This is caused by our server provider SoftLayer. They need maintenance them CISCO Router.

Emergency Data Center Maintenance – FCR04.DAL01 [11/30/2009]
Date: Monday, November 30, 2009 (11/30/2009)
Start Time: 02:00 CST (08:00 UTC)
End Time: 03:00 CST (09:00 UTC)
Services affected: Public Network
Location: DAL01
Duration: 1 hour
More info about this schedule maintenance:
(This is copied from SoftLayer tickets.)

The following notification is to inform you of an EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE event on the SoftLayer Technologies IP Network. Due to the severity, the time frame between this notice and the maintenance window has been shortened.

Start Time: 02:00 CST (08:00 UTC)
End Time: 03:00 CST (09:00 UTC)

Summary:
SoftLayer Technologies in conjunction with Cisco Systems have identified a service impacting bug in the current IOS version running on this router. A vendor recommended upgrade has been provided as a resolution and needs to be implemented immediately.

Original Issue Reference:
With the introduction of 4-byte ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers), a newly devised method of injecting a specifically crafted prefix into the global route table allows for the BGP process to be reset on older IOS code.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20090729-bgp.shtml

https://forums.softlayer.com/showthread.php?t=4585

Customer Impact:
During this maintenance, customers will notice a complete loss of connectivity to their servers on the frontend network (public network). Backend network (private network) connectivity will NOT be impacted during this maintenance. While the upgrade duration is scheduled for 1 hour, we only  as the routers reload and fully converge. Again, this will NOT impact the backend network (private network) for customer servers.

A notice will also be posted in the portal prior to the maintenance, during the maintenance informing you of the progress, and after with completion details.

If you have any problems with your connection to your services after this maintenance window, or if you have any questions regarding the maintenance at any point, please call us at 214-442-0603 or open a ticket in the customer portal.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance and welcome any feedback you may have.

SoftLayer Technologies
Network Engineering

We have chosen Softlayer as host for our operations. They offer an amazing network, competitive prices and free virtual networks. That’s like putting a patch cable between two servers for direct communication that doesn’t count as external bandwidth.

All servers are dedicated servers that we rent, sharing servers sucks and colocating has a too big upfront cost in my opinion.

Our web frontend is a Dual Core C2D with 4 GB RAM running Apache (and minor stuff like a DNS server)… and memcached of course – I love memcached.

As database backend we use another Dual Core C2D with 4 GB RAM running MySQL. Also this box is running Varnish which is a reverse proxy server that caches our static content like images, css and js.

We use cheap non-RAIDed non-SSD SATA disks, if one breaks it will be replaced almost instantly. Backups are readily available to be copied back. Adding RAID/SSD would add cost to the monthly hosting fees that I see no real benefit in.

At the moment TPU uses 23 GB of disk space and about 10 GB of db space – both really insignificant.

As operating system Fedora/CentOS is used. It is so widespread that major bugs are found quickly. Also it is incredibly easy add/remove software via rpm/yum. Don’t forget to get rid of stuff that slows down/potentially breaks the server like: redhat firewall, selinux, audit. If you use CentOS add the DAG RPM repository to get a usable amount of packages into yum.

Bandwidth use for those “content” servers is rather small. The web frontend which basically serves only HTML to the outside world (most images come from the Varnish instance on the DB server) goes through about 1.5 TB traffic per month. The DB backend which serves only images/css/js to the outside world pushes about 1 TB per month (we add caching headers whereever possible).

The bandwidth of the “downloads” servers is a different thing and served from other servers which are completely independent of the content servers, I’ll write about these another day.

Back to our hosting discussion…

There are a number of hosting options, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I am going to be minimalist with this – so don’t get upset. There are numerous books and dozens of in-depth research reports from the likes of Gartner, IDC and Tier1 Research that cover it off. I am trying to do this justice in the context of a blog, so I am going to broad brush stroke it and try to focus on the big picture. This post will essentially serve as a back drop for upcoming posts.

Co-location: This is the barest of offers. You get 24/7 access to racks and the ability to do with them what you will. You buy the servers, the firewalls, the tools and provide the people to build and manage everything. The co-location company provides a secure, properly powered and environmentally controlled facility to support the infrastructure. You are essentially renting space and access to a WAN.

• Colo is cheaper than doing it yourself as physical infrastructure costs are shared across a number of customers.
• The hardware is yours, not the co-location company’s. This means you can scale in the manner you please versus what suits the business model of the co-location company. The potential downside is that this assumes you were smart enough to pre-buy the space to grow into…
• The software is yours, too. You are not limited to the management suite provided by the co-location company. Use what you wish.
• Colo centers are usually more robust than at typical business environment. They deploy more physical security in an environment that is designed to properly manage power (multiple generators on-site for example) and the risks associated with fire and other natural disasters.
• On the downside, you have to have sufficient IT staff to do everything from installation to hardware management. In addition, their effectiveness may be limited by the fact they are not physically located on site. It is possible that they might not be in the same city as the gear they are monitoring.
• A typical customer is running a stable environment and has little need to scale up or down in capacity.
• Providers include Equinix and Switch and Data.

Dedicated:  You build your own box (a dedicated server versus a shared server) and manage it in someone else’s environment. Unlike co-location, the box is supplied and configured (to a degree) by the hosting company that provides the requisite security,  power and environment management. After that you are more or less on your own, the assumption being that you have the internal IT infrastructure (tools plus people, or people to use the tools provided by the hosting company) for the job.

• A dedicated server means better performance than offered in a shared arrangement.
• Providers have built in layers of redundancy as they use multiple carriers and peering arrangements. The end result is increased service reliability.
• As with a co-location, bandwidth and infrastructure costs are shared and therefore lower. You are also able to take advantage of lower hardware costs given the fact the hosting provider ought to be be able to negotiate better prices as dictated by volume.
• Additional services, such as load balancing and disaster recovery, can be offered.
• If you need to scale, additional boxes are managed through the hosting provider. This includes the ‘prep’ work – things like getting an OS on board.
• The entire arrangement will be governed by defined service level agreements to ensure the hosting provider lives up to their end of the arrangement.
• There is still a requirement for IT staff to manage the environments.
• Many providers use a no contract philosophy, which gives significant flexibility.
• A typical customer is any customer looking for flexibility, often with changing IT needs. Typically this is a sophisticated user of IT – a Web 2.0 company, for example.
• Providers include Softlayer, Rackspace and Peer1.

Managed: This is essentially dedicated plus. You get the advantages of a dedicated service plus you get an external resource to manage it for you.

• Another bump in cost savings (assuming of course your provider is good at what they do) given you do not need staff to manage the servers.
• In theory your servers are being managed by experts versus by an IT department that is probably juggling multiple priorities. This means that you can redeploy staff to revenue generating  or cost savings activities. At very least you can demand more focus on managing the remaining pieces of your IT infrastructure.
• Service is provided on a 24/7/365 basis.
• The arrangement might translate into a third party managed solution with a dedicated server provider.
• A typical customer is not a sophisticated user of IT. As with a customer of a dedicated service, the preference is for variable cost versus capex.
• Providers include Terremark, Savvis, AT&T,  Rackspace and Attenda.

Cloud Computing: The Cloud represents the technological pinnacle in today’s market. It is managed plus the ability to scale up or down on the fly.

• The potential for cost savings is significant given the cloud can be managed on a usage basis. Everything is incremental. If there is no activity, there is no associated cost. That said, these arrangements will come at a premium to a dedicated environment.
• In theory, moving from provider to provider is much easier. This is good if you are a customer, not so good if you are a hosting company (this represents and intersting business model discussion that has to be on going across the industry. I wonder what the commercial impacts will be vis a vis contract structure?)
• You gain the ability to add or kill instances on the fly and can potentially manage this using automated tools (for example automatically launching a new server when peak loads surpass predefined thresholds).
• There is a downside though – this is a shared infrastructure play (albeit on a massive scale), which means that enterprises with a security issue (most of them) may prove hesitant to adopt the cloud in its initial incarnation.
• A typical customer shows highly variable demand and spikes in users  and associated demand on a regular basis. Consider Social Networking or SaaS environments.
• Providers include Amazon, Mosso (a Rackspace sub) and Softlayer.

It seems clear that the world is not moving towards a single model. Each solution presents a set of clear advantages and disadvantages sufficient to encourage companies to look broadly for what fits best versus the notion of trying to shoehorn needs into a single solution. In many respects the solution decision will be dependant upon the company’s strategic outlook. Some companies will remain IT centric, and will be keen to keep internal control of their infrastructure regardless of the cost, while others will view internal management as depriving them of agility and contributing to lack of management focus. At the end of the day not all companies are alike – indeed, they are mostly different. It is likely that a hybrid solution will be adopted by many enterprises to meet different needs dependant upon the application, the designated user population (eg. internal versus external), security protocols, geographies etc…

TopHosts.com features a great Q and A with Lance Crosby, CEO of one of Mezeo’s Premier Hosting Partners, SoftLayer. Lance took the opportunity to discuss SoftLayer’s recently introduced CloudLayer services. The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform powers CloudLayer Storage and the first month has been terrific in terms of both performance and customer acceptance. Here is an excerpt of what TopHosts.com discussed with Lance:

TH: Tell us why you think cloud computing dominates the talk in the industry right now? What SoftLayer products in the virtualization stream and cloud computing realm are you most excited about?

LC: Cloud computing provides the flexible, on-demand model that many companies are looking for. Businesses increasingly are looking for technology solutions that provide scalable computing power that efficiently adapts to meet computing needs in real-time. Cloud computing provides a balance between massively scalable computing power and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so companies aren’t saddled with unaffordable capital expenditure.

At the same time, many customers will want a fully integrated solution that combines the scalability of cloud, the flexibility of virtualization, and the performance of dedicated. SoftLayer is the only hosting company to fully integrated cloud computing, virtualization, and dedicated servers and deliver them as a unified set of products and capabilities. Our CloudLayer™ suite of services is available as stand-alone products, but they can also integrate and be managed alongside of dedicated servers. That’s what we see as the future for cloud.

We had some intermittent outages with a few servers at our hosting provider. It wasn’t an easy issue to diagnose, and after the culprit piece of equipment was identified and replaced, we were alerted about the fix:

At 01:43 CST on 12.12.2008, SoftLayer Engineers were alerted to anomalies behind FAS02.SR01.SEA01. Due to the intermittent nature of these anomalies, SoftLayer Engineers opened a support case with the vendor, began investigating the root cause and, in partnership with the vendor, began work on a solution. As the issue repeated at 11:39 CST on 12.13.2008 (duration 30 seconds) and again at 00:07 CST on 12.14.2008 (duration 30 seconds), the decision to replace the misbehaving device was made. During the course of this issue, customers would have seen intermittent connectivity and/or packet loss. Emergency maintenance was scheduled between 03:00 CST and 04:00 CST on 12.15.2008, began at 03:00 CST and was completed at 03:15 CST. Duration of this replacement was 15 minutes.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and thank you for your patience in this matter.

Although I find it great that companies are able to send out notices like this (after the fact), I do wish that issues were made more transparent at the time that they were happening.

It’s very frustrating to report a failure and get a response like “We are not currently aware of any issues at this time. As far as we know, everything has been resolved and/or rectified at this time.”

Well, you have been made aware that there is an issue. Acknowledge it and take responsibility for fixing it. Thanks.

Several big announcements rained down from the Internet clouds over the past few days.  Amazon announced support for Microsoft Windows in their EC2 cloud. They will support both the Windows OS (AD, IIS, .NET, etc) and SQL Server. Additionally they are providing a 99.95% uptime SLA for their services. This is a respectable goal for a cloud hosting service.

Microsoft, not to be outdone, announced their own cloud computing offering called Azure. We all knew that Microsoft was working on a cloud hosting service over the past year. It’s nice to finally hear some of the details. Microsoft’s service is initially geared towards developers but it’s not hard to see that small businesses are the next likely target. Microsoft provides additional support in the cloud for technologies like Microsoft Dynamics, Sharepoint, and Live.

Someone recently asked me the question: “Are clouds going to compete with dedicated hosting services?” My response was both yes and no. Cloud hosting from Amazon and Microsoft will definitely compete with unmanaged dedicated hosters like The Planet and SoftLayer. Cloud hosting is nothing more than virtualized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). I also think cloud hosting will directly compete with smaller datacenter colocation deals. Think about it. If you are a company looking to colo half-a-dozen servers at a datacenter you could save significant capex and infrastructure headaches by using virtual servers in a cloud. Plus you could take advantage of the global business continuity features of a large cloud.

I don’t believe clouds will compete with managed hosting providers — yet. The simple reason is that cloud hosters don’t provide server management. They are purely infrastructure plays with some cool APIs. I’m sure some smart group of people is thinking about building a managed services business on top of a cloud platform. You just need the technical talent, marketing, and luck.

If someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say “SoftLayer!”. I’m impressed by their focus, their open architecture, and their frictionless business processes. SoftLayer probably looks like another me-too Internet hoster to a layperson. But to someone in the business this company is a shining example of how to do-it-right. I own and work at a hosting business and companies like this keep me awake at night — not out of fear, but because they prove what is possible in our industry. And I think everyone needs to identify a business in their industry that they look up to.

I love the fact they provide an open API that customers can leverage to manage their computing resources. Customers can use the API to integrate internal business processes with their service provider’s processes. As service providers become more of an extension of corporate IT’s internal resources these types of APIs will become more critical.

SoftLayer engineers also designed a network architecture which provides both performance and management benefits. They can easily connect multiple dedicated servers using a private internal network. The big benefit of a private network is that customers don’t have to pay for bandwidth consumed by servers talking to one another (i.e., web app server talking to a database server). Hosters like The Planet used to make oodles of cash off of companies that had heavy bandwidth utilization between servers. This kind of bandwidth effectively costs the service provider nothing.

SoftLayer’s frictionless business processes really separate the company from the pack. Take the service ordering process for example. You can go from an online order to a fully provisioned dedicated server in minutes. You can manage that server remotely using KVM-over-IP functionality. Need to reboot the server? No problem. They provide managed power port access. Need to rebuild your server? Again, no problem. You can rebuild your server using one of their server imaging systems.

SoftLayer didn’t invent anything new in the sense that most of these technologies have been around for years. Their success is based on their ability to elegantly bundle these technologies in a way that can be fully managed by their customers. The company recently announced a partnership with Citrix to build a cloud computing infrastructure. I plan to follow this new effort very closely.

We’ve had some reports of posts being republished without permission at chemicalengineeringconsulting.com. If one of your posts has been published there without permission, and you are the copyright holder of the material in that post, you can send a DMCA notice to the following addresses. This information was obtained from Whois and is believed to be accurate at the time this post was written, but you should confirm it yourself before taking action.

chemicalengineeringconsulting.com appears to be currently hosted at 67.228.3.238 which is managed by the web hosting company SoftLayer. Their DMCA email address is:

copyright@softlayer.com

Complete instructions for sending a DMCA takedown notice to SoftLayer are available here. You must include all of the information as instructed there, including a copy of the declaration with your full name and contact information filled in. In particular your DMCA notice must identify the specific URL of the post or page where your content has been copied without permission. Remember that making a false declaration in a DMCA takedown notice is illegal.

A sample DMCA notice suitable for sending to SofLayer is shown on this page under the heading DMCA Notice To Host.

Please note that the web hosting company merely manages the server on which that site is running; they are not responsible for its content and are probably unaware of its purpose.

Re posted from DatacenterJunkie:

I’ve been in Chicago for exactly 9.5 hours, and HostingCon is already better than I had hoped for. I landed at 2:30PM, and was checked into my hotel by 3:30. Daniel, BitPusher’s CEO arrived at about 7:15. We mostly relaxed until 8:30, enjoying room service and the view, the we headed out to an informal get together at the W.

We met up with some of the guys from MessageWire, and DedicatedNOW in the lobby, and spend some time with the owner of FortressITX. Once we realized that drinks were on SoftLayer, we chatted up their CEO Lance Crosby, and spent a couple of hours enjoying Macallan, and talking about SoftLayer’s rapid ascent. I’m going to meet up with Lance later on during the conference to do a quick interview about where he started, where they are today, and where they’re going.

This is shaping up to be the most exciting conference of 2008. We decided to call it an early night to save our livers and actually make it to the conference on time.

Really very exciting to see all the cool Adobe Air Apps being developed. We really should get some going for Fellowship.

Link Here for Adobe Air:
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Featured Apps:
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/showcase/
http://lifehacker.com/396393/top-10-apps-worth-installing-adobe-air-for

Update: the domain still exists but the scraper site is no longer functioning.

We’ve had some reports of posts being republished without permission at theparody.net. If one of your posts has been published there without permission, and you are the copyright holder of the material in that post, you can send a DMCA notice to the following addresses. This information was obtained from Whois and is believed to be accurate at the time this post was written, but you should confirm it yourself before taking action.

theparody.net appears to be currently hosted at 75.126.110.8 which is managed by the web hosting company SoftLayer. Their DMCA email address is:

copyright@softlayer.com

Complete instructions for sending a DMCA takedown notice to SoftLayer are available here. You must include all of the information as instructed there, including a copy of the declaration with your full name and contact information filled in. In particular your DMCA notice must identify the specific URL of the post or page where your content has been copied without permission. Remember that making a false declaration in a DMCA takedown notice is illegal.

Please note that the web hosting company merely manages the server on which that site is running; they are not responsible for its content and are probably unaware of its purpose.