While we’ve discussed how much us techies love, crave, and abuse caffeine what are some questions that may come up on the most abused substance in the world? What side-effects are there? How much caffeine is too much caffeine? Are there any benefits?

Generally, you’d want to stay with around 1-2mg’s of caffeine per pound of body weight. Which, for the most part, a 1-2oz shot of espresso or a cup of coffee all come out to approximately 100mg’s of Caffeine. A lot of this is based on tolerance but the most common side-effects from caffeine “intoxication” can cause things like insomnia, a rapid heartbeat, irritability, muscle twitching and increased urination. Speaking of which, much like after drinking alcohol you must make sure you keep yourself hydrated. You know where this is going, if you plan on mixing caffeine with alcohol via the common Jager Bombs, Cherry Bombs, Vegas Bombs, Bombs, you should be warned that this can lead to bad decision making.

Aside from the obvious benefit of caffeine providing that extra “pep” in the day, it has been shown in many studies that Coffee (the most common source of Caffeine) is extremely high in antioxidants. It has also been found to be a cancer fighter including reducing your chances for cirrhosis and liver cancer which is the #3 cancer killer. The ingredients found in Coffee most definitely synergistically work together and would be the best choice by far if compared to your endless choices of energy drinks. Most energy drinks also contain the same array of ingredients, B-Vitamins, Taurine, Caffeine, Ginseng, and Guarana (pre-cursor to Caffeine). If you are still determined to get an energy drink shoot for one of the coffee drinks unless coffee just isn’t your thing.

Always keep in mind that if you feel like you NEED Caffeine to keep you going day-to-day it’s likely that the Caffeine from the day before kept you from sleeping as well as you could have. I always recommend a Caffeine detox to keep your tolerance down and to avoid getting dependent on it but man those headaches make me want some coffee!

P.S.

If some of this didn’t make sense, I may have rambled on a bit and I confess.. I drank a Venti Starbucks Double Shot on Ice with an extra shot of espressob(6 shots total of espresso)..

For more info on Caffeine Wikipedia is THE place to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine

Most of the posts here have a technical spin, and well deservedly, but this one is a little different. This is my version of an open letter to the CEO of Starbucks and any other CEO out there who is messing with my daily life by putting the idea of “conquering the world”, over the needs of the people that will get them there — the consumer. So here goes my rant:

Dear Mr. Starbuck’s (aka Howard Schultz),
As a frequent patron of your fine establishment for many years, covering many locations in multiple states and multiple countries, I need to ask a personal favor. PLEASE stop messing with me, with the idea of me being anyone other than ‘big business’. See I live in Dallas, Texas and this past weekend I had the urge to actually forego my normal $5 cup o’ java at any of the 50 Starbucks within the 4 mile radius of my house and actually go to a local establishment that has some great beans. I wasn’t going for a cup, but I was going for an actual bag of beans that I might be able to take back to the house and brew a random cup of sissy coffee (the flavored coffees that actually make hair fall off your chest, rather than put it on there like the SENOMA blend from the aforementioned Starbucks). BTW, for you Dallas’er’s my preference for my random sissy coffee fix is a Cafe Brazil.

Location aside, I drive past the 50 Starbucks in route to the closest Cafe Brazil which is about 5 miles away. My coffee of choice is the ‘Snickerdoodle’, so I was thinking I will big bag it and get a pound, maybe two, to ensure my fix is completely covered. I walk in to the aroma o’ joy that comes along with a coffee house. To an addict of caffeine, it’s kind of like Vick’s to a cold! All employees eye me and my girlfriend as we smile our way to the counter. As we are walking up, something just isn’t right and we can tell immediately something is amiss. Where are the bean’s that all of the other locations have? Where are the grinders? Being sure they are in the back or on the other side of the restaurant, I say with confidence, I want the biggest bag of beans I can get my hands on. The response, without a bat of an eye, was “not here sir, Starbucks forbids it!” WHAT THE $!%$? Again, the CSR at the counter say Starbucks told the landlord that they forbid anyone else in the shopping square to sell Coffee Beans to- go and went as far to tell me that he could not even pour me a cup of the coffee in a to-go cup, as per this was also forbid by Starbucks. This disappointment was seen in both of our faces and the CSR could tell that tears may be near, so the obligatory ’sorry’ was thrown out with a ‘can we do anything to make this right’ comment?

This is unacceptable to me. As the loyal readers of theinnerlayer and all of the employees of Softlayer can attest, Caffeine in any form is like the blood through the veins of this company. Pound for pound, employee for employee, I would challenge the caffeine intake of Softlayer against any other company in the world. Pot after pot of, yes Starbuck’s, is brewed hourly, if not minutely. Literally, cases of Monster are brought in weekly to support the efforts here. With the new JAVA Monster, the numbers may just fly right off the charts. Hence, the frustration

Mr. Starbucks, as one of the founders here at Softlayer I can tell you that all of us think about dominating our segment of the world, planned for it and expect it. Surrounding myself with the smartest people I have ever been around gives me a comforting feeling that all of these goals will be achieved. With the support of these smart people I refer to, we all have a standing order internally that to get to our stated goals; the idea of alienating customers by self serving goals has to nipped in the bud. We are a services company to the masses which means we believe that natural competition is healthy and that continuing to strive to build the bigger, better solution, customers will always be the winner in the equation. If we believed that exclusionary practices and pure heavy weight domination was the proper way to win, we would have thrown our money that way, but the open market allows us to stay at the top of our game, remain cutting edge and push for innovation and automation that will allow us to grow our customer base because we have a better solution for the customer, not because we don’t allow the customer to have any other option. I/we may be a small fish in the pond so to speak, but I think you might be able to learn something from my statements. I’m off to get my fill of caffeine, but not sure Starbucks will be my first choice for the next short while.

Sincerely,
One un-caffeinated, unhappy customer
(Sean Charnock)

I’ve never been one to do things in half measures. Growing up, my tree-house had 3 stories, a deck and indoor plumbing- if you can call a garden hose run up a tree “plumbing”.

Softlayer has been a good fit for me because we’re not used to doing things in half measures here either. Within the last two months we’ve announced the addition of Passmark certification, Rescuelayer, Urchin, StorageLayer, EVault Backups, Load Balancing, KnowledgeLayer and even a new datacenter.

All of these things require countless hours to implement. There’s development to be done, as well as testing, building, re-testing, documenting, and then some more testing. These things can stack up on you pretty fast if you’re not giving them your full attention.

In this 100mph lifestyle, I have found that there is one friend that I can count on to never let me down. My friend will always be there when I need him to get me through the hard times.

That friend is caffeine.

In previous blogs we’ve seen how dependant our Sales team is on their caffeine fix, and it’s no different for the Support team. However, we’re much more versatile with our means of intake, and it’s important to keep a well stocked fridge to keep everyone happy. Nothing can ruin your morning faster than coming to work to find that the supply of caffeine has been depleted overnight. The vast emptiness of the refrigerator echoes your cries of despair, and your mind scrabbles for a contingency plan. Wasn’t there a 7-11 close by? Does Starbucks deliver?

There are as many methods of caffeine delivery as there are species of beetle, but here are some of our favorite ways to curb the insanity:

Monster – The undisputed king of the castle. Monsters disappear faster than we can chill them, and it doesn’t matter what flavor we’ve got.

Upshot – These little guys will pick you up and shake you, and in a serious way. They’ve got a lot of kick for being as small as they are, which means that you can down 3 or 4 of them without knowing what you’ve just done to yourself. Plus, they’re easy to hide from your caffeine deprived co-workers when they’re on the hunt.

Coffee – Believe it or not, we’re not big coffee drinkers in the Support department. Still, there’s nothing quite like a hot cup of joe to get you going.

Soda – We keep a well stocked supply of various kinds of sodas for when we’re all out of serious caffeine. They’re usually the last to go, but they get the job done.

Caffeine has helped me through so many late nights and pressing deadlines that I can’t even look at it as a vice anymore. It’s evolved from a crutch to an extra set of legs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the coffee pot percolating.

Wikipedia defines stress as the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the persons biological, psychological or social systems. In a nutshell that says Stress is your mind telling you that you are in over your head for a multitude of reasons. I have worked many jobs in the past where those transactions were out of control and they became high stress jobs. Let’s hit the “wayback” machine and relive the stressful ones. I am assuming some of you will relate to this and some will just think it’s funny.

The Burger years – It all started at Burger King. I know if you haven’t done the fast food thing you are thinking, “Right, that isn’t a stressful job!” I’ll tell you though, during a lunch rush when the order screen is full and backlogged and you are the only one making burgers and you are about 30 behind, it can be a little stressful. Then there are the times when non-paying customers are eating food from the salad bar and you have to tell them to leave, but that is a separate (and funny) blog entry. Anyway, I decided that the burger future just wasn’t for me and it was adding to my ham hocks so I left for…

The Factory Months – Repetition became the word of the day for the next 8 months. I lifted 100lb bags of powder repeatedly, then cut the bags and dumped the chemicals into a vat. After hours of mixing it magically and chemically became glaze for toilets. I even made pretty colors with Black being the most time consuming, specific, and expensive (if you have ever priced a black toilet now you know why it is so high). Really the only stress there was just trying to get it all done in 8 hours correctly and not hold up the day guys and make them wait on me. Driving the forklift through the wall and losing 50 pounds of Burger King induced ham hocks was just a bonus. After that it was off to…

The Mall years – Any of you ever hear of Babbage’s? I took a store manager position and you would be amazed at how stressful working from 9am to 10pm during Christmas hours was. Normally it was just the kids kicking and screaming but during Christmas it was THE PARENTS! “I was first in line! No! I was” All that for games for the Linx hand held (it was SO cool and so before it’s time), Nintendo, or Sega. Even during the slow months the monotony of standing there just waiting for a customer was almost as stressful. I thought it was time to get a real job so I went to work for…

The Clone wars – Computer clone manufacturer as a sales person. A sales position is very stressful. I bet all you folks out there that have to meet a quota know exactly what I mean. The last day of the month you are popping the champagne corks and getting big bonuses and commissions and then the very next day your sales are at $0.00 and you are at square one again. It’s numbing and nerve-wracking. I am no longer a sales guy after 5 years of that hell and my hat is off to those of you who are good at that gig. I learned a few technical things while being in sales so it was time to try them out.

The “Internot” years – Phone support at its finest! Phone support in the early days was different than today. Today we have remote control tools and things of that nature where in the past it was all trial and error with some folks who just bought that new computer (and very first computer) with a Winmodem in it. Oh, the good old winmodems (I just shivered). I can’t even begin to explain how stressful a 12-hour shift of phone support talking about winmodems can be. If any of you remember that I bet you just shivered too. Two years of phone support was enough so…

The Geek years – Systems admin/engineer. I stressed out like crazy taking my MCSE all to get this phone call while working at a fortune 500 company. “Email is down! For everyone! Fix it! We can’t do anything without it! We are dead in the water!” MORE STRESS! I have found that CEOs can’t live without email anymore when in the past they actually played golf on the golf course, now they claim to still work! I worked with Terminal services, Citrix, and Exchange, the things that companies just CAN’T live without. Sleep was optional during this time so I decided…

Management! – Get the title. Manager, Director, I want to be a VP, etc. Life will be stress free closer to the top. What was I thinking? I think this one is better broken into two categories, managing up and the WIT method (I just made that up!). We will start with managing up. Managing up? It’s the fine art of making your boss think you are interested, patting yourself on the back, seeking new “out of your comfort zone” responsibilities, getting noticed at all costs, act like and work like one level above your title, and knowing what matters to your boss and his boss even if they don’t matter to your group or the people you manage. So for the short definition Managing up = Stress! I took pride in being the laid back easy going manager that gains respect from his employees by trusting the people he puts in a place to do their job and letting them succeed and helping when necessary. If you mix that style with a micromanager you are looking for trouble. I think stress starts at the top and is instilled in everyone all the way down to the very bottom. A workaholic CEO = a stressed out workaholic staff. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t manage up as it is a very good form of getting promoted etc. I am simply saying it adds stress to your life. On we go to…

WIT – Whatever it takes. There is something to be said about a company that has one simple motto from the top to the bottom; whatever it takes and at the same time actually living to that standard. I have found that place. When my alarm goes off now in the morning, I hit the ground running. I can’t wait to get to work and be part of the fun and productive team and do whatever it takes. I can honestly say that everyone at Softlayer has one goal – to be the best! THAT makes for an extremely stress-free and fun workplace. We don’t need to work in the Bank of America tower in beautiful downtown Dallas to be happy, we are happy already! Just keep up the free coffee and Monster and I am good to go!

If you own a small business then you most likely deal with stressful situations daily. Why not let us ease some of your IT stress and outsource your infrastructure to the best stress-free IT Company out there – SoftLayer!

Disclaimer:The events depicted in this blog are true. Any similarity to a company living or dead is most likely coincidental.

Back in Computer Science 101 I was promoted to Assistant for the Networking Staff at Kemp High School, in the tiny town where I grew up. The networking staff consisted of exactly two people: a brilliant Pascal programmer with a penchant for networks and a veteran of the mainframe days, who would happily lean back and tell old war stories about 130 column chain printers and tape drives.

One thing I noticed upon entering their office was the strong smell of coffee in the air. Indeed, they had a large pot of coffee on perpetual brew. And these two techies would drink it down as if it were water from the river of life.

Fast forward 5 years. I’m now one of those techies, but I never got quite a taste for coffee. My coworkers, however, live off the stuff. That’s when disaster struck.

Now, if you’ve not been in an office environment for a while, or you haven’t worked in IT, the enormity of this disaster might be lost on you.

The office supply company has stopped producing SoftLayer’s preferred blend!

Shockwaves rolled through the company, as the news was blasted from email to email. A democratic process was set up to choose a new blend from those that are left.

Votes have been cast left and right. Active campaigns for specific coffee blends can be heard in the aisles of the company. Some are moved to poetry on one blend or another. One vote for a specific blend reads like this:

How does this affect me?
Will this make me a better person? These and other such questions must be asked when sampling a new coffee.As the day goes by a fall back onto a sure thing is essential. Sipping this flavour of coffee is not unlike slipping into a pair of your most favourite and comfortable slippers after a long day af the office. It does indeed lift the spirit.

Dare I say that Kenya AA gives us another reason to love life and love living it. The spirit soars until it becomes unbeatable. We cannot combat this or even hope to understand this cosmic handshake. This coffee is a reflection on a productive lifestyle.

It has a hallowed place in our break room. It also smells better than the other coffees.
- Klaude

It looks like the leadup to the 2007 SoftLayer Office Coffee Blend Election will be quite the hot topic for weeks to come.

A consensus is starting to build, and soon these harsh days will be behind us, and work will proceed as usual.

However, there are some (and I am in this camp), who see this as a bigger issue. Yes, we have successfully saved the day by switching blends of coffee. And like some hard changes, it looks like this change might be for the better. But as everyone knows in IT, the cycle of obsolescence is a fact of life. Some fear that this is just the start of a long, trying cycle of acceptance and rejection; there’s a low level tension that the choice being made right now must be made right, lest the coffee industry decide that our newly selected blend should also fade away into the night. Is there no solution? No solid ground? Some demand that we get approval of a blend from a standards body, such as the IEEE, to make sure that various vendor’s competing blends are compatible with our tastes. Is this the solution to our problems?

This has caused me to worry about the future of IT. Will technology be dictated by the whims of the coffee industry?

Here are the originals. [1, and 2 (ghost writer?)]

Yes, servers shrink with size over time, but after reading this post about iPhones being web servers, I’m thinking about sending the following to David Letterman:

And now, the Top Ten Reasons Hosting Companies Should Replace Their Servers with iPhones

#10: At $500 a pop, they’re cheaper than new servers
#9: They come with more standard RAM than most servers
#8: They use less power than servers (just think how many you could cram on a rack!)
#7: They’ve got a multi-hour battery backup soldered right inside – so dispo your UPS’s also
#6: There’s no spinning disk drive to wear out
#5: You can ditch your bandwidth providers and leverage AT&T’s blistering fast EDGE network
#4: The operating system (Mac OS X) is pre-loaded – just rack it up and go
#3: Since you can’t crack it open, the expense of delivering custom builds is gone
#2: There’s a YouTube shortcut icon standard on every one
#1: They just look cool!

</sarcasm>

SL: Good morning, thank you for taking the time to meet with me.
Elevator: Ding.

SL: Excellent. How would you describe the costs maintaining efficiencies in a hosting environment?
Elevator: Going up.

SL: Well, I think that’s obvious, depending on where you start. Perhaps a better way to phrase this would be, “How would you recommend leveraging existing technologies to implement an efficient execution of a hosting environment?”
Elevator: Ground floor

SL: Well said. I agree that it becomes difficult to put solutions into place after-the-fact, and that in order to run smoothly one must start with a solid plan and avoid retrofitting later. That ends up being far too costly and stifles resources a company should be using to grow their product. How would you describe the attitude of most large hosts with regards to “going green”?
Elevator: Please step away from the door.

SL: I too think that many datacenters out there are concerned with “stepping through” as it were to move operations in that direction. But, since the datacenters can hugely benefit from cost-savings due to reduced expenditures for cooling and power, it is very much worth the shift. What factors outside of the DC could play into making this shift easier?
Elevator: Lobby

SL: Well, I’m not sure that lobbying is the answer, though it may help. Really I was asking about computer manufacturers making the shift to properly-matched and high efficiency power supplies and processors. New technologies are making it easier for younger companies to go green, and older hosts are left trying to figure out how they can turn thousands of antiquated servers into efficient appliances. This goes back to your earlier comment regarding starting out with a solid plan making it easier to
Elevator: Ding

SL: Don’t interrupt me. Easier to maintain a plan than adjust and retrofit to a new one.
Elevator: Second Floor

SL: I’m not sure why you said that, it doesn’t make any sense. Having a host that doesn’t play catch-up constantly benefits the customer in several
Elevator: Ding

SL: Stop it.
Elevator: Third Floor

SL: You’re an idiot. I’m going to go interview the printer.

For so many years growing up, I heard the “Sam I Am” / “Green Eggs and Ham” comments when being introduced to other kids. At this point, you would think I would hate the color green. On the contrary – being green is good.

One of the biggest costs in a datacenter is power, and if you’re involved in datacenter operations you get to experience first hand the challenges of juggling power, cooling and floor space availability. If you use less power, your electrical costs go down and your cooling costs go down and there is a ripple affect across the entire facility. In an effort to reach that goal, we do everything we can to hone down the power requirements of our servers. We start by using 240v circuits to the rack. Doing so eliminates the need to step down to 110v which is much more efficient and it helps eliminate harmonic feedback in the circuit. Add to that “less heat” which means less wear and tear on the servers and that is a good first step.

Once you get power to the server, it helps to spec your servers properly. A properly sized power supply can save more than 25 Watts per server. When you multiply that by just 1,000 servers, that’s a cool 25kW of power savings. When you multiply that by the number of servers in our facilities? Well, it’s certainly worth the exercise of making sure we are ordering the proper equipment.

Aside from server equipment and datacenter power, SoftLayer has recently joined the Green Grid (more info). We are looking to use that association to join the likes of AMD, Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and many more to help reduce overall power consumption by datacenters. There are many lessons yet to be learned by IT companies to help reach that goal.

Being green is not confined to datacenter facilities. On SoftLayer Truck Day, we receive hundreds of cardboard boxes. Rather than just throwing those all away, we work with a local vendor to make sure the cardboard and packaging materials inside get recycled. Each server comes with various parts that are not needed (it’s cheaper for the vendor to just ship the servers with all misc parts than it is to strip specific parts from specific orders). It would be easiest to just deposit all of those unneeded parts into a dumpster, but being green means doing more than just whatever is easiest. We sort spare power cords and recycle those for the copper. We sort screws and sell them to a local vendor (and use the money to buy Monster). Any spare part that we have not found a specific destination for, gets donated to a group that sells the parts and makes donations to charities.

Being green not only makes good financial sense, but it also makes good ecological sense. And – it keeps us stocked with Monster.