/ By admin / Cloud • Cloud Hosting • Customer Service/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer and AWS: What’s the Difference?

People often compare SoftLayer with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It’s easy to understand why. We’ve both built scalable infrastructure platforms to provide cloud resources to the same broad range of customers—from individual entrepreneurs to the world’s largest enterprises.

But while the desire to compare is understandable, the comparison itself isn’t quite apt. The SoftLayer platform is fundamentally different from AWS.

In fact, AWS could be run on SoftLayer. SoftLayer couldn’t be run on AWS.

AWS provisions in the public cloud.

When AWS started letting customers have virtual machines deployed on the infrastructure that AWS had built for their e-commerce business, AWS accelerated the adoption of virtual server hosting within the existing world of Web hosting.In an AWS cloud environment, customers order the computing and storage resources they need, and AWS deploys those resources on demand. The mechanics of that deployment are important to note, though.

AWS has data centers full of physical servers that are integrated with each other in a massive public cloud environment. These servers are managed and maintained by AWS, and they collectively make up the available cloud infrastructure in the facility.

AWS installs a virtualization layer (also known as hypervisor) on these physical servers to tie the individual nodes into the environment’s total capacity. When a customer orders a cloud server from AWS, this virtualization layer finds a node with the requested resources available and provisions a server image with the customer’s desired operating system, applications, etc. The entire process is quick and automated, and each customer has complete control over the resources he or she ordered.

That virtualization layer is serving a purpose, and it may seem insignificant, but it highlights a critical difference in their platform and ours:

AWS automates and provisions at the hypervisor level, while SoftLayer automates and provisions at the data center level.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/softlayer-and-aws-whats-difference

/ By admin / Development/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer, Bluemix and OpenStack: A Powerful Combination

Building and deploying applications on SoftLayer with Bluemix, IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), just got a whole lot more powerful. At IBM’s Interconnect, we announced a beta service for deploying OpenStack-based virtual servers within Bluemix. Obviously, the new service is exciting because it brings together the scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure from SoftLayer with the open, standards-based cloud management platform of OpenStack. But making the new service available via Bluemix presents a particularly unique set of opportunities.

Now Bluemix developers can deploy OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer or their own private OpenStack cloud in a consistent, developer-friendly manner. Without changing your code, your configuration, or your deployment method, you can launch your application to a local OpenStack cloud on your premises, a private OpenStack cloud you have deployed on SoftLayer bare metal servers, or to SoftLayer virtual servers within Bluemix. For instance, you could instantly fire up a few OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer to test out your new application. After you have impressed your clients and fully tested everything, you could deploy that application to a local OpenStack cloud in your own data center ̶all from within Bluemix. With Bluemix providing the ability to deploy applications across cloud deployment models, developers can create an infrastructure configuration once and deploy consistently, regardless of the stage of their application development life cycle.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-bluemix-and-openstack-powerful-combination

/ By admin / Cloud • Development/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer and Koding join forces to power a Global Virtual Hackathon

Koding is excited to partner with SoftLayer on its upcoming Global Virtual Hackathon, happening December 12–13, 2015. The event builds on last year’s Hackathon, where more than 60,000 developers participated from all over the world. The winners took home over $35,000 in prizes! This year, we’ve upped the ante to make the event even larger than the last time: the winner will take home a $100,000 grand prize.

“We are working with Koding for this virtual hackathon as part of our commitment to promote open source technology and support the talented community of developers who are dispersed all over the globe,” said Sandy Carter, general manager of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. “Cloud-based open source development platforms like Koding make it easier to get software projects started, and hackathons are a great place to show how these kinds of platforms make software development easier and more fun.”

Why a virtual hackathon?
Hackathons are awesome. They allow developers to solve problems in a very short amount of time. The challenge with traditional hackathons is that they require you to be physically present in a room. With more and more of our lives moving online, why be tied to a physical location to solve problems? Virtual hackathons allow talented individuals from all over the world to participate, collaborate, and showcase their skills, regardless of their physical location. Our Global Virtual Hackathon levels the playing field.

Who won last year?
Educational games, especially those that teach programming, were popular to build—and a few actually won! Want to see what the winners built? Click here to check out a fun yet effective game teaching students to program. Learn more about the team of developers and see their code here. Last year, nine winners across three categories took home a prize. To see a list of last year’s winners, see the blog post here.

Tips to be successful and win this year
Here’s some motivation for you: the grand prize is $100,000. (That’s seed capital for your startup idea!)

So how do you win? First and foremost, apply now! Then talk to some friends and maybe even team up. You can also use Koding to find teammates once you’re accepted. Teammates aren’t a requirement but can definitely make for a fun experience and improve your chances of making something amazing.

Once you’re in, get excited! And be sure to start thinking about what you want to build around this year’s themes.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-and-koding-join-forces-power-global-virtual-hackathon

/ By admin / Infrastructure/ 0 Comments

Opening Up the Cloud

With OpenStack, cloud computing becomes easily accessible to everyone. It tears down financial barriers to cloud deployments and tackles the fear of lock-in. One of the main benefits of OpenStack is the fact that it is open source and supported by a wide ecosystem, with contributions from more than 200 companies, including Canonical and IBM. Users can change service providers and hardware at any time, and compared to other clouds using virtualization technology, OpenStack can double server utilization to as much as 85 percent. This means that an OpenStack cloud is economical and delivers more flexibility, scalability, and agility to businesses. The challenge however lies in recruiting and retaining OpenStack experts, who are in high demand, making it hard for companies to deploy OpenStack on time and on budget. But BootStack, Canonical’s managed cloud product solved that problem by offering all the benefits of a private cloud without any of the pain of day-to-day infrastructure management.

Addressing the Challenge of Finding OpenStack Experts

Resourcing an OpenStack six-strong team to work 24×7 would cost between $900,000 and $1.5 million and can take months of headhunting. Thus the savings that OpenStack should bring companies are eroded so Canonical created BootStack, short for Build, Operate, and Optionally Transfer. It’s a new service for setting up and operating an OpenStack cloud, in both on-premises and hosted environments, and it gives users the option of taking over the management of your cloud in the future.

After working with each customer to define their requirements and specify the right cloud infrastructure for their business, Canonical’s experienced engineering and support team builds and manages the entire cloud infrastructure of the customer, including Ubuntu OpenStack, the underlying hypervisor, and deployment onto hosted or on-premises hardware. As a result, users get all the benefits of a private cloud without any of the pain of day-to-day infrastructure management. For added protection, BootStack is backed by a clear SLA that covers cloud availability at the user’s desired scale as well as uptime and responsiveness metrics.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/opening-cloud

/ By admin / Infrastructure/ 0 Comments

Semantics: “Public, “Private,” and “Hybrid” in Cloud Computing, Part I

What does the word “gift” mean to you? In English, it most often refers to a present or something given voluntarily. In German, it has a completely different meaning: “poison.” If a box marked “gift” is placed in front of an English-speaker, it’s safe to assume that he or she would interact with it very differently than a German-speaker would.

In the same way, simple words like “public,” “private,” and “hybrid” in cloud computing can mean very different things to different audiences. But unlike our “gift” example above (which would normally have some language or cultural context), it’s much more difficult for cloud computing audiences to decipher meaning when terms like “public cloud,” “private cloud,” and “hybrid cloud” are used.

We, as an industry, need to focus on semantics.

In this two-part series, we’ll look at three different definitions of “public” and “private” to set the stage for a broader discussion about “hybrid.”

“Public” v. “Private”

Definition 1—Location: On-premises v. Off-premises

For some audiences (and the enterprise market), whether an infrastructure is public or private is largely a question of location. Does a business own and maintain the data centers, servers, and networking gear it uses for its IT needs, or does the business use gear that’s owned and maintained by another party?

This definition of “public v. private” makes sense for an audience that happens to own and operate its own data centers. If a business has exclusive physical access to and ownership of its gear, the business considers that gear “private.” If another provider handles the physical access and ownership of the gear, the business considers that gear “public.”

 

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/semantics-public-private-and-hybrid-cloud-computing-part-i

/ By admin / Business/ 0 Comments

The Importance of Data’s Physical Location in the Cloud

If top-tier cloud providers use similar network hardware in their data centers and connect to the same transit and peering bandwidth providers, how can SoftLayer claim to provide the best network performance in the cloud computing industry?

Over the years, I’ve heard variations of that question asked dozens of times, and it’s fairly easy to answer with impressive facts and figures. All SoftLayer data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) are connected to our unique global network backbone, which carries public, private, and management traffic to and from servers. Using our network connectivity table, some back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that we have more than 2,500Gbps of bandwidth connectivity with some of the largest transit and peering bandwidth providers in the world (and that total doesn’t even include the private peering relationships we have with other providers in various regional markets). Additionally, customers may order servers with up to 10Gbps network ports in our data centers.

For the most part, those stats explain our differentiation, but part of the bigger network performance story is still missing, and to a certain extent it has been untold—until today.

The 2,500+Gbps of bandwidth connectivity we break out in the network connectivity table only accounts for the on-ramps and off-ramps of our network. Our global network backbone is actually made up of an additional 2,600+Gbps of bandwidth connectivity … and all of that backbone connectivity transports SoftLayer-related traffic.

This robust network architecture streamlines the access to and delivery of data on SoftLayer servers. When you access a SoftLayer server, the network is designed to bring you onto our global backbone as quickly as possible at one of our network PoPs, and when you’re on our global backbone, you’ll experience fewer hops (and a more direct route that we control). When one of your users requests data from your SoftLayer server, that data travels across the global backbone to the nearest network PoP, where it is handed off to another provider to carry the data the “last mile.”

With this controlled environment, I decided to undertake an impromptu science experiment to demonstrate how location and physical distance affect network performance in the cloud.

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/importance-datas-physical-location-cloud

/ By admin / Business • Cloud/ 0 Comments

Streamlining the VMware licenses ordering process

IBM and VMware’s agreement (announced in February) enables enterprise customers to extend their existing on-premises workloads to the cloud—specifically, the IBM Cloud. Customers can now leverage VMware technologies with IBM’s worldwide cloud data centers, giving them the power to scale globally without incurring CAPEX and reducing security risks.

So what does this mean to customers’ VMware administrators? They can quickly realize cost-effective hybrid cloud characteristics by deploying into SoftLayer’s enterprise-grade global cloud platform (VMware@SoftLayer). One of these characteristics is that vSphere workloads and catalogs can be provisioned onto VMware vSphere environments within SoftLayer’s data centers without modification to VMware VMs or guests. The use of a common vSphere hypervisor and management/orchestration platform make these deployments possible.

vSphere implementations on SoftLayer also enable utilization of other components. Table 1 contains a list of VMware products that are now available for ordering through the SoftLayer customer portal. Note that prices are subject to change. Visit VMware Solutions for the most current pricing.

 

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/2016/streamlining-vmware-licenses-ordering-process