it had a 4HP Engine on it. One day I was riding it on our 100 acre homestead and the chain broke. Well I just popped the kick stand up and left it there waiting for Dad to get home. Upon my father arriving I let him know the chain broke, he explained to me the proper maintenance one must do in order to keep a chain working, proper oiling techniques, making sure it has the right tension and more. A few years later I got my first two stroke dirt bike. I loved that thing! I rode it all weekend long and then I mixed the gas too lean and blew the top head of it. That’s when I learned how to maintain a 2 cycle engine. My uncle helped me rebuild the bike engine (or shall I say I handed him the tools, and he rebuilt it) With all motorized engines they need proper care and maintenance. I now take my car for an oil change every 4000 miles (even though they say it can go 5,000) and get everything checked out.

The same thing can be said for internet servers. Quite often I talk to people and they think they can just install their operating system, upload the applications they want to run and/or data they want to serve, and walk away from that machine for the next 12 months. That is wrong! Computer software is always updating and you need to stay on top of updating your software. Security threats are found hourly, Viruses are written daily to attack the threats found yesterday. Proper maintenance is the only way to make sure your data is safe and secure. That is why SoftLayer has partnered with companies that offer extended server management. We call them SoftLayer Certified Management Companies. You can find them in our forums. These companies like rackaid.com, seeksadmin.com, Bitpusher, and many more have all been certified by SoftLayer to know our infrastructure and work closely with us and many of our clients. They provide the same great level of customer service that is standard at SoftLayer and do a lot of the advanced administration tasks for our customers. We have teamed up with these managed services partners in order to provide our customers with the proper maintenance of their infrastructure. So if you haven’t done a security audit on one of your machines in a few months, I would suggest taking it to the service center and contacting one of these companies, so you can insure your machine is safe and secure!

Social Networking in my eyes has been around for years since the old bulletin board system days, though now with the advancement of technology and the internet, we see it on a much larger scale. I remember in 2004 I told myself I would never join Myspace. That turned out to be wrong in October of 2005 I joined and connected with friends from the past.

Then came facebook, I once again refused to become a member of another social networking site, though in 2008 I joined to help diagnose one of our customers issues as they hosted an application on the site. I then later found additional friends that had one or the other, so I started using both to stay connected (Still all wondering why no one just uses email like it was intended for instead of just for notifications from your favorite social sites).

I then joined a more professional social networking site, LinkedIn, and became connected with former co-workers, contractors, professors, students, and industry people. Then came twitter, which I just signed up for a few months ago and haven’t really gotten into it, as I feel it is the same as status updates on facebook and myspace, while thinking to myself, do I really need to update my friends with what I am doing every hour on all three. No I don’t think so, but I have friends that do!

My blackberry has five main applications that are used on it: Email; Browser; SMS messages; Myspace; and Facebook. All get checked about every 30 minutes so I can stay in the know about everything from work, to friends. I rarely use personal email for things anymore as most of my friends contact me on one of the social networking sites. I have often thought about deleting one or the other if not both. I find myself telling myself, why it’s like when you disconnected text messaging from your cell phone in 2000 because you hated it, you’ll sign right back up for it as it has became an essential in my life.

I can’t say I couldn’t live without social networking sites, but it would require me to reorganize how I organize my already busy life. My answer is yes, social networking has changed my life and how I interact with people. Social Networking can be a very vital tool, if you are a restaurant / bar, band, sales person, etc. You can use Social Networking to expose yourself to that many more people and reach out!

Now I’m off to install TwitterBerry and see if that makes me like twitter anymore, ask me in three months.

Do you remember sitting back in a high school class saying to yourself: “I am never going to use this in the real world once I grow up!” Well I often felt that, especially when I was in the Student Computing Services program at Henderson Bay High School in Gig Harbor. The year was 1998 and Henderson Bay had just landed a grant from the Intel Corp, which made us a certified Intel refurbishment program.

Intel and the computer teachers worked on a program, which they donated old hardware (Pentium 90’s when Pentiums 120’s where being released) to our school. We then had to develop a streamline operations program of building these computers, using an imaging system to install the OS and applications. Then we had to create an inventory tracking system to track them prior to giving them away to other schools in Washington State. Over the course of 3 years, I think we deployed a few thousand machines throughout the state, while Tigard High school in Oregon was doing the same thing.

I was working a long day at the beginning of this month for our beloved truck day here at SoftLayer, this is when we get all of the servers the SLales team will sell for the month. All local staff is required to be there and work long hours. We streamline the process so well that within hours we have unboxed, sorted all the parts, double checked the inventory, and deployed the 500 or so servers into the rack each month at each location.

The process reminds me of the truck days we used to have when the Intel truck would show up with cases, motherboards, processors, ram, and hard drives. All which had to be put together. We never had a problem building and deploying boxes for the schools ten years ago, and that is because the teachers ran it as a company. We had a staff of students that operated as inventory control managers, project managers, systems administrators, and front line technical support, and hardware technicians supporting each school district that we donated systems too. The process was overseen by two teachers, that ran the SCS program, and it was there fine detail that kept 50 students running this mock company.

It’s the same fine detail that the operations team at SoftLayer has taught us while doing truck days. I first dreaded my first or second truck day – something about working doubles didn’t appeal to me. After one or two of them, I started to like them. It’s a wonderful way to start off the month. Now if you would have asked me during a high school truck day, if I’d be looking forward to doing it again in ten years, I would have told you that you’re out of your mind. Ask me today and I will tell you it was one of the greatest processes that I learned during my high school years (Along with ditching English to hang out in the computer lab).

I often get asked why I started using Linux as my core desktop OS and server OS over 10 years ago. And why I continue to use it today. Linux has come a long way since its early days as a free OS and I am thankful for that. Here are a few reasons that I choose Linux:

1. It is free – no license fee or maintenance associated with it
2. Spyware / Viruses are very rare
3. Requires few reboots
4. It can read most any file system that has been made
5. Open source, so you can see what you’re running!
6. It’ll run on just about anything (WiiLi.org)
7. Built in virtualization that is also free
8. The shell environment is much better than any type of DOS
9. Lack of a registry, most configurations is stored in standard text files
10. It has more documentation than any other open source O/S
11. It will still run fine as a proxy on my Pentium II
12. Most distributions now come bundled with an awesome desktop environment
13. Saves on bandwidth due to not having to update virus dat files and windows updates every night
14. The Linux kernel comes shipped with an enormous load of hardware drivers, already installed, making most PNP friendly things available after you plug them into the machine
15. Easy to build into a home media center
16. Most server distributions come bundled with a database program, so you don’t need to purchase an expensive database service
17. It can scale to 1024 processors on a single computer
18. Easy to setup in a dual boot configuration
19. Linux is easy to updated, most distributions make it quick and easy to upgrade from on version to the next
20. The Linux community is very helpful out here on the internet

So it’s been about 4 months now since Seattle went live. We have approximately 2000 servers active already! (That’s more than the last DC I worked at has and they’ve been selling servers in Seattle since August of 2005). Server room 1 has lots of cool servers with lots of blinky lights and we’ve been working hard on deploying Server room two around the clock to keep up with the demands of sales around here.

With the “Go-Live Team” back in Dallas loading up the truck to head out to Chantilly, everything is running smoothly up in the great northwest. We no longer have to hear about {insert random person from the Dallas Go-Live team} complain about not having a What-A-Burger for dinner. That’s fine because we have world famous Hot Dogs right up on the corner at Matt’s Famous Chilidogs to cure the hunger that strikes us in the middle of our shift.

With Server room two going live this last week we had another Seattle truck day (this was the first truck day that we completed with 100% staff from Seattle). We didn’t need those experts from Dallas to baby us through. No Brad Lewis’s to answer questions when we have them. ☺ I must say that everything this last week went great and to continue a new SoftLayer tradition, everyone in Seattle deserves a VFB!

So here is MY Seattle VFB to everyone!

- III!

Something cool is the guys from Operations decided to drop by late last Friday. They were more than pleased and impressed with everyone and the performance that we showed them with our preparation of SR02 this last week.

We’ve set sail guys, and are doing a great job, and we like being noticed by the guys down in Dallas and from what our customers have to say. We will keep up the great work.

It really rocks! I must say that we have it good at SL, but that must be because we got the best C.E.O. ever! (Wonder’s if I’ll see a extra $50 now.. hey Little Jones got it right!?! )

- III! to the guys in Seattle..