4. 4
IBM Point of View
4 Guiding Principles
Powerful, Accessible
Analytics with Cognitive
Choice with
Consistency
DevOps
Productivity
Industrialized
Hybrid Cloud
14. IBM Point of View
4 Guiding Principles
Powerful, Accessible
Analytics with Cognitive
DevOps
Productivity
Industrialized
Hybrid Cloud
Choice with
Consistency
21. IBM Point of View
4 Guiding Principles
21
Powerful, Accessible
Analytics with Cognitive
Choice with
Consistency
DevOps
Productivity
Industrialized
Hybrid Cloud
24. 24
IBM Point of View
4 Guiding Principles
Powerful, Accessible
Analytics with Cognitive
Choice with
Consistency
DevOps
Productivity
Industrialized
Hybrid Cloud
Prolific adoption of mobile phones and devices, as well as, smarter products, and instrumented enterprise assets is driving an explosion of data, and enabling new insights from analytics, as well as new opportunities for business. In turn, ‘Big Data’ is placing greater demand on existing infrastructures, driving a need for instant access to resources – compute, storage, and network -- as well as analytics, and other core business and IT applications.
To gain unique competitive advantage, lines of business are increasingly turning to public cloud to quickly access new capabilities and improve time to market for products and services. This puts greater pressure on IT leaders to continue to work strategically with lines of business and achieve the right mix of computing models that can seamlessly meet unique business requirements. All of this while improving the economics of IT and ensuring service continuity and reliability – both on and off premise.
For these reasons, I am going to walk you through our SoftLayer cloud offering at IBM.
Global Cloud Leader
SoftLayer was founded by 10 industry veterans
Combined 18 years of experience over 3 different companies
1995 - Worked with one of the first hosting companies in the world
Hosting thousands of websites
Key Takeaway: Automation
1999 – Moved on to one of the first dedicated server hosting companies
Translated automation into faster provisioning time
Revolutionized the time to market for servers (Two weeks48 hours)
2005 – SoftLayer was founded
How do we decrease time to market and increase automation?
Customers were ordering the same products and services over and over.
The same x86 servers, firewalls, load balancers, etc but in a custom deployment.
We had the ability to create something new from blank sheet of paper – driven by customer demands and needs.
Wanted to design something that at the time didn’t exist
We decided to pre-build a standardized platform with an abstraction layer on top called IMS that allows us to sell infrastructure as service.
Build a custom environment and easily scale over time with price predictability
To make this vision a reality, our founders had to think differently
Pre-rack and stack servers
Create a new complex network topology
Create a billing model to allow for monthly and hourly billing
Ultimately SoftLayer would become one of the first (if not the first) cloud computing company in May 2005 - 12 months before our closest competitor – Amazon.
Four Guiding Principles
Innovation – “innovate or die” – SoftLayer’s fundamental operating mantra is to bring new technologies to market as soon as they become commercially viable
Empowerment – complete transparency and control to the end customer. Our datacenter is your datacenter. We show customers everything. If you want the information its there, if not spin up your infrastructure and you are on your way.
Automation – key takeaway today – automation / automation / automation – if it cannot be automated – it does not live within the SL platform. Automation; 1) reduces costs 2) improves efficiency, 3) improves time to market, 4) eliminates human mistakes and results in higher SLA
Integration - SoftLayer offers a fully integrated approach from billing to service delivery delivered thru a single interface and API set. It also means building solutions that allow you to integrate your current infrastructure into the SoftLayer cloud. – We invest in the hardware, power, network, and bandwidth to deliver to you via a single interface and API set meaning you can build your entire infrastructure on the SoftLayer cloud.
SoftLayer, an IBM company, is an infrastructure as a service provider that challenges the norm for cloud providers that all resources are shared and virtual. SoftLayer gives our Enterprise clients choices. While the initial cloud revolution was centered on virtualized, multi-tenancy clouds, this is only one model of compute, and one that isn’t necessarily well suited to the full breadth of workloads, use cases and industries. As cloud has mainstreamed and matured, organizations are increasingly looking to take advantage of the power of consumptive, real-time computing without compromising performance, security and control. They want to choose when—or not—to use virtualization, control precisely where their infrastructure is physically located and shape their infrastructure to their application—not shoehorn their app into someone else’s idea of the right platform.
Performance – IBM offers the highest performance because of our bare metal options
Bare metal means - High performances – ideal for gaming , big data, analytics. Bare Metal + POP = speed. Ex. End User enters the network at the point that is closest to their location, reducing latency.
Flexibility – buy what you need today and expand when you need it tomorrow
DON’T Spend months calculating the potential size of the space needed. Start now and grow - dynamically add capacity
- Set up the account, and check back in to help them grow with the next phase of activities – from public to private and, as needed, bare metal.
Control – The Infr Management System visibility and granularity like no other cloud provider
- Security and compliance matter. Exactly where is your data and where do you want it to be. Not just the east or west side of a country, but what location, what server, and which drive. If
- For some companies and government agencies, you need to be as specific as the serial number of the hard drive and server and track through audit logs
- Amazon? Microsoft? No visibility to specific location or hardware within that location.
SoftLayer has uniquely designed and deployed a global, interconnected platform that’s designed to meet the key operational and economic requirements of cloud infrastructure across a broad portfolio: dedicated and shared devices, physical and virtual servers, hourly compute instances and four-way, octo-core bare metal, along with a wealth of storage, networking and security components.
You can take these building blocks and deploy public cloud instances, build private clouds on your choice of virtualization stack, leverage the raw power of bare metal on demand, or combine these solutions into distributed, hybrid architectures. Build what you want, or leverage our turn-key big data and private cloud solutions to design and deploy complex, scalable infrastructure online in near-real time. It’s all delivered as a unified service, managed from a single pane of glass via our web portal or mobile apps, and accessible via a powerful, full-featured API.
Our bare metal option mirrors on-premises resources across a continuum of single processor servers, quad proc, hex-core, and even graphics processing unit (GPU)-powered. It deploys in near-real-time via the self-service portal or API.
Within our private cloud environment, you have a variety of hypervisor choices, including:
VMWare
Citrix (Xen)
Parallels
Hyper-V
OpenStack
Having these choices along with the ease of managing them together in one environment is unique to SloftLayer.
SL is Uniquely Positioned to Match Business Needs to IT Needs
What sets the SoftLayer cloud apart from the rest? How have we defined our cloud?
Integration – we anticipated legacy installations – a “shift to the cloud”
API - Over 3000 API calls that expose all the functionality and control needed to work with our cloud like your own
Global Network - Our robust network and private network connectivity tools allow your cloud environment to co-exist with your existing environment (Direct Link)
Software – We are software agnostic. You can bring whatever software stack you want to our cloud as long as they can be installed on Intel machines (OSS, BSS)
Security & Audit – We’ve built a platform that can meet all unique security and compliance standards.
Single tenant offerings for all services – virtual server on a private node, dedicated servers
All datacenters are SOC-2 certified
Audit Log - Interactions with your account are tracked via API & Portal
Access to Technology – Eliminate large capital investment (capex) for hardware refreshes and new projects
Access to Innovation – Fast direct path to new technologies that become commercially viable.
Examples you can use circa 2015: GPU’s, SSD’s, customer controlled networking
Time to Market – IT resources are often the “long pole” for most organizations
Rapid time to market for new infrastructure and changes
Make a mistake, buy the wrong resources – easy to change hardware rapidly
No contract, no setup fees. Cancel and reorder what you need.
Contract and Cost
No long term contract requirement – consumed by the hour or by the month
Effectively makes technology “zero risk”
Control and Transparency
You pick what you want, where you want
You select the city / datacenter/ POD you want to be in – not in a regional zone
You can expect the same amount of control and visibility that you have in your own in-house datacenter
Routers, switches, racks, power, server, components, serial #, firmware, etc
Enterprise & Internet Scale –
Enterprise – robust SLA’s, redundancy, single tenant, dedicated hardware
Same trusted hardware used internally (Juniper, Cisco, Intel, Citrix, Fortinet, EMC, NetApp, IBM)
Without sacrificing the benefits of Internet Scale
Internet – scalability, flexibility, and consumptive billing of internet scale
Ex: FitBit needs the security of an enterprise company because they hold personal health records, but they need the flexibility of internet scale to handle their workloads efficiently
Global Footprint
Today (Q3 2015) we have 27 datacenters and counting.
Projected to 40 with IBM’s investment into expanding SoftLayer’s global footprint.
Only Cloud provider in the world with a global internet backbone
25+ Network POPs including all major carrier exchanges worldwide
Multiple transit providers – Over 3,000Gbps of transit & 900Gbps of public peering
Thousands of private peers
IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack
AnyCast DNS system consisting of hundreds of globally load balanced physical nodes
Over 20,000,000 active domains
125,000+ physical nodes – millions of virtual machines
Over 40,000 customers from over 150 different countries
The network is the cloud and the cloud is the network. The network is perhaps the fundamental component in terms of performance, yet it’s rarely discussed in detail by hosting providers. We’ve made a significant investment at SoftLayer in building a network of networks from best-in-class networking infrastructure, hardware, and software designed to deliver exceptional bandwidth and connectivity for the highest speed and reliability. We think our network architecture and performance stand apart in the industry.
Having this interconnectivity and the ability for customers to transport data from site to site at no additional charge and be able to get on our backbone through the closest PoP is critical. And we are one of the only cloud providers with our own global backbone. Others may be rumored to be building that, but we are there today! We pass 500 to 600 gigs sustained across our backbone. We house a large percent of the content on the Internet!
The entire network and services stack provides native support for IP version 6, helping to ensure that as this critical transition takes place over the next few years, you’ll be well ahead of the game.
Every server comes multi-homed to our fully redundant best-in-class public and private network as well as a third network for management
Public network is IPv4 and IPv6 stacked; every ancillary service comes ready for IPv6
Private network allows for unmetered bandwidth usage between servers and data centers; use at no extra cost with no special connection feeds or devices needed
Management network provides unlimited VPN; security-rich KVM access goes beyond basic controls and unsecured connection methods offered by some competitors KVM tool gives you console access as if you are standing right in front of your server; you can even use it to mount your own ISO and install your own custom operating system (OS)
Part of the SoftLayer value proposition is control. You want to control this environment as if it was between your 4 walls. That is exactly what we offer.
So, while you only pay for what you use without surprise usage fees you may see with other providers, at SoftLayer you can plan your budget accordingly.
To help you budget, we provide 500GB public outbound bandwidth on each bare metal server and an additional 250GB of outbound bandwidth on virtual servers (of which you can pool together).
In addition, you get the unmetered private network usage… mean no cost.
SoftLayer built our own management system and customer portal on top of our API. We expose this same level of control to our customer base by providing more than 3000+ function calls to over 200 services – industry competitors less than 100
Supports Rest, SOAP, and XML-RPC interfaces
At SoftLayer, you know exactly where your data sits from the datacenter location, the POD, the rack, and down to the serial number of the server. And speaking of your data, you can rest assured that your data will not be abused at Softlayer because SoftLayer can not even access your data. Other cloud providers use client data within the rights of their customer service agreements.
Service Organization Control (SOC) 2
We cater to customers with compliance needs from PCI, HIPAA, to governmental standards
SoftLayer has a SOC 2 Type II report for all data centers
Audits security, availability, process integrity, privacy and confidentiality
You can request a SOC 1/2 Report right from the portal
If you’re not a customer yet, you can request this via an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)
One of SoftLayer’s greatest advantages over competitors, is the ability to look like the data center your client is used to. We offer a level of customization that competitors can’t do. SoftLayer has a unique network structure that allows you to deploy ancillary services on top of your server infrastructure on the fly.
Take a look at a logical picture of a SoftLayer data center. We call this the triple network architecture as it represents 2 separate networks and one unified network. Public traffic will come in through our network PoP to our datacenters and distribute through our front end router. All of our servers, storage, DNS, load balancers, firewalls, and other services are able to communicate over the secure private network free of charge
Triple network Architecture
Every physical or virtual node has 5 network interfaces
2 x GigE or 10GigE to the public network
Transit to and from the internet
2 x GigE or 10GigE to the private network
Connect any physical or virtual machine to any other in any datacenter
Access to the service network – SAN storage, Object storage, DNS resolvers, OS update servers, application update servers, template repository
1 x GigE to the management network
VPN Access to the management interface – BMC and KMV over IP
Customer controlled – create VLANs, add/remove IPs, SWIP IPs – with dual stack IPv4 and IPv6
Datacenter POD’s built post Summer of 2014 will have a slightly different architecture.
Each server does maintain five interfaces but instead of 1GigE interfaces, they are 10GigE interfaces.
This equates to 40GigE available to each individual server.
BBR = BACKBONE ROUTER
DAR = DISTRIBUTION AGGREGATION ROUTER
SLR = ???
FCR = FRONT END CUSTOMER ROUTER
MBR = MASTER BACKEND ROUTER
BCR = BACKEND CUSTOMER ROUTER
As I mentioned on the previous slide, you buy what you need, and the pricing is also extremely transparent. With monthly costs, you won’t have to make a significant investment to get started..
You can sign up with your IBM credentials or just by logging onto SoftLayer.com and placing an order with a credit card.
So, why SoftLayer?
Lets start with price performance. You can customize your infrastructure to match exactly what you need to deliver your service, just as you would in your own datacenter. You get to choose between shared and dedicated, physical and virtual, on server and off server, etc. With other providers you have to use a virtual public cloud whether it is best for your performance or not. You may also get over provisioned VMs resulting in higher costs.
Triple network architecture: The three tier architecture provides both performance and security. Not only can you run data from datacenter to datacenter without impacting public traffic, you can keep vlans safe from external threat be keeping them off of the public network. In addition, the private data does not get metered. With other providers, even your private data needs to access public, internet connections which increases risk and reduces performance. Also, DC to DC data charges can grow exponentially, often outpacing data charges on the public network.
With Control and Automation within SoftLayer, you get one panel to comtrol physical and virtual environments and everything is automated. This reduces risks and expense. You can use the granular APIs to create additional automation based on your requirements. Other providers are much more limited in the level of control offered.
SoftLayer provides complete transparency to your environment. You can see exactly where your data site down to the serial number of the hardware. Our complete visibility helps clients pass audits quickly and painlessly. Other providers won’t even give you a data center location, much less a piece of hardware within that datacenter. Some can’t even tell you what country your data is in.
Innovation, one of SoftLayer’s founding principles, can be found in how the infrastructure is built, allowing for ease of management, speed, and performance.
A hybrid cloud within SoftLayer. You can build a truly hybrid cloud within SoftLayer utilizing physical bare metal servers, private virtual servers, and shared virtual servers. Very few providers can offer the dedicated bare metal servers. No other providers can offer the seamless management across the whole environment.
Continuing on, if look at global consistency. While competitors can only offer services in certain geographies, SoftLayer rolls out services across all datacenters. In fact, once inside a datacenter, you would not be able to tell which location you are in because they are all built the same way.
SoftLayer offers 24/7 support via chat or phone. We also have on-boarding services to help clients with strategy, migration, etc. Many other providers rely on third party providers for support.
Your developers will appreciate that SoftLayer is on open architecture. SoftLayer and IBM are committed to open standards to protect your investments and to provide partners with flexibility and choice. Many cloud providers lock clients and partners into proprietary services.
Most importantly, SoftLayer is secure. With the global private network, the triple layered architecture, and the ability to place physical and virtual firewalls across your environment, SoftLayer is the most secure cloud provider. We also have the major compliance standards across the world and can handle international regulations. No other cloud provider can match the same level of security, especially when their clients rely on only shared servers and the public internet with all of their private data.
So where does SoftLayer fit into IBM’s overall cloud portfolio and why does it matter? Based on the level of management and customization that you need, IBM has an option for you.
SoftLayer was acquired by IBM to be the main infrastructure as a service offering. We also have the fully managed cloud offering in CMS. IBMs Platform as a Service offering, BlueMix, is a composable application development platform.
Other Software as a Service offerings will be delivered through the IBM Cloud Shop for consumable business applications.
The bottom line is, we can provide a fast, standard offering, or we can make your cloud environment look like your datacenters today if that is what you require.
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, WorldTicket is a leading global provider of sales and reservation software for the airline industry. Although the company started small, it now has offices in four countries and supports customers spread across four continents.
When expanding internationally, WorldTicket found an immediate need for local IT operations in new territories. After a decade of relying
on traditional IT, WorldTicket needed a more flexible and cost-effective infrastructure and network to connect its global operations.
WorldTicket evaluated cloud infrastructure providers, narrowing its search to SoftLayer and Amazon, both of which offered the nternational data center presence needed to support the company’s global expansion.
with SoftLayer, WordTicket’s efficiency and productivity has increased. The company has significantly decreased its infrastructure provisioning time, cutting its standard from two weeks to an hour or less, a reduction of more than 97 percent. It has also accelerated
its software development processes, speeding new product release time from six hours to approximately one hour, an improvement of more than 84 percent. On top of that, with SoftLayer we were able to avoid major capital expenses—we saved close to $150,000 and reduced ongoing operational expenses by 60 percent,”
WorldTicket also experienced a high level of customer support with SoftLayer during its test phase. SoftLayer’s high-quality, responsive
service assured WorldTicket that it picked the right cloud provider to take its business to the next level.