It shouldn’t be any surprise to people who know SoftLayer that we follow the “Virtual Datacenter” discussions quite closely. In fact, it is awesome to see people discussing what sounds a lot like what SoftLayer already is.

The concept of Virtual Datacenter is that you have all the power of a datacenter at your command without having to worry about the details of actually running a datacenter. Chad Sakac from EMC wrote an excellent post in his personal blog about the transformation to a Virtual Datacenter.

One of the points Chad makes is the abstraction of the physical infrastructure. Quoting Chad:

“Every Layer of the physical infrastructure (CPU, Memory, Network, Storage) need to be transparent. Transparency means ‘invisible’. This implies a lot, and implies that the glue in the middle, like a general purpose OS, needs to provide the “API models” for those hardware elements to be transparent. ”

I latched on to this point because that is what we have been building at SoftLayer for the last few years. We realize that the abstraction of the physical infrastructure not only means that end-users don’t need to know how to manage the physical infrastructure, but that the abstraction can make more efficient use of resources (= money!).

Let’s talk about the advantages of virtualized infrastructure. Without virtualization, provisioning a web-facing server on the network would involve obtaining rack space, a server, licensing and loading an OS, finding a switch port, physically connecting a cable or three, setting up the switch port (I hope you know IOS), getting IP Addresses (hopefully you don’t have to go get more from ARIN), and adding a firewall and/or load balancer (more procurement, cabling, and configuration). Adding storage could be just as complex – also involving procurement, racking, cabling, and configuration. This doesn’t sound very efficient. In fact, it sounds a lot like creating a “circular device that is capable of rotating on its axis, facilitating movement or transportation whilst supporting a load”. It’s been done before and I’ll bet it’s been done better by people other than you.

Using virtualized infrastructure you should be able to perform the task with a few clicks of a mouse or a few API calls and have the functionality you need set up in a few minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. No worrying about procurement, physical constraints, or learning the specifics of network and storage devices from different vendors. All you should have to focus on is the running of your particular application. You shouldn’t have to worry about configuring servers, networking, and storage any more than you should have to worry about chillers, HVAC, generators, and UPS batteries.

When I was 14 I got my first tech job as a tech support guy for a local “mom and pop” internet service provider, from there on out I have been in many data centers in the North West working with multiple companies of all caliber. From National Dial-up Internet Service Providers to small webhosting companies that have had their stuff collocated in many of the area’s datacenters.

When I was about 20 I decided I was burnt out on the internet and wanted to try Central Office build outs for a national telecommunications company installing their fiber and DSL network in Washington and Oregon. The one thing that I learned in the Telco industry is to do nice and neat work. Work that you could trace a single cable in a bundle and follow it from point A to point B.
After a few years of doing the same thing over and over, I figured it was time for me to get back into the Internet as it was way more challenging for my ever-thinking mind.

So I took my nice and neat skills and worked on a contract for Microsoft building out a data center in a top secret location in the Puget Sound. This was by far one of the nicest and cleanest datacenters I had ever seen. After that I went to work for some other area datacenters doing systems administration work. I helped them do a migration of two datacenters into one. I helped build out a datacenter, and I helped by trying to make the datacenter as nice as Microsoft’s along with as neat as the Telephone companies COs.

During this time I really noticed SoftLayer Technologies was Ahead of the Rest when it came to the internet utility hosting Industry. I quickly wanted to learn everything about this company, and being the nerd that I am, figured I should buy a server from this company. I Bought one and went to lunch thinking I might have a call or e-mail saying that my server will be done here within the day. Wow! 45 minutes later? “These guys are on top of it”, I thought.
Then one day I was browsing Webhostingtalk.com (this is my equivalent to your teenager’s myspace.com addiction) and noticed that SoftLayer just released a P.R. about signing a deal with InterNAP for a 10,000 server datacenter in Tukwila so I figured this company’s features are so freaking amazing and cool. “I just need to try to get a job at this location with this really cool company”, I said to myself. I sent off a Resume and a little info about myself. I did not hear back from them for a while. I figured my quick-witted humor may have rubbed the HR department the wrong way, or maybe I wasn’t qualified, or too qualified.

SoftLayer finally called me back. I was as happy as a 10 year old getting a dirt bike for his birthday — they wanted an interview.
So I go in and tour the facility and do my interview with the interviewing committee, I have to say it was one of the most intense interviews I have ever had with the technical questions that was asked along with just a hard interview process, though I left that day knowing I would be getting a call from SoftLayer as I felt I sold myself to them on my skillset.

I have to say it is really relaxing and challenging working for a world-class company in a world-class datacenter. There is a great deal of stress that comes with our job in this industry, and when the datacenter and management have everything in order from the get go and it hasn’t been patched together it makes your job as a Systems Administrator a little less stressful. I do my daily walks of the datacenter in Seattle looking at thousands and thousands of racked servers that are set to standards which is weird when I’ve worked for places that use motorcycle tie-downs and zip ties to secure your rack to make them ‘Earthquake’ ready.

I now sleep at night knowing if there is an earthquake we will be prepared and your data and machines will be safe in SoftLayer’s Seattle N+1 datacenter. We have a wonderful team of build engineers and systems administrators that work around the clock to keep your virtual datacenter up and running. I wouldn’t want to be at any other place for 40+ hours a week!

3 bars for life!

Here at SoftLayer, all the developers stay on Jabber all day so we’re all accessible. As you know, we’ve recently been doing a major piece of software development: the new API. During development, we all were trying to get things finished as well as continue our day to day operations.

No fewer than 4 times during the last 3 weeks I have had the following conversation with a fellow developer.

Me: Hey, I need you to do something on this API class you wrote.
Other developer: Ok, no problem.
Me: Wait, you didn’t write this, did you?
Other developer: No, I didn’t.

Each time, when faced with a request to understand and modify something that they didn’t write, in addition to their already overwhelming workload, my fellow developers were more than happy to accept the new task.

It just goes to show what kind of environment we all work in here. Everyone is always willing to help, and it’s this attitude that allowed us to develop the API so quickly with such robust features. Each developer was willing to help the others, and that resulted in a tightly integrated product that we’re all very proud of.

The same sort of attitude pervades all of SoftLayer. I have had help on tasks from Networking, Accounting, and Sales since I got here, and each time everyone is more than happy to help out. The end result is, of course, that the customer gets their problems solved faster, and gets higher quality services out it the deal.

But really, fellow developers, if you’re reading this also, it’s acceptable to say “I didn’t write that” when I ask you to change it. I won’t be offended. Half the problem is that we have 5 developers with names starting with J, I just clicked the wrong guy!

I am one of the new guys in the Seattle datacenter. Since I started, people often ask me that question or some variation of it. The short answer: It’s wonderful, I love it.

The long answer is…well, long.

First some background! I’m a recent addition to the IT industry. Since I joined the workforce, I’ve worked in fast food, security, retail, and even a call center. After my call center job, I decided to take my computer hobby and turn it into a career. I received my associates degree and found that I really needed employment. Luckily, my school helped me search.

For almost three months, I received calls from IT recruiters. I interviewed with 4 companies. I finally had a position lined up that was very promising.

Then my Career Services recruiter called, asking if I wanted to come in for an on-site interview, as SoftLayer was interested in recruiting students. I was hesitant, as I already had a position lined up. She convinced me to interview anyway. The day before the interview, she sent me tons of information about SoftLayer. After poking around, I found the InnerLayer. (Has this come full circle or what?)

After reading a few blogs, I realized that SoftLayer had the perfect corporate culture for me.

The next day I interviewed. Joshua Rushe, VP of Operations conducted the interview. He was warm, friendly, and very down to earth. In some ways it was the strangest interview I’ve ever had. Josh appeared to be more interested in me as a person, than my qualifications. (Of course, he had already seen my résumé.) I was more than a little shocked when he ignored my prepared portfolio. We spent most of the interview time talking about the work, what SoftLayer expected out of an employee, and SoftLayer’s corporate culture.

Here I am, 2.5 months later, and I love my position.

So enough of background! What’s it like to work at SoftLayer?

We work hard, and we play hard. In the few moments between working hard, when we have the time, we joke around and have fun. SoftLayer recently flew myself and a co-worker down to Dallas to work alongside the great people down there. I learned a great deal. For instance, I learned at the cable labeling party in Dallas that we can work hard and have fun at the same time!

The people are helpful and friendly. The work is challenging and rewarding. It’s nice to know at the end of the day that I’ve done my part to help the internet grow.

Hi! I’m George, one of the newest additions to the SoftLayer team. I joined the company for a few reasons:

1. The People – one of the best teams that I have ever met, and now, have the pleasure of working with
2. Vision – as someone recently said, how often do you get a chance for a “do over” without being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day?
3. Industry – how cool is it to be able to play with new technology and help shape the way people will do business
4. Acronyms and Buzzwords – as anyone that has worked in the telecom or technology industries can attest, this is the best place to be if you want to assemble new words based simply on the first letter of each.

Even before the Internet, (did that time really exist?), telecom hardware vendors, service providers and others in this little universe loved to create acronyms to make technology sound complicated. And of course, it created employment for thousands of people, which according to many of those techies, offered no real value, to help translate all of this into something that the consumer and investment community would buy… Welcome to the world of marketing in the Internet Age!
One thing that all of these people that came to be known as “Gurus” or an even buzzier buzzword – Evangelists – learned was to standardize on at least part of the acronym. Out of this concept was born:

• _AN (G, L, M, S, W)
• _EO (G, L, VL, S)
• _DSL (H, A, S, V)
• _SP (A, M, S)
• _2_ (B2B, B2C, P2P, M2M)

And each of these led to spin-off acronyms, like DSLAM, FRAD, ATM (the network not the cash machine), and my favorite – BE – which said a lot about what we were all doing back then. Acronyms became the patents of the original dot.com era (which we did not actually call Web 1.0, but more on that later). Of course, we also learned different naming systems and adjusted the English language to suit this purpose. Capitalization rules were thrown out along with the baby and bathwater. Capitals now appeared in the middle of all company names (yes, we even did it here…) and products thanks to another phenomenon of the era – the mandatory use of compound words.
Best of all, the digital age gave birth to an industry designed to make all of us look like techies – the acronym dictionary. Many of the generation that graduated into the telecom and Internet revolution of the early 1990s (including yours truly) built careers on the ability to string acronyms together to define the future of networking and ultimately, life. The common toolkit for all of us: Newton’s Telecom Dictionary and a fluffy cloud graphic from the MS Office clip art files – that was generally used by “advanced” gurus and not something to be thrown around by anyone with less than 12 months of experience in the dot.com trenches.
The web generation also taught the masses about versions and a fundamental rule in software: avoid buying version 1.0 and never launch a product called version 0. Even the web generation of telecom -mobile carriers – figured this one out. 3G has long been touted as the utopia of communications, but we had to get through 2.5G first. Never mind that v1 and v2 seemed to actually work. Thus, versioning took its rightful place at the left-hand of acronyms.
Jumping ahead a decade or so, we are now firmly in the grips of Web 2.0 and a new set of buzzwords and acronyms. If you don’t have an avatar living on a virtual street in a virtual world that spends virtual time stuck in virtual traffic driving to a virtual job, you probably are like me – part of the 1.0 generation. I too used an Apple IIe in school, but for me it was grade 10, not grade 1! And then there was the Newton which did not exactly fit into a palm, but that story will have to wait…
Like all things, buzzwords and acronyms have evolved as well. We are now using words like “grid”, “utility” and “always on” to reflect the way we are connected and work. And of course we all need to be Irish for more than 1 day per year. Don’t get me wrong. SoftLayer agrees that green is good. We have turned our facilities green in search of the “green”. Basically, we believe the best way to help our customers with access to technology on a real-time basis is by being as operationally efficient as possible. So, we have forced ourselves to be “green” in everything that we do. But, I digress…
My favorite current acronym root is “_aaS”. We can thank the failure of ASP (part of Web 1.5) and its lesser known cousin – AIP – to catch on for this latest iteration. The good news is that almost everything that we can think of can be called an “X as a Service”. Our internal top 10 list includes:

• Architecture as a Service
• Communication as a Service
• Data Center as a Service
• Hardware as a Service
• Network as a Service
• Platform as a Service
• Software as a Service
• Storage as a Service
• Virtualization as a Service
• Widgets as a Service (the favorite of our Starbucks fan)

But, don’t take my word for it. Whatever as a Service will be hard to avoid. Now that I think of it, MaaS (Monster as a Service) might be a big money maker around here.
I know we would all like to see Service as a Service, but that may need to wait until Web 4.0 when we have all been virtualized. Personally, I can’t wait to see what comes next. Given our place in the universe, I think that SoftLayer will have some influence and that’s why I’m here…

Relationships are, well, key. This is true in all walks of life. It is especially true in a business environment. At SoftLayer, we understand this. There are two very important types of relationships that we continually try to maintain.

1. Customer Relationships – This is an obvious one. We constantly want to know what our customers have to say. We try to set aside time to call our customers, get to know them, gather feedback, and find out what makes them tick. If there is a way to improve, we want to know about it. Some customers prefer to deal with a specific person, whether it is a Salesperson, Support Technician, or Accounting Representative. While all departments work as a team and we do not specifically assign customers to certain employees, we do enjoy working with you if you specifically enjoy working with one of us! If there is not a little bit of personal communication, we would be your typical, cold corporation. We do not want to be labeled with this stigma. There is no denying that SoftLayer is rapidly growing into a major corporation. But we want to be the major corporation with a small company feel. Each of you is our favorite customer – keep dishing it, we can take it!

2. Employee to Employee Relationships – We would not be where we are if we did not get along well with one another. In fact, we work extremely hard at keeping the utmost respect for one another. Our technicians are some of the best in the industry, our Accounting Representatives some of the most personable, and our Sales team is quite the group of go-getters. So it is easy to keep a good lasting relationship with each and every employee. I can speak for myself, by saying that sometimes I am not the most technical person. It is great to have someone to go to at the drop of a hat to find out about a specific application or hardware question for a customer. The Sales Team is here for anyone to ask about pricing, or to help a customer with an upgrade. And Accounting is always there for any sort of billing need.

In a nutshell we are one big, happy family – that goes for customers and the entire SoftLayer team.

I live in America, and as any American knows, we pipe Christmas Music and Christmas TV and Christmas Movies directly into the brains of as many people as possible to attempt to keep everyone safe during this difficult shopping season.

Admit it: when you and your neighbor are running to Electronics in hope of getting the last Wii from the shelf, sometimes the only thing stopping you from dumping a bag of Skittles in front of him or knocking over a Lego display is the constant barrage of Rudolph and Frosty and other Christmas cheer over the PA.

Unfortunately, unless you are content to give everyone a copy of Dryping for Dummies (By Steve Kinman, SoftLayer Press), you will have to wade into the shopping rush to eek out your Santa sized bag ‘o goodies.

Never fear, however! The Retail Industry is there to help! For those who don’t want to dive head first into the excitement of Christmas Shopping (which can make even a foray to pick up some toilet paper from Wal*Mart into an exciting 2 hour adventure), nearly every retail outlet is willing to give you a 2″ x 3″ credit card like piece of plastic stamped with their brand. Yes, the Gift Card.

It’s been said that over 60% of American adults have either bought or received a Gift Card, this year. It’s a very convenient device. For example, if I figure out that Lance really likes Outback Steakhouse, I can buy a $10 gift card from Outback Steakhouse, wrap it in a $1 Hallmark card (although, sometimes the retail outlets already have such cards (stamped with their logo) available), and give it to Lance. “Merry Christmas!” Sometimes you can even get the card gift wrapped.A gift-wrapped credit card!

We’re to the point, now, that simply handing somebody a plastic card is actually considered a thoughtful gift. On the way to work, I heard that any fishing lover would prefer to receive a Bass Pro Shop Gift Card over, say, that Bassomatic ‘76 they’ve been talking about.

But, lets be honest… it doesn’t take much to choose a gift card. I overhear Lance say he likes steak, I see a Outback Steakhouse card, and bam! Before you can say “Impulse Purchase” I now have an instant gift! Sure, it’s not as fulfilling as, say, a box of prime steaks… but this way you can give him more gift cards! And more is better, right?

But the comedy doesn’t end there. Have you ever seen a gift card in a usable denomination? Usually I find cards with a value between $10-50. Can you even get a steak meal for $10 at Outback Steakhouse? (Don’t forget to include the State and Federal Wallet Excise Tax.) And I’m not talking about that free bread, either. No, what happens is you end up either leaving a trifling amount of money on the card (Your balance is … twenty five cents), or you end up wrapping your card in a sizable amount of cash. See how neat this is? I bought a $10 card, and Lance will pay the balance of the meal… AND STILL THANK ME FOR IT!

Retailers make MILLIONS of dollars off the trifling amounts that just sit, unused, on gift cards. And gift cards aren’t usable at another store, so if I want to buy a $20 book, but I only have a $10 Half Priced Books gift card (and a $10 Outback Card Lance gave me as a Thank You), I’ll use the card + $10. You can almost never just spend what’s on the card.

Here’s some friendly holiday advice: If you know what your friend wants, buy it for him. If you don’t, ask people close to him. Even Aunt Myrtle’s sweater contains more holiday cheer value than the sweater’s monetary value in McDonalds Gift Cards.

Is there a way out of this trap of value-locked slivers of plastic? Indeed there is! If you wish to transfer value to another person without locking them into one choice, give them… CASH! Yes, greenbacks, bucks, dead presidential portraits, green… whatever you call it, United States Federal Notes are accepted by all retailers, in any denomination. Value not used by one retailer can then be spent at another. This value can also be stored up where it may earn interest and combine with more legal tender until a large item can be bought. The best solution for any gift giving problem where “Gift Cards” are suggested as a solution is CASH, such as when you absolutely can’t think up something to buy. And it makes a great stocking stuffer. In Bulk. Hint, hint.

Yes, you in the back? What does this mean for SoftLayer? Just because this is a SoftLayer Blog doesn’t mean it has to have a SoftLayer moral! But lucky you… I’ve got one right here: (this weekend only, special holiday financing available!)

Like Gift Cards, each SoftLayer server comes with a bloc of value attached: bandwidth. This valuable commodity makes the servers work. You can have all the processing power in the world, a RAID 75 array with 100 petabytes of space, 40 terabytes of onboard memory, and if you don’t have any bandwidth… it’s all moot.

Unlike gift cards, however, SoftLayer attaches some real value you can actually use. For many users, even touching the top of the 2 Terabyte bandwidth pipe is a real exercise.

However, sometimes, like gift cards, a customer buys a server with value attached… but simply cannot use it all. Or they put the server 100% on the private network and never use the bandwidth at all (Like that $20 gift card from Sludge Emporium your Granddad gave you last year). Is there any way to salvage this value?

Indeed! The SoftLayer Secret Labs rolled out a new feature a while back: Virtual Dedicated Racks. These VDR’s (as we cool SoftLayer Secret Lab Technicians like to call them, because TLAs are cool) allow you to virtually rack a group of servers behind a virtual bandwidth meter. All the attached bandwidth value of those servers are lumped together, like a good ‘ol pile o’ cash, and the aggregate amount attached to the rack. An example:

Each server comes with 2T bandwidth (generally).

Without VDRs, if server bassomatic.76.example.com only uses 1T of bandwidth, and server auntmyrtle.sweaters.example.com uses up 3T, you end up with a full 1T overage on Aunt Myrtle’s site, even though you have a full 1T worth of value on the other server not being used!

With VDRs, the two servers pile their value together, making a 4T rack. Bassomatic.76.example.com uses 3T this month, while Aunt Myrtle’s site only uses 1T. Combined, their “rack” uses 4T of 4T, so 4-4 = 0!

Like cash, but unlike gift cards, with VDRs you are able to pool your value to allow the usage of more value at one time. Now how awesome is that?

If you would like to experience the excitement of pooling your bandwidth, talk to your SPS (as we cool SoftLayer Secret Lab Technicians like to call our SoftLayer Professional SLalespersons, because an acronym is still a cool TLA as long as only three letters are capitalized), and get yourself a Virtual Dedicated Rack (make sure to call it a “VDR” when you order it to sound cool).

And let ‘em know this post by Shawn got you interested. If I get enough referrals, I’ll get the December SoftLayer Referral Outback Steakhouse Gift Card!

117 Servers in one day. That’s right — We sold and fully provisioned 117 servers yesterday. Words can’t express how proud this makes me as we’ve come a long way from when I started at Softlayer just over a year and a half ago. When I got here I was the 25th employee and we were in a very small, weird office and I was always within (literally) arms reach of Lance and Steven and a good (great) day was selling and provisioning double digit servers. Now things have gotten much bigger and we are still humming along coming out with new products, new datacenters (Seattle and more to come) and innovating new and never before seen ideas and services in the hosting world.

We now have over 100 employees, nearing 15,000 servers in production, a new (bigger) office and record revenue being generated daily. Two years ago when we opened our doors for business we had zero (0) in all of the above categories. We have grown up fast while continuing to be the best out there with our innovation and services.

I’m just so proud. *tear*

As I watched the Dallas Cowboys dismantle the Green Bay Packers last Thursday night, I noticed an ever so slight – almost invisible – passing of the torch from Brett Favre to Tony Romo. It became quite clear – Football is a young man’s game.

As I sat and pondered what that must feel like for Brett and his crew, I noticed frightening similarities between hosting and football. Hosting appears to be a young man’s sport as well.

Now, before you guys (there I go again) pile on and beat me down – hear me out. I am not saying that Brett and his older brethren are washed up and incapable of playing football – but I am saying, their primetime has passed and any future success should be considered borrowed time on a great career coming to conclusion. Facts are facts – professional football is a very physical and mental job and the youth + skill appears to outweigh age + experience.

This leads me back to hosting. A world full of very young and extremely talented players. An industry where degrees and certifications come in a distant second behind skill and innovative thinking. I often find my thirty-something (barely) resume on-the-line with both new and old competitors. I can assure you, the young competitors terrify me, and the older ones typically bore me.

The recent interviews for potential new hires here at SL are eye-opening. Young Guns coming out of high school with Cisco Certs, college students working on cutting edge technologies and of course – the prodigy that shows up from time to time who was born to design and innovate beyond all our wildest dreams.

I often tell Mike, our CFO, that technology is changing the rules of business and how things will be done going forward. In Mike’s accounting world, graduates come out of college with lots of book knowledge and very little experience and gain experience over their career. In the technology world, I would argue the younger talent holds more technical knowledge (book or real world) than the older more established crowd What I bring to the table is business and technical experience; but I find myself learning more and more technology from my younger team members everyday. It’s a never ending battle to stay on the leading edge – but I wonder – how long will it be before I hand the torch?

Go Cowboys!!

Seattle baby! That’s what’s next. With that being said I thought I would blog about Tom Hanks. I know you wish you had thought of this one too. I chose him because I figure he has done enough movies and other things that I can actually have enough content and he did do “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” and they are both closely related to our expansion. Why, you ask? Right now we have a few guys in Seattle installing cage nuts — 17,280 to be exact. That is 1 cage nut installed every 5 seconds for 24 hours straight (Sleepless!). I hate that I am missing out on that fun. Writing blogs is nice too I suppose.
So here we go Tom Hanks and Softlayer!

Softlayer works because we are all “Bosom Buddies”. We all get along. Hopefully all of us will continue to be famous afterwards and not just half of us. That would make for a lot of “Happy Days” in the future. We also have quite a few “Family Ties” as we have a brother/sister pair (Fleitman), and 3 brother pairs (Kinman/Laude/Guerra/Harris) and we can’t forget the Father/Son set (Rushe) family keeps things fun and busy! If we continue to grow at this rate we will all be making a “Splash” soon when we leave our competitors in the dust. When that happens we will have a party to rival the likes of the “Bachelor Party” and we can invite “The Man with One Red Shoe” and will need some “Volunteers” to serve the Hors D’oeuvres.

I bet most of you didn’t know that Tom Hanks was in “Real Genius” but I will use it anyway because we really do have some real geniuses here (Everyone take a bow). This keeps us from turning into a “Money Pit” and on the top of our game. I could say that before Softlayer all of us would have been just a bunch of guys with “Nothing in Common” but it seems that “Every Time We Say Goodbye” we seem to end up back together. Even having to go through the “Dragnet” is worth it, because we all want to be “Big” and have the last laugh in the “Punchline”.

We all drive in from “The Burbs” almost daily just to make sure we make our customers happy and we let the kids watch “Turner and Hooch” on the in-car DVD on the way to daycare. Once we get here we keep the “Joe Versus the Volcano” attitude and will take on any problem and get it solved.
To keep it light, once a year we go play in Muenster and Sam cooks up the BBQ on “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and we pig out and have a blast. There are some great “Tales from the Crypt” after those parties. Sam and his cooking crew won 3rd place last year and that puts them truly in “A League of Their Own”.
Meanwhile the guys are still “Sleepless in Seattle” and Lance is spending his nights thinking of the next location. I really doubt it will be “Philadelphia” at least I hope not, too many Eagles up there. Go Cowboys!

Note: I am pretty sure I am the “Forrest Gump” of Softlayer. I think Gump had ADHD like me and that is why he wanted to be and do so many things in his life. I take pride in that! You can always tell by my blogs.

Back to being the best — in “Apollo 13″ the most famous line in the movie (true story too) was “Houston, we have a problem” I bet there are some competitors to Softlayer out there that are saying that same thing right about now with our continued growth and that isn’t some kid’s “Toy Story” that is the honest truth. We do it with customer service and the best product. Why? We just like hearing our customers say over and over, keep doing “That thing you do” and we will keep buying your service. That hurts the competition sometimes. We aren’t sorry about that. We will go “From the Earth to the Moon” to continue to make our customers happy and we will make sure “You’ve got Mail” when something important is coming and it will not be just another “Toy Story 2″. Even if it is like “Saving Private Ryan” we do anything we can to make it happen. All while walking “The Green Mile” because taking care of our environment is very important to us. (You didn’t think I was going to talk about the death penalty did you?)

Some people like to look at us as a “Castaway”, but we truly are a “Band of Brothers” on the road to fruition instead of the “Road to Perdition” like so many others. I welcome all readers to try and “Catch me if you can” in this blog and let me know of the movies I have missed so far. I will admit I have skipped a few TV appearances so you have to let me slide on those.

One of these days I might have to blog on “Freedom: A History of Us” and let you know where we all came from and what got us here. It is a long list of “Great Performances” that would impress you. Some of us were the smart geeky type and some of us were “The Ladykillers” and could have fun at an airport in “The Terminal”.
I am getting close to the end now so the Narrator would now say, “Elvis has left the Building” on the “Polar Express” or was it in a pack of “Cars”, oh well either way. I hope reading this blog has been an enjoyable experience and not like trying to “Crack the Da Vinci Code”.