The high-pitched whine of a drill sends a shiver down my spine. I jump a little in my seat at a loud bang followed by shuffling feet and mumbled voices. I involuntarily cower at the unmistakable sound of a saw blade spinning—gaining momentum—biting. Nope, I’m not sitting in a theater watching Eli Roth’s next installment in the Hostel franchise. In fact, I’m at the office.

That’s right. I’m sitting at my desk. Sitting at my desk and trying hard to ignore the plethora of singing power tools and crooning contractors who for the last two months have been busy putting up dry wall, wiring electrical outlets, installing locks, and occasionally setting off the fire alarm. It’s the sound of growth. And at the risk of conjuring up images of bad 80’s haircuts, guys in jeans way-too-tight, and shirts where the collars just wouldn’t seem to stay down– one might dare refer to the ruckus as “growing pains”.

Make no mistake about it, growing is painful. Take it from me. I think I was 19 before I managed to grow enough facial hair to require the use of a razor. Combine that tidbit of info with the fact that I had every 8-bit computer known to man proudly on display in my room right next to my impressive collection of latex Hollywood style monster masks and you’ll start to get the picture. Growing requires a lot of work and allows almost no planning as humans have a habit of blossoming in their own sweet time. Companies are no different.

So while management did everything possible to make the required building expansion as unobtrusive as possible, well, it’s still construction work within earshot of a whole team of developers, technicians, and engineers. That’s just the way it is. And while I may complain about the noise and distractions now and again, there is also something very comforting about knowing that I am working at a place that is growing. Growing phenomenally, in a time when not all technology companies are fairing so well.
When the dust settles there will be a lot of new space.

More space means a lot of new hires. More space means more opportunity for existing employees. And yes, more space means more work for everyone involved. Having worked for three failed ventures in as many years, I can tell you I am more than happy to be putting my time and effort and energies into something that is successful; something that continues to be more successful every day. It feels good to be on the winning team for a change. Hearing what some of the other engineers here are saying I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment.

That’s not to say I’ll miss the noise when the construction is all said and done. Which in case you are interested sounds to be winding down. As for SoftLayer, well something tells me we are just getting started.

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.

As we all know there is an incredible amount of attention being paid to the “greening” of IT. Most people in the hosting industry regard this as the responsibility of the datacenter, as they can make the largest impact with their large-scale deployments of energy-efficient power supplies and processors, efficient physical layouts, cooling practices, and recycling.

Outside of the hosting industry the options become more varied—namely the ability to save massive amounts of power by turning off unneeded infrastructure during non-peak times. A great example would be a call center that operates 9-5 and shuts their workstations down when not in use, or an accounting firm that turns off their billing servers when they go home for the day. This is far from a common practice currently, but it is a very logical and easy step to conserving power. The gotcha here is that unless you can physically walk over to the infrastructure and power it back on, you are going to have to call someone to do it for you. Then wait for them to do it for you. Then hope that they don’t forget. This leaves many businesses with infrastructure in an outsourced datacenter throwing their hands in the air, because it’s frankly just too risky to not have their resources available at 9:00am when their day starts—might as well just leave everything on.

The story is a little different here at SoftLayer. Using our innovative network design and remote power control, our customers are redefining the way that IT is deployed in an outsourced datacenter. They run their web and mail servers here, pretty normal stuff. But utilizing the SSL to private backend network feature (allowing them to completely disable connectivity to the public network), they are also deploying their domain controllers here. And their office file servers. And their central servers to which their local thin clients connect. They are getting them out of the closet in the back of the office and into a datacenter on enterprise-grade hardware. And you know what they do at the end of the day? They turn them off. The next morning, a click on the power control in the SoftLayer Portal brings them instantly back online anytime, day or night. No phone call to support needed, no waiting for someone else to do it for you. The impact of technology designed to give you optimal control of your IT environment is staggering, especially when you see so many companies utilizing it.

So not only can you choose to deploy your operations in a datacenter that is making enormous strides in green infrastructure, but you can also deploy in one that provides you with the ability to control your own impact as well.

And just like that, everyone gets to be green. And sorry, envy doesn’t count.