– Mark Quigley, Director of Corporate Communications with Softlayer Technologies (www.softlayer.com), says:
Most organizations face multi-faceted challenges that can’t be met with just a single system or service. By design, SoftLayer’s services seamlessly integrate to create comprehensive, enterprise-class solutions that leverage our industry-leading automation and network architecture advantages. Not only do customers receive the highest standards of performance, security, and reliability, they can harness the power of having a solution architecture that is fully cloud-enabled.
SoftLayer is a Cloud Infrastructure Provider offering both dedicated and virtualized cloud resources. SoftLayer does not sit inside an enterprise data center, rather we are a logical extension of it. Key to SoftLayer has been the ability to anticipate customer’s needs and to deliver innovative solutions to meet those needs. A number of areas are worth considering:
SoftLayer’s Customer Portal:
Our industry-leading Customer Portal gives customers full control of their SoftLayer solutions, systems, and services and allows access to more than 100 automated actions, backend services, and valuable technical tutorials. Customers can use multiple modalities to connect to the portal:
Public Network Approach: Directly connect to dedicated or cloud servers over the internet via SSH, Terminal Services, and/or many other server control console applications.
Private Network Approach: Connect securely via VPN and gain access to the private out-of-band management network. Once connected, directly connect to dedicated or cloud servers via SSH, Terminal Services, and/or many other server control console applications.
Mobile-ready website Approach: Customers can access manage.softlayer.mobi. This website is designed to work on all web-enabled mobile devices, and has been optimized to take advantage of extra features provided for the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), as well as Google’s Android.
Mobile Clients Approach: Download one of our Mobile Clients for iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad), Google’s Android, or Blackberry and connect to the customer portal. For more information, go to the Mobile Apps page.
SoftLayer provides customer access to their hosting environments via a single interface. It does not matter what kind of solution has been deployed or where it is physically hosted – the end user can still access and manage it through a single interface. The result is ease of management.
Server Rack Architecture:
The SoftLayer network design seamlessly integrates three distinct and redundant network architectures—Public, Private, and a Data Center to Data Center Management Network — into the industry’s first Network-Within-a-Network topology for maximum accessibility, security, and control. This architecture is common to all data centers, all racks, and all servers that live in the SoftLayer environment. This revolutionary design gives system administrators unfettered access for total control over their environments without exposure to external threats. Our network is built from best-in-class networking infrastructure, hardware, and software with exceptional bandwidth and connectivity for the highest speed and reliability.
SoftLayer’s Network:
The SoftLayer network provides all customers with over 2,000 Gbps of connectivity between our data centers and 7 points of presence (PoPs). We have enabled dozens of 10Gbps network connections across our locations that are provided by 10 leading US network providers, and include multiple public peering links to dozens of additional Internet access networks.
SoftLayer’s geographically diverse PoP’s provide seamless, direct, private, and high speed access to our backbone network, bringing connectivity closer to the end user. You may choose the SoftLayer POP location closest to your office or end users. High-speed metro-WAN services and cross connects from providers including Equinix and Telx are also available. Our network is built from best-in-class networking infrastructure, hardware, and software with exceptional bandwidth and connectivity for the highest speed and reliability.
SoftLayer seamlessly integrates three distinct and redundant gigabit network architectures—public, private, and data center-to-data center—into the industry’s first network-within-a-network topology. This design provides you maximum accessibility, security, and control for your IT infrastructure.
SoftLayer invented the private network for the hosting industry in order to provide an unparalleled advantage in security, accessibility, and bandwidth efficiency. Administrators can access servers via VPN over carriers that are not connected to our public network. This totally segregates public and private traffic, making it impossible for external parties to access server functionality and allowing administrators to securely transfer data and manage servers without sacrificing public bandwidth to their sites.
In addition, SoftLayer has provided native IPv6 support to our publicly available services since December 2008. SoftLayer does not have to worry about tunneling to carry IPv6 over IPv4 networks, which in turn means that our networks are not limited by a diminishing pool of IPv4 addresses. In addition, our support personnel are IPv6 savvy today.
Cloud infrastructure delivered via dedicated and virtualized resources is the ONLY thing that we do and we are very good at it. In fact we are better at this than anyone else is. And because we continue to innovate and automate, we are able to deliver a powerful solution in a cost effective manner.
