Network Redux Blog

A company I have admired since their initial inception is Softlayer Technologies, Inc. of Texas.  They provide Hardware as a Service to thousands of customers across the globe.  Unique to their offering is a feature rich portal and API.

Early in their growth we managed servers for approximately ~20 customers at Softlayer.  As our portland based operations grew, and our virtualization offerings matured, this number has since dwindled to three.

Recently, each time we've migrated a customer from one of their unmanaged dedicated servers, to our managed virtual private server environment, a member of their rigorous sales team has tried to reach us via telephone and email (usually within 15 minutes of the cancellation request).  Though respectful on the surface, the underlying tone of their sales pitch could easily be construed as "ours is bigger than yours, therefore let the big boys handle the architecture," as seen in a recent blog post by one of their team members.

Does this type of size still matter?  It would be interesting to see actual metrics on the 20,000+ servers they have provisioned for customers.  CPU usage, physical memory consumption, disk IO and disk space usage.  Too often we've brought a customer to our services from a dedicated server to a managed virtual private server, saving them several hundred, in certain cases several thousand dollars per month.  How?  We built a solution that was appropriate to their actual requirements.  We took into account CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk IO, disk space usage, and SLA requirements -- using our virtualization technologies and our own network of servers, built a solution appropriate to the customers needs.

I'm losing a tremendous amount of respect for organizations such as Softlayer which seem to believe that strength is in the raw number of servers they can rack.  We build at minimum 8 core servers with 32GB of memory, and we build these on an as need, utility basis.  We're using our space, power and cooling efficiently and in what the competition is taking credit for as a green manner.

While hardware as a service has its place, more focus should be spent on the quality of service, rather than the quantity of service.  I can say this with due respect, as one of our largest customers was previously a several hundred server customer at Softlayer.  This customer's new found savings have allowed them to focus their energy less on dozens of dedicated servers (which were unfortunately prone to disk drive failures), and more towards their core competencies.

First impressions are everything.  45,000 server capacity is a marketing point, gorgeous PDFs which highlight this capacity are business intelligence at its finest...

Selling the customer a solution that fits their actual needs and doesn't constrain them to a physical device that requires downtime to upgrade (or downgrade) is our method of delivering a sustainable platform.

Author: Thomas Brenneke