SoftLayer differentiation
Stand apart from the crowd with SoftLayer,
an IBM company
Executive summary
Early cloud models—shared, virtualized resources—are no longer enough to achieve cloud’s potential innovation.
To use cloud to transform your business, you need an industry-leading cloud vendor that offers you flexibility, performance, and control.
With a SoftLayer solution, you can gain:
Triple network architecture connecting an expanding global footprint of data
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Triple network architecture connecting an expanding global footprint of data centers and points of presence
The ability to combine bare metal or virtual servers, shared or dedicated environments, and public, private, hybrid or dynamic hybrid models.
A granular API with over 3,000 exposed methods accessed through a robust self-service portal
Automation and standardization across the data centers to strengthen security
A SoftLayer solution is backed by the full expanse of resources and long-standing innovation of IBM.
SoftLayer, an IBM company, stands apart from other cloud vendors in
the market today by challenging common assumptions and providing
you with options.
The initial cloud
revolution was based on assumptions such as:
SoftLayer® embraces the idea that:
All resources are virtualized All resources are shared
But cloud
computing
needs have
evolved.
… virtualization is a choice with a flexible set of options … resources can be shared, dedicated or mixedBut you
have the
ultimate
CHOICE
Flexibility
SoftLayer offers a broad portfolio of
infrastructure choices to help you achieve
greater business agility.
Any compute and storage combination at any time is available in three models.
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Bare metal with your own stack
For high input and output (I/O)-intensive apps, databases, big data
Shared virtual environment
For unpredictable, seasonal or
research and development workloads
Dedicated virtualized environment
Designed to be ideal for enterprises
Build and customize the environment based on what you want to achieve
Fine-tune to meet changing business needs or respond to competitive pressures Additional services for compute, storage, network, security, platform management and big data are available
Dedicated virtualized environment
Flexibility
We offer a standardized, modular infrastructure
on one platform with the ability to customize
selections to meet your requirements.
Move back and forth between dedicated and shared servers for greater business agility with the Flex Images™ server deployment system
Provides image capture and deployment for dedicated servers, unified across bare metal and shared cloud servers
Dedicated
server Unified image library
Shared virtualized server
Combine workloads on the same network: Use a combination of virtual servers for your
front-end workloads that need to scale out while using bare metal for your back end high input/output workloads like app or database servers.
Performance, control and flexibility
The expanding SoftLayer global footprint offers
you access to our infrastructure choices through
13 data centers and 17 points of presence for
improved global reach and performance.
Key markets for
expansion in 2014: Hong
Kong, London, Canada, Japan, India, China, Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Dallas1 Geographically dispersed China Tokyo Seattle San Jose Los Angeles Houston Denver AtlantaWashington D.C. Montreal Chicago London Frankfurt Paris Amsterdam New York City
Toronto Dallas
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Geographically dispersed points of presence (PoPs) bring connectivity to our carrier-grade network backbone closer to the end user
These PoPs, combined with over 2,000 Gbps connectivity between our data centers around
the world, can deliver exceptional bandwidth and connectivity
Data Center & Network Point of Presence Network Point of Presence
India Hong Kong
Singapore Melbourne Sydney Mexico City Houston Miami Brazil
Performance, control and flexibility
SoftLayer features a granular API designed
to offer you more control over your cloud
environment for increased productivity
and security.
IT management tools Hardware
Custom applications Softlayer Software
Data Center API
SoftLayer portal Services
Developers and administrators can:
Directly access more than 240 back-end services through more than 3,400 API methods Control APIs at the function level, not just by pre-defined classes of APIs, for greater security Build auto-scaling environments for on-demand growth
Performance and control
Our triple-network architecture is fundamental to
the performance of the SoftLayer infrastructure.
SoftLayer integrates three distinct and redundant gigabit network architectures—public, private, and data center-to-data center management—into a network-within-a-network topology.
Load balancer Firewall Network Storage Infrastructure iSCSI 8 Load balancer Firewall Network security IMS VPN edge router VPN IMS Services
Public network Management network Private network
MPLS
Linux
Any device at any time can have any of three types of connections:
Public network: Connection to public Internet through Tier 1 carriers with multiple 10 Gbps connections for public traffic to hosted web sites or online resources
Private network: Virtual private network (VPN) server access through dedicated, stand-alone third carriers not connected to the public network with unmetered bandwidth usage between servers and data centers Management network: Out-of-plane management network connection through an unlimited VPN
Performance, control and flexibility
We have a full-featured web-based customer
portal for increased control of your management
infrastructure from virtually any device.
Tour the customer portal
Drive productivity for increased performance and control with:
Ability to purchase, provision, deploy and manage infrastructure, with access to 180 services Access to services, tools, automation and tutorials
Security-rich access via virtual private network (VPN) to management network Two-factor authentication to web portal
Performance
SoftLayer built-in automation through
standardization helps accelerate responsiveness
and reduce risks.
Data center A
Data center B
Standardization
for uniform
deployment of workloads across
data centers
Building of ‘pods’ that consist of
standard deployment of servers,
power and ancillary services
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power and ancillary services
Automation
manages
provisioning as well as
operational and business
management processes
for
faster time to market
Control
SoftLayer is designed to offer complete
transparency from network topology down
to the hardware.
With other cloud providers, With SoftLayer, you know: Data center Pod Rack Network port Server NIC controllers The resultingvisibility
means you can have morecontrol
cloud providers, you may only know:
Zone
Maybe the data center
Rack Rack unit Power port NIC controllers Firmware Serial numbers Plus
Audit trail of all actions and access to resources
control
over your application and its performance—as well as security and compliance managementControl and flexibility
Predictable billing offers greater control over
budgeting for your infrastructure needs.
Order services on demand for what you need Pay for what you use
No “surprise” usage fees
No additional charges for compute cycles per second, or bandwidth usage for public inbound
– Systems come with 20 TB (bare metal) and
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– Systems come with 20 TB (bare metal) and 5 TB (virtual) bandwidth outbound
– All private network traffic and public inbound traffic is unmetered
Control
For greater control over resiliency and risks,
security is built into the SoftLayer infrastructure.
Security certifications such as SOC21 for data
centers; alignment with stringent government and industry standards
A secured single global network with a highly redundant architecture, firewalls and load balancers Cyber security assessment and response Security intelligence and analytics
Strategy, risk and compliance
Single-tenant options for operational control and compliance management
Virtual local area networks (VLANs) for customer isolation on private networks
Control of the switch ports Add-on security products Add-on IBM security services
IBM security services and solutions portfolio can enhance your security posture
and analytics P e o p le Cloud and Managed Services D a ta A p p li c a ti o n s In fr a s tr u c tu re
Why IBM SoftLayer for your infrastructure needs?
More than100,000
devices managed Predictable bare metal performance Speed of deployment Dedicated servers:hours, not days
Shared servers : 14 for 21,000 customers in 140 countries Shared servers : minutes More than 22 million domains hosted—roughly one domain for every person in
the 10 largest U.S. cities
Hundreds
of configurationoptions
More than
130 million
online game players are playing games runningSome references
Social
Software as a Service
Mobile & Communications
Games and Entertainment
Bump Voxer Instapaper Yelp
Marketing and Digital Media
Enterprise Hosting & Service Providers
Next steps
For more information:
Visit the SoftLayer website where you can learn more.
View the video: IBM and SoftLayer: Enabling innovation with on-demand cloud computing. Take a tour of a standard SoftLayer data center.
Trademarks and notes
© IBM Corporation 2014
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and QRadar are registered trademarks, and other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at
www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
SoftLayer, CloudLayer and Flex Images are trademarks or registered trademarks of SoftLayer, Inc., an IBM Company. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.
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Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
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