I love to travel every chance I get. Growing up, my family would always take a summer vacation. We were just like the Griswalds, making our way across the country in a Station Wagon, driving hundreds of miles to go to a world famous theme park. I’ll admit, it would have been fun holding John Candy hostage with a pellet gun. Wherever we ended up going each year, we would always drive.

As an adult, I still enjoy going on vacations, but the thought of driving a great distance makes me nauseated. Anytime I make plans, I always check and see if I can fly there instead of driving. Some people do not enjoy flying. Some individuals don’t like to wait all day at the airport. Some folks are fearful of flying. But the thought of getting to my destination 95% faster than driving, has always appealed to me.

Being the frugal individual that I am, I usually won’t pay for a direct flight and as a result, will have a connecting flight in route to my destination. Trying to get to my connecting flight always seems to be an adventure. They always seem to be in another terminal, on the other side of the airport. When walking, or in most cases, running to the other terminal, I have noticed a few things about how people walk from one terminal to the next.

Most of your major airports have automatic, or moving sidewalks. These devices have always fascinated me. The usual layout in most terminals is two moving walkways on either side of the terminal, with a standard walkway in the middle. DFW International is set up this way. I have noticed three different ways that people walk through these terminals.

1. The First is Mr. Safe – he takes the middle path. He might not be in a hurry or maybe he is afraid of a moving floor beneath his feet.
2. The Second is Mr. Stationary – he is a little more adventurous, but not too risky. He rides the automatic walkway, but does not move from his standing position until he absolutely has to. You might consider this individual to be lazy, but perhaps he is saving his energy to deal with that screaming baby on the next flight.
3. The Third is Mr. Hurrysome – he is very energetic. Not only is he riding the automatic walkway, he is physically walking on the moving sidewalk to make faster time. This individual is ahead of the pack and in front of everyone else.

Web Hosting Companies like SoftLayer and their competitors usually fit into one of these three categories:

1. Mr. Safe – always taking the slow path, never doing anything innovative, always playing it safe, never leading the way.
2. Mr. Stationary – a little more adventurous, but not wanting to get in too much of a hurry. He could move a little faster, but why use all that energy when he can sit back and enjoy the ride.
3. Mr. Hurrysome – fastest walker, always a step ahead of everyone else, a leader with new technology services like CDN, Data Transfer Services, covering more ground per second than anyone around him, always the first to arrive.

If you sit back and think about it for a moment, you will see that SoftLayer is the only web hosting company that moves like traveler number three. Everyone else is left in the dust.

Each morning as I back my car of out the drive way, I ask myself, “I wonder how bad traffic will be this morning?” My commute through Dallas traffic is always a challenge making it to work on time. My 1997 Monte Carlo may not be much to look at, but it always gets me to work in one piece. My car has been through multiple wrecks and its biggest flaw is no air conditioning. Wow does it get hot in Texas! To quote that country song “she aint a Cadillac, and she ain’t a Rolls, but there ain’t nothin’ wrong with the radio.”

I finally decided to purchase a new vehicle . Any kind of an upgrade would be a vast improvement. I did not care what it looked like, my main concern was, “does it have air conditioning?” I stopped by a Toyota dealership on the way home one night after work. After getting the run around, I decided to make one last stop at the Ford dealership before they closed. As the salemen asked me what I was looking for, I told him “something reliable and economical.” He pointed out the Ford Fussion and then all of a sudden, something magical caught my eye.

Sitting there, calling out my name, was a 2011 Ford Mustang with a V6 3.7L and all 305 screaming horses. I just had to take it out for a test ride. After just a few moments, I knew I had found my upgrade. Not only did it look good, but it was very economical. With an estimated 31MPG and a reasonable sticker price, it was love at first sight.

The longer I thought about my upgrade, the more it reminded me of some SoftLayer customers. Some of our customers have a “monte carlo” server with only 1 proc, 2 gig of ram, and an older motherboard. It may have worked great at one time, but it is clearly time for an upgrade. For a while I had been content with my Monte Carlo, but there comes a time when we all have to upgrade.

• The Mustang spedometer shows a top speed of 160. What speed processor are you using?
• The Mustang has more interior room. What size ram are you using?
• The Mustang gets a lot of second glances. What type of performance is your server getting?

When people see my old vehicle compared to the 2011 Ford Mustang, they usually comment “wow what an upgrade.” Just think what type of response you will get after a long overdue upgrade!

I must admit coming to work for SoftLayer made me a little nervous. I was hired as a receptionist and I assumed my computer skills, or lack thereof, would get me through just fine. I am not one of those people that you would consider computer savvy. Sure, I can use a computer to look up directions or make a PowerPoint but I knew I was rather limited for the times.

Before working here I thought the only kind of cookies out there were the kind you could bake with chocolate chips. I thought clouds only were up in the sky and was impressed when I heard someone mention they were customizable. When people said “I’m headed to the NOC” I just assumed they were going to knock on someone’s office door or maybe it was a hip new restaurant.

My first day I received calls about phishing and honeypots, I was beyond confused. I was sure Winnie the Pooh did not work here and these guys didn’t seem like the fishermen type. I decided it was time for me to get a little more current on the times. Everyone at SoftLayer has been accommodating and so generous with their time. I have been so impressed with everyone’s team work. I have learned so much in these first few weeks.

The SoftLayer Team has been so helpful showing me around the new building. It is absolutely stunning, it is a bit of a maze though. I’m afraid if I didn’t have someone walking me through, I might have to leave bread crumbs to find my way back.

In closing, I am glad to learn there are more cookie options but I still prefer the chocolate chip kind.

We are about to move, and in my new home, it turns out to be cheaper to get my daughter a cell phone than it is to add a home phone… That wouldn’t be particularly remarkable, except that she just turned 7 — this year! That got me to thinking: I am part of the generation during which computers went from curiosities to appliances… That is, I remember a time during which the only thing at home comparable to today’s PCs was an IBM Selectric typewriter my mother used. So, yeah, I am old.

I would guess that the first piece of technology a child uses is still the TV. Sure, we use phones around them and some use baby monitors, but I think most parents have used the one-eyed baby-sitter at one time or another. And with the familiarity with a TV, is it that much of a leap to viewing a computer monitor? Is the leap from remote control to a keyboard that huge?

And as our children get more and more familiar with technology at younger and younger ages, I’m thinking this is putting us more and more into an “On Demand” society. Through the past decade or two I have watched that concept evolve from pure marketing to reality; you can get non-programmed TV at the touch of a remote button, you can order pizza online, and, thanks to the innovation of Softlayer, you can create a turn-key server solution in a matter of hours.

As much as I worry about how my daughter will adapt to the technological leaps she is going to face in her lifetime, I am also curious about the wonders she will get to experience and build upon. This is one of the many reasons I am proud to work for Softlayer—we will create more of those wonders before I am done. And who knows? Some day she may be writing here about how it used to take a few hours to create a turn-key server solution and that her father must be really old to have ever lived in a world without computers…

Security Myth #4: A hardware firewall will stop the evil hackers from the internet. They also stop viruses and spam emails.

The Facts: A hardware firewall will filter your traffic based on a set of rules. If properly configured, this will certainly harden your system from certain types of attacks. However, if you want to stop intrusion attempts on your server, you probably want to implement brute force protection or intrusion detection (IDS). Most operating systems nowadays include brute force protection in one form or another (although it may not be turned on by default). If you want an IDS, there are several options available. Here at SoftLayer, we offer McAfee Host Intrusion Protection System (or HIPS for short) for Windows systems. This will offer you some additional protection against intrusion attempts, but it is no substitute for a well patched system with strong passwords. This is especially important to know if you contract with an outside agency to configure your firewall for you. It’s easy to delude yourself into a “set it and forget it” attitude toward security. I can’t tell you how many administrators I’ve talked to that have asked “how did I get hacked? I had a firewall!”

The Side Effects:

• Having a hardware firewall means an additional step to allow access to ports. Can be time consuming.
• Having a hardware firewall can potentially mean an additional point of failure.
• Too many rules can mean degraded performance.

Security Myth #5: I run a Unix/Linux based system, so I can’t get hacked.

The Facts: I have seen a fair share of Unix based systems get hacked, simply because the user is unfamiliar with the OS. Running everything from within a control panel is convenient, but make sure you or one of your administrators is familiar with command line access.

The Side Effects:

• Running a control panel can cause more security holes

Security Myth #6: I have my Wordpress (or other web application) patched to the latest version, so I should be fine.

The Facts: WordPress is a piece of cake to install. You don’t even need to know how to code in HTML. This means you can install it and have it working properly, and still forget to correct your filesystem permissions. You need to make sure that you read the installation documentation and complete all steps. If you just stop reading once the application starts working, you could potentially forget to correct your permissions and someone could gain access as an administrative user. I ran into a situation one time where a user was utilizing a web interface to manage an online marketplace. I was shocked to find out that the link he sent me allowed me in without the use of a password! Make sure that your application doesn’t use the default password or a blank password.

The Side Effects:

• Having the latest version is great, but make sure you take a 360 degree look around to make sure nothing is out of place

Security Myth #7: I am getting SPAM messages, but I have a firewall.

The Facts: A firewall does not filter SPAM messages. You might look into the free SpamAssassin software that will filter email for potential SPAM. http://spamassassin.apache.org/

Most days, it seems that technology progresses all too slowly. It is a different feeling when you work with cutting edge technology on a daily basis: deploying the first dual network datacenter infrastructure, being entrenched in solutions for everything from CDN to ISCI to DTS and more, testing the latest enterprise solutions from leading industry vendors long before money could buy them… it never really meant a whole lot to me; it was very much just, “How we roll”, as the gang would say.

But every so often, there is a day when a new technology catches my attention and reminds me why I got involved in the IT industry. Something that reminds me of the days spent tapping out QuickBasic 2.0 applications on my 18MHz 386 and 16 color EGA monitor. Surprisingly, the rise of cloud computing did just that. There was a day some still remember, when the cost of localized hardware was significant enough that terminals ruled the world. Occasionally, you may still see one at a grocery checkout stand or being used in a retail stockroom to check inventory across locations. Early terminals were commonly thin clients lacking a processor, non-volatile user storage, and only possessing enough memory to display what was on the screen at any given time. As the cost of memory declined, fat clients gained some popularity offering locally programmable memory. However, the concept was still the same: one host machine, usually a mainframe, serving applications over a distance to multiple (less capable) client machines.

Terminals were not destined to last though. In a twist of irony one of the innovations that they helped to inspire, the microprocessor, combined with the falling price and increased capacity of memory eventually led the decline of terminals. Left behind, in a cloud of dust, by hardware manufacturer’s race for speed capacity combined with advances in networking technology, the terminal PC became a historical relic looked upon as a necessary stop-gap solution used in the days when hardware was just too-darn-expensive. It was at that time the truly personal computer that we know and love was born and has forever-since reigned supreme. Then came the ARPANET, which gave way to the Information Super Highway, gave way to the World Wide Web, gave way to the internet we know today.

Mainframes gave way to servers. And today, I walk into a datacenter surrounded by servers boasting quad octo-core processors and Cloud Computing Instances, talking to customers who use their smart-phones to remotely access their web hosts, and quietly thinking to myself, “Have things really changed?” How far off is the day, when the benefits of remotely hosted applications outweigh the benefits of localized hardware? When we sit at the start of a new era where CCI’s can be created in minutes, regularly imaged for data security, migrated and restored quickly in the event of hardware failure, accessed from anywhere and from a variety of client hardware and software implementations, how much more would it take for us to return to the days of terminal PC’s. As bandwidth continues to improve, purchase and operational costs per processing core continues to fall, people demand more and more ‘anywhere access’, open source gains popularity and the idea of renting freely upgraded applications becomes accepted outside of the IT community, who knows what the future might hold. In a future where the concept of parallel uplinks may be no more foreign than that of parallel data transfer over CAT6 is to the layman, I wonder if personal computers will be thought of as the necessary stop-gap solution used while we waited for bandwidth to catch up to useable processing power; nothing more than a dinosaur that gave way to the green-movement and our need to be connected everywhere.

While I work on bringing my head out of the clouds, I remember why I am here. I am not here because technology’s past was all that fantastic, or because the present is all that glamorous, but because the future is still wide open. Whether-or-not clouds ever really kill the PC is anyone’s guess and only time will tell. However, one thing is currently known, as companies continue to see the benefit of having their staff conduct business through a web-portal interface, consumers continue trying to figure out what they are going to do with the extra two or three of the four cores they have, and the cost-to-performance ratio associated with remote resources continues to fall, we are steadily moving that way.

I often get asked “what makes SoftLayer different?” The problem with that simple question is – SoftLayer is so different from all the competition out there that it’s not a simple question to answer. I have my standard version that I run thru – but I’m not sure people really grasp how different SoftLayer really is. After talking to my wife, she recommended doing a Letterman style top 10 reason why SoftLayer is different. I figured I would give it a shot – so here it is..

10. SoftLayer terminates 40Gbps to every single rack!! 20Gbps to the public internet and 20Gbps to the private network.

9. SoftLayer offers three types of VPN services for out-of-band connectivity (SSL, PPTP, IPSEC)

8. SoftLayer manages its own nationwide MPLS network with 10 PoPs and over 1000Gbps of transit and peer connectivity

7. SoftLayer offers free enterprise grade DNS services through our DNS farms located in all 10 PoPs in North America

6. SoftLayer has over 1600 APIs for custom integration, a full service control panel for ease of use and a private label option for resellers

5. Every single server in every datacenter is a rackmount, hotswap, tool-less chassis offering enterprise grade hardware with ultra-fast modifications

4. SoftLayer has downloadable iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps in addition to our mobile phone friendly .mobi site for complete control.

3. Only hybrid solution available – dedicated, virtualized, and cloud instances operating in a single environment and control thru a single interface or API

2. Private Network – connect any server to any other server in any datacenter with a click of a button

1. Fastest service delivery
   a. Over 1000 servers in stock
   b. Dedicated servers – 4 hours or less
   c. Servers with virtualization – 2 hours or less
   d. Cloud instances & storage – 5 to 15 minutes
   e. Firewalls, Load Balancers, SAN Storage – added real time w/ no downtime

The world of IT security is full of partial truths and paranoia – some of which is completely justified. Sometimes, steps are taken that actually are beneficial, but without knowing the reason behind the precautions, many administrators are lulled into a false sense of security. Here are some common misconceptions that I see in action frequently:

Security Myth #1: If I set my password strong enough, my system will be secure.

The Facts: There are many ways to compromise a system. For example: exploitable code on your website, lax filesystem permissions, and publicly accessible services running on your system (such as email or chat). In fact, having a long secure password is often like having a steel security door with retinal scan technology on a grass hut. Don’t get me wrong, having strong passwords is a great thing, but don’t forget to look at the rest of your system!

The Side Effects:

• Longer passwords take longer to type (obviously).
• You are more likely to forget a longer password.
• You are more likely to mistype a longer password (and get locked out).
• If you force this policy on your end users they are more likely to write the password down (bad).

Security Myth #2: If I replace letters with their corresponding l33t speak numbers (e.g. hello -> h3110), it will make my password more secure.

The Facts: Technically, yes it will make your password more secure, but only marginally. Simple character substitution is a common feature among brute force tools. This will slow down the brute force attack, but your system may still eventually be compromised by a hybrid dictionary attack. You might also consider configuring the brute force protection options on your server.

The Side Effects: There are no side effects – in fact, this is a far greater idea than simply using a dictionary word. However, it is best to also add some additional numbers or letters to throw off brute force tools. Many brute forcers also allow for pre-pending or post-pending a string of numbers (e.g. 123hello or hello123). It is better to place random numbers or characters in the middle of your password so that it is not vulnerable to a dictionary attack (e.g. hagen!23daas). Another alternative to a secure and easy to remember password is make an acronym of a famous phrase or quote. For example: “sticks and stones may break my bones” -> “S&smbMb!$”.

Security Myth #3: If I change the port number for RDP/SSH/Plesk or turn off ping response, my server will be safe.

The Facts: This is the myth of “security through obscurity.” Changing your port number or turning off ping will only reduce attacks from computer worms and extremely lazy hackers. Say for example that you run a website on your server. Anyone who knows the URL of the website can easily find your IP address (by ping or nslookup). Then all they have to do is port scan that IP address (using a port scanning tool such as nmap or SuperScan) to see which ports are open. If your passwords are secure enough, you needn’t worry too much about the brute force attacks from the internet. You should only consider this a secondary safeguard just in case the server happens to have a vulnerable service running on it. Your first priority is making sure your system is properly patched and updated.

The Side Effects:

• It is very difficult to track or troubleshoot packet loss on servers that have ICMP blocked.
• Changing ports may confuse your users.
• You will need to remember to include this port information in any technical support request.
• Many automated systems or scripts will require custom configuration.

I was thinking the other day about languages. It came to mind because when The Girl was about 3 ½ or so; she had invented her own language. She would typically use this language when she was “reading” a book in her bed before going to sleep. She would say “words” that had a flow to them, but it was not recognizable as English, or Spanish, or any other language. So one night, The Husband asked The Girl what language she was speaking, and she replied, without hesitating or missing a beat, “Green.” If she got into the flow of her language, you could stop her while she was “reading” and ask her what something meant. My all-time favorite from the language of Green was the word “gronka.” Gronka means mad, angry. (And no, this was not referring to me – she was talking about something in one of her books). Other words that I remember are “shun sho,” which referred to a rash she would get in the winter-time from eczema and “magogle,” which refers to an ogre head (don’t ask). Alas, Green appears to be a dead language like Latin, because as The Girl has gotten older, she has resorted exclusively to English.

And of course, we have our own SLanguage here at SoftLayer (in addition to the official, super secret, street cred, gangsta sign). We have SLackers and SLayers (guess we all know which category our pink-clad CFO falls under). And we have the SLadies, as in “The SLadies are going to happy hour, wanna come?” We can also add: SLimey, SLake, SLeer, SLuper, SLervers, SLales, SLOps, and the SList goes on and on and on….. I’m getting SLeepy, just thinking about it. Additionally, thanks to our international customer base, we have also added vernacular from other cultures to our SLanguage. Another all-time favorite: “Please do the needful.” This is used whenever you need someone to help you out or to get something done, as in, “Sean, I need a fully-executed copy of the lease from our Landlord (SLandlord??), please do the needful.” Great, isn’t it?? The phrase is descriptive on so many levels. Well, I need to go back to SLaving away on some SLegal stuff….. Until later, and let me know some of your favorite SoftLayer sayings!

I recently returned from vacation (go ahead and let out your jealous, exasperated sighs). During our vacation one of our stops was the ancient mayan temples at Chichen Itza. For those who ever get a chance, it’s a must see. The landscape is emerald green, the temples are awe inspiring, and the weather is beautiful. For those who aren’t quite sure about what I’m talking about, here’s a nice image to refer to:

Image from Wikipedia Commons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chichen_Itza_3.jpg

While the temples are cool, even more amazing are the little details the Ancient Mayans put into this that really set it off. Things like the serpent visible only on the spring equinox, the echo when you clap (which sounds like a bird – no kidding!), amongst others.

What’s really interesting here is the story of human engineering, and to see how far it’s come since those ancient times, and even though Its mind-boggling to see how far we’ve come, it’s quite intriguing to see what they did with their own type of technology.

While they used to clap at the temple, we now send facebook or twitter posts. They passed their stories and music verbally over centuries, and we share MP3s and other media across the globe at the speed of light. While SoftLayer sits at the edge of technology with our state of the art datacenters, hardware, and networking topology, it’s pretty hard to compare to the tools used by, and the creations made by the people of this era. Luckily our tour guide re-assured us that we’ll be fine in 2012, despite what the movies say, so we’ll have plenty of time to see some more amazing advances in technology. Who knows that our future generations will say about our ‘rudimentary’ communications and technology some 2500 years from now.