Professional athletes have them. Doctors have them. Lawyers have them. Chefs have them. Movie Directors have them. Writers have them. NASCAR drivers have them too.
Are you lost yet? Wondering what this has to do with hosting or small businesses? It’s really very simple. Let’s dig into a few of them.

Athletes - most are very good at what they do, hit the ball, kick the ball, throw the ball, shoot the ball, swing the club, etc. They are so busy learning to be the best at their trade that they don’t have time for the business side of their business. What do they do? They outsource that to an agent. Jerry Maguire might be the SoftLayer of agents. The best, the top of the line, the cutting edge, like us. He gets what the players want and more and was a master at customer service. The players don’t mind giving part of their hard earned cash to him because of the benefit they get from him. It is a very symbiotic relationship.

Doctors - they are paid to fix people. They have to keep up with the latest threats to our health and the ways to fix us. They have almost continuous education to worry about and don’t have time to worry about the office, and the bills, and whether they are getting timely insurance payments, etc. They are there to do whatever they can to help their patients. What do they do? They outsource to an office manager who takes care of the day-to-day tasks that a doctor just doesn’t have time for and frankly shouldn’t have to worry about. It’s really just another form of outsourcing.

Chefs - this one is interesting because I am going to make the assumption that the chef owns the restaurant. I agree that many times there are restaurants that hire chefs, but the argument goes both ways. Let’s say you want to open a restaurant but you can’t cook. You outsource to a chef. To turn it around, a chef can cook but wants his own restaurant. He is a master at cooking and has studied in culinary schools for years to become a great chef. What does he do about running the place? He outsources to a restaurant manager. The manager takes care of HR, and guest services, and the chef does what he loves - cooks.

So where does this leave you? Are you an individual who knows (insert what you know here) and have studied it for years and you are the worlds expert on it? Are you a small business owner who is looking for ways to make the hours of the day last longer and find that competitive edge? Are you that IT manager who has hit the technology roadblock and your company doesn’t have the large capital for the things you need to continue to scale your infrastructure? If you are then you need to consider hiring an agent of your very own. SoftLayer can be your technology agent and allow you to focus on what you do best!

p.s. Lance is the greatest CEO EVER! Now pay up! (Worth a shot, right?)

As I have started to settle into my new role with SoftLayer, we have spent a lot of time meeting with various vendors and partners to discuss our overall vision and plan for 2008. In almost every one of those meetings we get to the same question: “What does a typical SoftLayer customer look like?” Or, the other version of that: “What is SoftLayer’s target customer?”
You would think this should be an easy question to answer. After all, we have over 4,500 loyal customers that rely on us each and every day to deliver on-demand, world class IT infrastructure. Surely, there must be some common thread among these customers. Being responsible for “Strategy & Marketing” I decided to look into this to come up with a standard reply to that question. The standard ways to do this from a marketing text book (i.e. “in theory”) perspective include:

• Industry – financial, manufacturing, retail, distribution, etc.
• Geography – typically regions within a country, or countries themselves
• Customer Size – normally based on revenue or employees
• “Retail” or “Wholesale” – are we selling to the final consumer of our products or to a reseller

The next step — look at our customer database and start to build up a profile based on those criteria. A relatively simple process, but the problem we found was that the four metrics above did not adequately define any of our customers. Some examples:

• Industry — we serve all possible combinations of traditional and new industry classifications; from large manufacturing, to Web 2.0 start ups and no single segment is more than 5% of our business
• Geography – we have customers in over 100 countries. Even in the US our customers come from every corner and every state in the country
• Customer Size – 1 employee to 50,000+ employees and everything in between; $0 in revenue to $10 billion and more
• Retail and Wholesale – almost an even split between the two groups

Being inquisitive by nature, I could not let this end with an answer like: “we have a very diverse set of customers that represent all industries, all geographies, and all customer size categories.” It did lead me down a path to start asking customers some questions like:

• Is IT infrastructure a critical component of your business?
• Do you need highly scalable IT to adjust for seasonality or growth in your business?
• Do you want a simple and flexible management tool to allow complete control of your data center infrastructure?
• Are enterprise grade solutions of value to your business, but something you cannot afford?
• Are you looking for innovative solutions to help drive your business forward?
• Do you value standards based processes and controls?

To steal a quote from a very, very distant relative… Eureka! While this might not be as significant a discovery as the wheel, fire, or the Archimedes’ screw, it did finally bring some clarity to our little customer debate. The vast majority of our customers answered “yes” to many or all of those questions. It also led me to understand what our customers do not want from us:

• Specialized application support
• Highly custom solutions that scale poorly
• Up-front fees and long term contract commitments

The net result is that our customers are segmented very differently than traditional methods would suggest. They are clustered around a common need that spans across all demographics. The customers that come to us are looking for a very special thing – the SoftLayer approach to IT management. If you belong to a company that can resonate with the questions above, you have come to the right place.

Outsource IT – Part III
Third in a series of three! In other words you won’t have to read this stuff anymore after this one. I will get back to the fun ones. I might try to make this one fun along the way. So I left off on the last one discussing some of the financial reasons and technical reasons to outsource your servers. This blog will be geared towards some ideas floating around in my head on what would be some good examples of outsourcing.

You have to step back and look at it from a different angle. If you aren’t ready to outsource the whole farm just yet, then you can go about it in a couple of different ways. One, you can outsource your sandbox, development, and/or test environment. We all know that with SAS 70 and SOX you have to have all of these (or most of them anyway). And outsourcing might be a good way of getting them in place. The cool thing about outsourcing any or all of those are you have a pristine environment and if it does get polluted somehow you can just reload the OS quickly and painlessly and try to tear it up again. Outsourced servers are great for this type of scenario. You can even get a few servers and carve them up virtually and have even more toys to play with. Now, you can just go buy new servers and have this in house but when they break or they are obsolete then you get to buy more. With an outsource model you can buy 1 or 100 and have them for 1 month or 2 years, it’s up to you, your needs, and your budget. You can add hardware, memory, change the OS daily, and only buy the License for a month instead of having to buy it outright when you buy your own servers. I personally believe this is a really good way to get acclimated to outsourcing and test the waters both with yourself and your boss. You always have to make sure they are ok with the way you are doing things. Well, sometimes anyway.

Another option with outsourcing is outsourcing production. Some bosses out in the world aren’t ready for this yet, but they will be. They like keeping their data close by and having multiple copies and instances and USB keys with copies on it, etc. That’s just the nature of data. Now we all know that you can have the same if not more redundancy in the outsourced model too, it is just hard to explain to them sometimes. I have to give them credit. Think about all the data in the world and how much of it we need to use every day. If folks like them didn’t demand that we techies keep it safe the world might have a bad day, I know I would. I use tons of data everyday (might be a fun blog).

If you decide to outsource dev/test or production you have the ability to scale quickly and accordingly when dealing with technology. Not having to be bogged down by worrying about hardware lead times, dealing with accounts payable, the receiving dock, and all the other worries you have when buying hardware is a liberating feeling. I know what you are thinking; I have been over this side of it a few times so I will just leave it at that but the numbers and today’s technology make it all come together and make good business sense.

Outsource IT!

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.

“ah - I don’t need backups.”
“Too busy to do backups - I’ll get to that later.”
“Backups? It costs too much.”
“I don’t need backups - MTBF of a Raptor is 1.2 Million hours.”
“Oops - I forgot about doing backups.”

Backups are one of the most commonly forgotten tasks of a system administrator. In some cases, they are never implemented. In other cases, they are implemented but not maintained. In other cases, they are implemented with a great backup and recovery plan - but the system usage or requirements change and the backups are not altered to compensate.

A hard drive really is a fairly reliable piece of IT equipment. The WD 150GB Raptor has a rating of 1.2 Million hours MTBF. With that kind of mean time between failures, you would think that you would never have to worry about a hard drive failing. How willing are you to take that chance? What if you double your odds by setting up two drives in a RAID 1 configuration? Now can you afford to take that chance? How willing are you to gamble with your data?

What if one of your system administrators accidentally deletes the wrong file? Maybe it’s your apache config file. Maybe it’s a piece of code you have been working on all day. Or, maybe your server gets compromised and you now have unknown trojans and back doors on your server. Now what do you do?

Working in a datacenter with thousands of servers, there are thousands and thousands of hard drives. When you see that many hard drives in production, you are naturally going to see some of them fail. I have seen small drives fail, large drives fail, and I have even seen RAID 1 mirrors completely fail beyond recovery. Is it bad hardware? Nope. Is it Murphy’s Law? Nope. It’s the laws of physics. Moving parts create heat and friction. Heat and friction cause failures. No piece of IT equipment is immune to failure.

That 1.2 million hours MTBF looks pretty impressive. For a round number, let’s say there are 15,000 drives in the SL datacenter. 1,200,000 hours / 15,000 drives = 80 hours. That means that every 80 hours, one hard drive in the SL datacenter could potentially fail. Now how impressive is that number?

Ultimately, regardless of the levels of redundancy you implement, there is always a chance of a failure - hardware or human - that results in data loss. The question is - how important is that data to you? In the event of a catastrophic failure, are you willing to just perform an OS reload and start from scratch? Or, if a file is deleted and unrecoverable, are you willing to start over on your project? And lastly, how much downtime can you afford to endure?

Regardless of how much redundancy you can build into your infrastructure with the likes of load balancers, RAID arrays, active/passive servers, hot spares, etc, you should always have a good plan for doing backups as well as checking and maintaining those backups.

Have you checked your backups lately?