SoftLayer – CLOUD BUILT TO PERFORM
April, 2014
Notice - Information concerning non-IBM products and services was obtained from the suppliers of those products, their published announcements or other publicly available sources. IBM subject matter experts have reviewed this document for technical accuracy, but specific questions on the capabilities of non-IBM products and services should be addressed to the suppliers of those products and their capabilities. Document content represents offering available from the vendor (not any extended partner community) and is believed current at the time of this document publication, but subject to change. Public information and consultant quotes are current as of the date of their publication. SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services (AWS) content is based on an understanding of information available as of April, 2014.
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SoftLayer leadership in cloud computing infrastructure: One platform. Endless possibilities.
Cloud computing means unobstructed access to the computing resources needed to provision, develop, fulfill or support a business objective. In short, cloud can be a platform built to perform. Today’s public, private and hybrid cloud platforms aren’t just changing computing models: they’re changing business models. Cloud is causing a rapidly evolving paradigm shift in the marketplace in which “optimizers” improve operational efficiency, “innovators” significantly extend their client value proposition, and “disruptors” create radically different forward- thinking value propositions.
Leadership in cloud computing infrastructure (public, private and hybrid) means providing an open, automated, security-rich and high-performance workload-based solution for enabling the endeavors of these optimizers, innovators and disruptors. Today, companies and IT providers are looking for the flexibility to deploy cloud-native applications along side cloud-enabled and legacy applications, using a mixture of bare metal, single-tenant virtualized and multi-tenant virtualized environments, all through a single management portal and application programming interface (API) across a high-performance global network to support unparalleled performance, security and control1. Additionally, they want to provision, scale up and down both horizontally and vertically, and decommission—they want to do all of this in minutes or hours. Just think how much these things could benefit business models, cash flows and companies´ agility in the marketplace. And it’s available today from SoftLayer®, an IBM Company.
It’s not enough to simply have data centers distributed around the globe. These data centers also should be interconnected in ways that make it possible for organizations to operate seamlessly wherever they’re doing business. SoftLayer's unique network architecture helps clients to optimize global performance using a private network, avoiding the disadvantages of public networks and the Internet.
SoftLayer simplifies the process for organizations that want to move to a cloud model while at the moment still having non-cloud-native applications running on dedicated on-premise hardware. These organizations can start by leveraging SoftLayer bare metal or virtual server delivery models for cloud-enabled workloads for performance or cost reasons, while maintaining in-house resources for other workloads. For newly built applications, starting from a cloud-native architecture, application development and test can be built from scratch based on the API, utilizing SoftLayer bare metal or virtual servers. And as soon as the remaining in-house resources reach the end of their usable life (or need an upgrade), these workloads can be shifted onto bare metal or virtual servers under the same management portal and API. The result will be a mixed environment of cloud-enabled and cloud-native applications running on either bare metal or virtual servers, all under a single management system and API.
IBM has recently announced an additional US$1.2B planned investment into IBM cloud computing to support the growing cloud computing demand. It can extend the options and enable growth for both clients and IT providers.
1Source: SoftLayer web portal: One platform. Endless possibilities: http://www.softlayer.com/about
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Executive Summary
The following pages highlight key high-level executive message points, and then take a closer look at each of the key categories identified. This section will examine the capabilities and some of the specific differences between SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services (AWS). SoftLayer differentiates itself in six key areas: o Performance and flexibility o Globalization o Control and transparency o Network bandwidth o Security o Workload-based solutions
Cloud computing offers the potential of placing information, insights and decision-making intelligence at people’s fingertips, any time and anywhere. Via the cloud, large multinational businesses can function more seamlessly, and smaller companies can become almost instantly global. But this promise can’t be fully realized without robust global networks of data centers and communications hubs that can help provide strong security for data, high reliability and fast interactions for their employees and clients alike.
SoftLayer provides the ability to choose a cloud environment and location that is designed to best suit individual business needs—plus great visibility and transparency to where data resides, and strong control of data security and placement. While this document will take a closer look at SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the following information provides a high-level summary on why SoftLayer is viewed as one of the leaders in the cloud infrastructure space.
Performance and flexibility o SoftLayer delivers services across the globe via a network of local cloud hubs, such as data centers and points of presence. These local cloud hubs can provide prompt access to data without having to wait for servers several countries away to respond. o SoftLayer’s high-performance private network also makes it possible to build global applications that do not require or use the public Internet to connect to servers that are located in multiple countries, which helps avoid disruptions caused by other traffic on a public network. o SoftLayer provides automated services to help create an ideal hosting environment for enterprise-class applications, both cloud enabled and cloud native. SoftLayer clients can build their businesses using virtually any combination of hybrid hosting with dedicated servers, single-tenant virtualized servers and multi-tenant virtualized servers—and security-rich, highly scalable web service solutions to help address operational requirements, whether they are unique or standard. o Performance is the intersection of power, agility and control. What organization that values performance would want to use an oversubscribed, commodity cloud as the cornerstone of their business?
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Globalization o SoftLayer is one of the largest cloud infrastructure providers in the world. Today, it supports a rapidly growing list of clients in over 140 countries. The data center and points-of-presence (PoPs) locations provide near-seamless, direct, private and high- speed, security-rich access to a highly optimized backbone network, bringing connectivity closer to the end user. o Nearly all SoftLayer services are available at all of its data centers. The only exceptions are object storage and storage-area network (SAN) storage, which are available in all regions, but not in all data centers. This means that most clients can build complete replicas of their deployments at other SoftLayer data centers, no matter where the data center is located or what SoftLayer services are leveraged—unlike Amazon Web Services where regional or location inconsistencies exist. 2
Control and transparency o SoftLayer can offer transparency from network topology down to the hardware level— all selectable by the client. This high granularity of transparency is important for designing, building and running applications that live and breathe on the Internet, and also for better managing compliance and regulatory needs. Clients turn to SoftLayer because they realize the need for transparency, a security-rich environment and control to help them better address their internal or external compliance requirements. o SoftLayer’s hybrid-environment support helps simplify the process of moving IT infrastructure from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operating expenditure (OpEx) model. It is designed to allow client to control and integrate the most appropriate physical and virtual technologies based on workload requirements, as well as help enable better scalability. Additionally, explosive data growth is expected to continue, and it is clear that legacy storage technologies will likely not provide the right cost structure to deal with this. o SoftLayer provides bare metal servers and cloud-virtualized environments that are integrated into a single global network, with an API and management system that helps image, deploy and switch between physical and virtual servers. This allows clients to more easily control, customize and design a hybrid environment that can meet the requirements of their applications and have a higher level of IT infrastructure control— without being asked to select a “one- size-fits-all” solution. It also enables clients to leverage one single management system and API for both cloud-native and cloud- enabled workloads. In order to help make cloud a growth engine—a strategic driver—organizations should consider strategically mixing clouds to deliver their desired business outcome. Where does it make the most sense to run a given workload—from a business perspective and an IT perspective? The answer changes as circumstances change—as market conditions evolve, as a new product takes off, as competitors change, and as industry regulations, security concerns and compliance requirements change. SoftLayer can help clients achieve a dynamic hybrid cloud strategy.
2Source: AWS portal - Products and Services by Region: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/
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o SoftLayer provides a common user interface client portal and APIs across a unified platform. Clients can mix and match the dedicated servers, single-tenant virtual servers and multi-tenant virtual servers and manage them from a single panel, which provides the control to tailor and automate management to the needs of the applications.
Network bandwidth o SoftLayer believes that if “the network is the computer,” then its three-tier network architecture (public, private and management) should be one of the primary reasons organizations would select SoftLayer as their enterprise-class hosting provider. Remember, even the most powerful server can be sidelined by a poorly designed, inefficient network. o SoftLayer’s network can provide a high input/output (I/O) intensity and data-optimized network with more predictable performance in order to support the new and expanding workloads organizations are deploying around the world. For companies that choose to leverage the global presence of SoftLayer by using services in multiple data centers across the globe, it can provide a very positive influence on the business case that data center to data center traffic does not come at an additional cost. o SoftLayer's network provides high-speed, redundant connectivity for optimized performance throughout its architecture. Each system in our data centers has three separate network interfaces to each network, segregating and securing traffic, and providing greater access and streamlined management. To optimally support applications including grid, clustering and high performance computing, each server rack features 40 gigabytes per second (Gbps) of connectivity. Multiple dedicated 10 Gbps fiber connections between our geographically diverse data centers provide high-speed throughput with low latency.
Security o SoftLayer has over 120,000 physical nodes and 22,000,000 domains worldwide today. Plus, they are supported by the same network topology, the same infrastructure, cabling design and infrastructure management processes. A client’s global network can be better secured and managed from a single client portal across a consistent infrastructure setup. o SoftLayer’s bare metal servers and single-tenant virtual servers can offer an advantage for running “sensitive workloads” with a greater level of security and a higher level of granularity of control. o SoftLayer provides a wide range of security options for clients to choose from, so they can better protect their infrastructures with multiple, overlapping layers of protection customized to their needs and interests. Specifically, SoftLayer can offer options for physical and operational security, network security and system, application, and data security.
Workload-based solutions o SoftLayer’s delivery models (bare metal, single-tenant virtualized, multi-tenant virtualized), advanced network and single management portal and API provide the scalable power to support applications such as big data, mobile, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other workloads. More workload-specific discussions can be found in
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the “closer look” part of this document. In today's world of rapid response with mobile and social data proliferation, this type of automation and speed of access to data with high availability and control is designed to make the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure an ideal choice for business clients worldwide.
Additional comments SoftLayer stands apart from those cloud providers who make core assumptions and mandate that all resources are virtualized and that all resources are shared. With SoftLayer, neither is mandated, giving clients more flexibility and better opening up cloud computing to new applications and use cases. Clients have the ultimate choice—virtualization is a choice with a flexible set of options and resources can be shared, dedicated or mixed.
SoftLayer can easily support smaller-client or line-of-business requirements with an optimized solution for performance and cost, which can also scale and grow. Equally important, SoftLayer supports large enterprises that want the control and access that they get from in-house IT, but the server efficiency and cost effectiveness of cloud infrastructure. We help design a solution with physical or virtual servers that can deliver strong performance, security, scalability and manageability.
Some cloud hosting providers offer “zero-down, low-cost leases” and encourage clients to window shop for the lowest monthly price based on number of cores, random access memory (RAM) and disk space. These clients may find the lowest price and mentally justify the cost-per- gigabyte (GB) bandwidth charge they receive at the end of the month because they know that they are getting value from the traffic that used that bandwidth. But they are likely better off getting a more powerful server that includes a bandwidth allotment.
It’s important that you make your buying decisions based on your specific use case and support requirements. Are you going to spin up and spin down instances throughout the month, or are you looking for a cloud server that is going to stay online the entire month? From there, you should estimate your bandwidth usage to get an idea of the actual monthly cost you can expect from a given cloud server. What level of technical support do you expect? You get the idea … o One of SoftLayer’s competitors offers an entry-level Linux cloud server for just over US$15 per month (based on a 730-hour month). When you compare that offer to SoftLayer’s least-expensive monthly virtual server instance (at US$29 per month), you might think that SoftLayer is more than three times as expensive. But then you need to remember that you actually want to use your server.3 o Cloud providers can mean different things when they speak of virtual CPUs. AWS abstracts its compute into "EC2 Compute Units" (ECUs); one ECU does not necessarily equate to a 2011-era single CPU core. When comparing the cost of solutions, ensure that you factor in all the costs and evaluate “apples-to-apples” performance. You should also factor in storage, bandwidth and the cost of optional features such as static Internet Protocol addresses, virtual private network (VPN) connectivity and technical support.4
3Source: Kevin Hazard, SoftLayer Blog, September 30, 2013 – “The Economics of Cloud Computing: If it Seems Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is”: http://blog.softlayer.com/2013/the-economics-of-cloud-computing-if-it-seems-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is/ 4Source: AWS portal: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
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How does SoftLayer deliver on its cloud-competitive leadership position claim? It provides a set of key features that set the platform apart from the industry. The ability to deploy to bare metal servers, single-tenant virtual instances and multi-tenant virtual instances makes complex deployment architectures possible. The unified management of the platform makes it easier to consume the wide range of services that SoftLayer offers.
Please read the November 8, 2013 article in Chief Information Officer (CIO) magazine titled “Why IBM Will Win the War With Amazon Web Services”5 which discusses how our acquisition of SoftLayer and our six billion dollar (US$6,000,000,000—that’s six billion, not million) research and development investment, along with our deep cloud skills and number of patents (approximately 1.400 cloud patents alone), make IBM a great choice to provide clients with a very robust cloud portfolio of offerings and cloud services.
In the end, it comes down to three main decision points for companies and IT providers: performance, control and network availability. If companies and IT providers perform a complete comparison of the highlighted decision points, then SoftLayer is very competitive when compared to any other competitors.
Hear Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO, talking about SoftLayer’s value proposition at IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9h2cXwcUvA& (26 minutes)
5See: CIO - November 8, 2013: http://www.cio.com/article/742861/Why_IBM_Will_Win_the_War_With_Amazon_Web_Services
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A Closer Look
SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions This section takes a closer look at SoftLayer and Amazon Web Services capabilities available for companies. Information is organized around the six key areas previously identified.
Performance and flexibility
Performance starts with the platform, but includes operational, server and network performance. SoftLayer was built from the ground up to allow automation and control of all available services. To accomplish this goal, SoftLayer standardizes its processes and hardware components in each data center. This engineering of performance into the cloud infrastructure, cloud services, portal, API and the integrated, worldwide triple-network architecture allows our clients to focus on tuning the performance of their application, middleware and database software. Client workloads vary in their differentiated needs around availability, performance, security levels, customer service, ease of use and responsibility to manage the workload. As a result, the combination of business and technical needs should drive a tailored solution and not simply the selection of a packaged alternative from a list of offerings. The following table provides the price versus performance and performance results from an analysis of five different use-case workloads with each attempting to focus on different characteristics.
Infrastructure as a Service SoftLayer advantage versus competitor cloud (IaaS) test results (including total cost of acquisition – TCA) (Based on IBM internal analysis) Price performance Use Case Focus Performance Observations (Three-year TCA) Web CPU SoftLayer SoftLayer Unmatched raw performance on bare applications scalability 4.5 times better 2.7 times faster metal servers Flexible Value of combining Best-fit-to-workload characteristics SoftLayer SoftLayer mixed bare metal and Value of Flex Images™ for mixed 1.9 times better 1.2 times faster deployment virtual servers servers environments I/O capacity SoftLayer SoftLayer Provisioning for high IOPS on Analytics and throughput 2.9 times better 11 times faster competitor cloud can be expensive Dedicated servers on SoftLayer can Application- Network SoftLayer handle heavy network demand SoftLayer to-application performance up to 11.5 On competitor cloud: 16 times more 13 times better messaging Impact times faster cores delivered; only 4 times the performance gain Efficiency of bare SoftLayer 2.8 times Hosted Higher VM density reduces cost metal scalability lower cost per virtual Not applicable private cloud Lower crossover point machine (VM) Note: Pricing is current as of April 14, 2014. Additional details found in the document appendix.
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SoftLayer can provide flexibility at all levels in the cloud infrastructure. Servers are uniquely offered in three models, including bare metal with the client’s own operating system stack, in a dedicated private cloud virtual environment—which can be ideal for enterprise use—and as virtual servers.
o SoftLayer offers hundreds of hardware configurations, including processor, central processing unit (CPU), memory, hypervisor and other options which allow clients to tailor their SoftLayer servers to meet their specific client workloads and performance requirements. Clients benefit by speeding up their time to market by provisioning the right configuration for the right application workload at the right time. o AWS has only 34 Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances offered by their configuration tool (as of April 9, 2014).6 o SoftLayer is designed to be better suited to run certain types of workloads, including big data and I/O-intensive software than AWS because SoftLayer offers true-bare metal servers. One SoftLayer client stated, “One of the key features differentiating SoftLayer over competing platforms is the ability to stand up bare metal servers in a wide range of sizes and configurations in the same cloud environment with virtual servers.” o SoftLayer provides clients with a single, common command and control interface, allowing them to combine bare metal servers, public cloud instances and private cloud deployments into distributed hybrid architectures, and manage from a single control pane and API. All are deployed on demand and provisioned in near-real time across an integrated global network (virtual local area networks, or VLANs, and wide-area networks, or WANs). SoftLayer’s integrated cloud service allows clients to select and pay for the appropriate type of cloud service to meet their performance requirements for each component of their environment. SoftLayer is not just another “one-size-fits-all” cloud service, regardless of a client’s business needs. o AWS lacks a solution for clients who are interested not only in single-tenant virtualized compute instances but also in integrated actual "bare metal" servers with no hypervisor installed between the hardware and the operating system. AWS EC2 Dedicated Instances are similar to SoftLayer’s private virtual servers, not SoftLayer bare metal servers.
6 Source: AWS portal: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
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o SoftLayer’s flexibility to have dedicated resources intermixed with virtual resources means that workloads from on-premise hypervisors that require native or near-native performance can be moved to cloud more quickly. And because those workloads don’t have to be powered by in-house servers, a company has more flexibility to now control IT infrastructure expenses. o SoftLayer lets an enterprise connect physically separated servers—even between our geographically diverse data centers—into virtual racks for more optimized performance and integrated performance and management. For example, this support can include adding servers to VLANS virtually anytime, or adding services on the fly. o SoftLayer’s Virtual Dedicated Rack (VDR) offers the flexibility to pool public outbound network traffic bandwidth among servers. This can help clients save money by avoiding overage charges for web servers that are exceeding their bandwidth. They can pool the unused public outbound network traffic bandwidth from their database server that, by design, does not use any public bandwidth. o Inherent benefits of SoftLayer’s platform allow clients to manage their IT infrastructure in near-real time, scale on the fly and pay only for as little or as much as they need. An organization with an immediate need to add IT infrastructure for a business-critical application can order and provision bare metal servers in as little as two-to-four hours. SoftLayer x86 virtual servers can be provisioned in approximately 15 minutes or less. SoftLayer servers can more easily integrate into the same private VLAN during deployment without requiring customization or other potentially costly integration methods. o SoftLayer offers bare metal and virtual servers that are hosted in the same environment, so clients aren’t restricted to one type of IT infrastructure. To break down the barriers between physical and virtual, we’ve developed Flex Images technology to help streamline the process of moving between the two. Clients often use bare metal instances for performance, security or software-compatibility reasons. When SoftLayer bare metal servers and virtual servers are treated as equal and relatable devices, client workloads can be deployed using cloud resources that best suit their needs. For example, a client with a big data application can choose to provision its web servers using public virtual servers while storing and accessing data using SoftLayer bare metal servers with internal solid-state disk (SSD) hard drives.
Globalization The power of the Internet resides in its ability to transcend borders. Clients want to deliver information, interactions and insights to their employees and clients without delay. Even a fraction of a second can interrupt the flow of business or spoil the fun of watching a video online or playing a multi-player game. Additionally, the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets has dramatically changed the way the world accesses the Internet. As an example, Indonesia had an estimated 30.7-million smartphone users at the end of 2012, and that number is expected to nearly triple to 81.5 million by 2015.7 According to Sirius Decisions, “by 2015 over
7Source: Nick Lane, Chief Analyst, mobileSQUARED - adsmobi report: http://www.adsmobi.com/media/Adsmobi_WP_Smartphone_Movement_Heads_East_052012.pdf
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70 percent of business-to-business leads are expected to originate on the web8.” Today, companies want to capitalize on the burgeoning worldwide markets and build their services or applications to more easily reach a global audience and scale to meet that audience’s demand.
SoftLayer offers services today from 13 data center sites around the world including Amsterdam, the United States and Singapore. IBM is planning to invest over US$1 billion dollars in 2014 to deploy 15 new SoftLayer data centers in Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States (Note - See Appendix for additional data center expansion information). With 28 data centers around the world, our clients can deploy into the SoftLayer location that makes the best sense based on their business requirements, and rest assured that their data and workload will not move. If one of our clients is subject to laws which require that their end-user data remain in a particular continent, region or country, the expected availability of 28 standardized SoftLayer data centers around the world offers a large selection of locations from which to choose. o IBM and SoftLayer have invested resources to pursue achieving Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance in 2014. In addition to FISMA compliance, we intend to pursue FedRamp certification for two new, dedicated federal data centers. Once we have achieved FISMA compliance, we plan to submit our package for FedRamp certification to the FedRamp Joint Authorization Board (JAB). Furthermore, synergies between SoftLayer and IBM’s fully managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service, IBM Cloud Managed Services (formerly IBM SmartCloud® Enterprise+), are planned to be announced and delivered later in 2014. o SoftLayer is one of the largest cloud infrastructure providers in the world, with more than 120,000 devices under management for 21,000 clients across 140 countries (as of this document’s release). A third-party survey of the 100,000 busiest websites revealed that SoftLayer hosts far more of them than any other provider—150 percent more of the top internet domains than Amazon EC2.9 o SoftLayer’s software automates virtually every aspect of IaaS (such as bare metal servers, power strips, firewalls, load balancers, update servers and even the accounting system) 10—enabling it to deliver one of the industry’s broadest and highest-performing global cloud platforms and its Infrastructure Management Service (IMS)-supporting automation and transparency. o SoftLayer services and their data centers are client selectable. Our clients have control and visibility over the location of their services and data, including the migration of their data from one location to another. This level of control helps our clients to better manage their regulatory and compliance requirements. o AWS has a lack of complementary data center and managed application services beyond the cloud. There is a need for more conventional data center services including co-location and supplemental consulting support. The lack of these
8Source: IBM Software Business Partner 2014 Kickoff, January 2014, Shaun Jones, IBM Vice-President, Marketing: www.ibm.com/partnerworld/software/2014 9Source: 30% reference from HostCabi.net as of October 25, 2013 10Source: SoftLayer web page—Automation and Control: http://www.softlayer.com/about/automation
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services and internal professional services resources highlights its limited depth outside of the cloud.11 o Nearly all SoftLayer services are available at all data centers—the only exceptions are object storage and storage area network (SAN) storage, which are available in all regions, but not all data centers. This allows most clients to build complete replicas of their deployments at any SoftLayer data center, no matter where the data center is located or what SoftLayer services are leveraged. o AWS has regional inconsistencies in its offerings.12 New service capabilities are deployed at a phased rate across their regional data centers, which can prevent clients from having consistent and mirrored deployments in all regions. Lack of availability of offerings or delays can be for extended periods of time. o AWS is broken up into many Availability Zones across the United States (currently 13, at the time of this document release). They are not transparent with clients on where a client’s AWS servers are located within an availability zone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not currently support the ability to coordinate launches into the same Availability Zone across AWS developer accounts.13 o AWS clients must use their own private wide-area network (WAN) or the public Internet in order to integrate across AWS regions and Availability Zones, whereas SoftLayer clients are allowed to use our private WAN to communicate, replicate data on our iSCSI storage-area network (SAN) and store our Flex Images between SoftLayer Point of Delivery (PoD) sites around the world. This is a significant advantage of the SoftLayer service, because networks and bandwidth consumption can be expensive.
Control and transparency
SoftLayer clients are able to “clear the fog and look inside the cloud” to control the network topology down to the hardware level of their provisioned environment. SoftLayer’s hybrid- environment support helps simplify the process of moving IT infrastructure from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operating expenditure (OpEx) model. It is designed to allow the client to control and integrate the most appropriate physical and virtual technologies based on workload requirements, as well as help enable better scalability Automation can build efficiency, reduce overall costs and reduce human error in the datacenter, which can equate to improved up-time. When everything is automated, clients can reduce the potential for human error and improve uptime. The SoftLayer cloud services architecture is designed from the ground up to include automation, standardization and performance. This is important when building and designing applications that “live and breathe” on the Internet (“cloud native, born on the web”), or deploying traditional business application environments onto a cloud service (“cloud enabled, run on the web”). And it can be very helpful for clients
11Source: IBM Current Analysis: Amazon Web Services - Data Center and Cloud Services (Amy Larsen DeCarlo - October 22, 2013): http://www.currentanalysis.com/COMPETE/Common/Report.aspx?rid=88324 12Source: AWS portal - Products and Services by Region: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/regional-product-services/ 13Source: AWS web portal: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_can_I_make_sure_that_I_am_in_the_same_Availability_Zone_as_another_developer
April, 2014 v1.2 12 WU612345-USEN-01 SoftLayer – CLOUD BUILT TO PERFORM who have compliance and regulatory requirements and must have clear insight into their cloud- based environment. The client interface into the platform is controlled by SoftLayer’s IMS. This includes provisioning and de-provisioning of services, logging, billing and alerts. SoftLayer has been making very conscious design decisions when building the platform, emphasizing the automation of service provisioning over manual intervention. No matter the service (bare metal servers, virtual compute instances, billing or alerts) the platform is controlled by the IMS. Clients interact with and control their SoftLayer offering through IMS. For this purpose, SoftLayer provides a rich set of open APIs that expose capabilities in the system in a programmatic fashion. The functionality exposed by our API allows users to perform remote server management, monitoring and retrieve information from SoftLayer's various systems such as accounting, inventory and domain name system (DNS). Our API powers many of the features in the SoftLayer customer portal, which typically means if an interaction is possible in the customer portal, it may be executed through the API, as well. o SoftLayer automates the deployment and management of virtually everything. Clients get direct access to more than 2,200 documented methods across 180-plus discrete services, executed with little-or-no human intermediation, including core functions like server reboots, operating system (OS) reload, load balancing, more thorough and easier- to-use client portal and its generously featured API. o SoftLayer’s API 3.0 supports the use of both Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and XML-RPC (XML - Remote Procedure Call) interfaces, and as an open, standards-based platform, can fully integrate with any third-party or custom application. It can connect to virtually any system regardless of device or location in a security-rich manner—even mobile devices such as a RIM Blackberry or Apple iPhone—via our private network. o SoftLayer allows clients to “look inside” to see everything from the network topology down to the hardware. In the SoftLayer model not only can clients select the data center, they can select the pod, know the rack they are in, rack unit, power port, network port, server, network interface controller (NIC) controllers, firmware, the serial numbers—clients can know virtually everything about the environment. That can be important not only when you are building and designing applications that live and breathe on the Internet, but also if you have compliance and regulatory management needs—and that can be because you do have transparency into the environment.
o AWS does not provide any significant level of transparency to see inside the AWS cloud infrastructure. Some enterprise clients establishing risk mitigation strategies may actually be very interested in the architecture or how it operates or manages its network, hardware, security and other aspects. o The SoftLayer mobile application allows clients to connect and control their SoftLayer services. A full range of management functions (such as bandwidth monitor, service
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tickets and server performance) make infrastructure immediately accessible, virtually anytime and anywhere. Many SoftLayer clients use the API to integrate similar functionality and automation to integrate their SoftLayer environment with their own corporate systems. o When SoftLayer clients cancel (delete) devices (such as servers, network and security), they have the option to cancel the device immediately or at their billing anniversary date. Server storage is automatically “scrubbed” using the DOD 5220.22-M algorithms developed by the United States Department of Defense (DOD). o SoftLayer support activities are automatically recorded in SoftLayer service tickets, which are retained and viewable by clients. This gives clients a full view of what SoftLayer is doing to support their SoftLayer environment. o SoftLayer proactively automates support ticket creation for incidents they identify that are reported to clients, so that they are not ignored or “swept under the rug.” Hardware failures target a ticket creation within 15 minutes and are updated consistently throughout incident support process for client information. o SoftLayer’s service-level agreements (SLAs) include: 100 percent public and private network uptime, 100 percent power uptime, one-hour hardware replacement, critical incident response of 15 minutes and general incident response of 60 minutes.14 o SoftLayer’s pricing model is designed to be simple and transparent, without confusing pricing models and practices from other cloud providers that can result in billing surprises. SoftLayer has a private back-end network which connects all SoftLayer data centers together with unmetered bandwidth available for data transfer between a client’s environments in separate SoftLayer data centers at no additional charge. o AWS compute cycle and bandwidth pricing model can leave clients estimating their usage charges. AWS charges for data transfer between Availability Zones. Additional charges are incurred for data transfer between an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and non-VPC instances in the same region, regardless of Availability Zone. o SoftLayer provides 24-hour-a-day, 7 day-a-week technical support via chat, email and by telephone at no additional charge (beyond any associated client telephone charges). o AWS support offerings are tiered based on the level of support that a client purchases, rather than on a "relationship" or size-of-spend basis; the quality of support differs materially between tiers. AWS does not include enterprise-grade support by default; clients will need to buy Business-tier support for this. Its Enterprise-tier support offers a dedicated technical account manager and other "platinum" capabilities, providing a higher degree of support than most of its competitors offer without managed services, but it carries up to a 10 percent premium on the client’s overall AWS spend.15 o SoftLayer provides on-demand provisioning, hourly pricing and services with a consumptive billing model, with no minimums or long-term contracts. SoftLayer provides a pricing model that is designed to be easy to understand, with the flexibility of
14Source: SoftLayer web portal: http://www.softlayer.com/about/service-level-agreement 15Source: AWS portal: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/
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on-demand cloud computing services with more accessible entry points and easier scaling up and scaling down. o Actual SoftLayer clients have integrated utilization monitoring of their servers with custom-built code that leverages the SoftLayer API to provision new servers and introduce them into their SoftLayer load-balancing configuration when usage demands them. Clients can then remove those resources when usage no longer demands them— offering truly elastic, born-on-the-web services.
IBM “as a service” announcement (February 2014) – The new IBM Service Engage delivers integrated service management solutions when you need them—right now—putting IBM’s proven management solutions at your fingertips. No longer do you need to struggle with software update and enhancements. IBM Service Engage is just a click away, enabling you to deliver the high levels of service performance and quality you demand and deserve. It includes the general availability of the following software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions: IBM Application Performance Management (SaaS), IBM SmartCloud® Control Desk (SaaS), IBM Workload Automation (SaaS), IBM® Maximo® Asset Management (SaaS) and Maximo Inventory Insights. With just a few clicks, IT practitioners can try and buy systems management as-a-service solutions, helping to provide instant insights and value. With these new solutions, IBM provides IT practitioners with the ability to optimize how they manage mixed workloads—both cloud and on-premises—along with connected devices and business applications across any given organization. IBM Service Engage delivers as-a-service hosted on SoftLayer and as on-premise installed software, providing clients with deployment and management choice and flexibility.
Network bandwidth The network is the cloud and the cloud is the network. The most powerful server can be sidelined by a poorly designed, inefficient network. If “the network is the computer,” the network should be one of the primary considerations for clients selecting a hosting provider.
SoftLayer's network provides a level of scalability and control based on an innovative delivery of a seamless "network of networks," including a public network, a private network, and an internal management network. Each system in our data centers has three separate network interfaces to each network, segregating and securing traffic, and providing greater access and streamlined management. The network boasts more than 2,000 Gbps of connectivity between our data centers and the network PoPs, with multiple 10 Gbps connections per location from leading network carriers and public-peering links to additional Internet access networks.
Network traffic between data centers or PoPs is never routed over the Internet, but rather stays in SoftLayer’s private network, unless the client specifically codes their application to access resources over the public Internet. Better yet, the network traffic on the internal network is unmetered and therefore included in the price of the service—plus up to 20 terabytes (TB) outbound public network traffic is included per server, per month, for SoftLayer bare metal servers, as well as up to 1 TB per month for SoftLayer Virtual Servers (VMs). This creates very compelling deployment architecture opportunities, especially for failover and disaster recovery, where it is now possible to mirror data between data centers without having to pay additional charges for the (sometimes-significant) traffic between data centers.
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SoftLayer’s network PoPs allows clients to connect to the network more quickly. By reducing the number of hops (and internet service providers, or ISPs) between users’ and clients’ content in one of SoftLayer’s data centers, latency decreases significantly. The combination of the number of SoftLayer’s network PoPs and the reduction in the number of hops required allows SoftLayer and SoftLayer clients more control over optimizing network paths.16
As mentioned above, the SoftLayer private network can provide a great advantage in security, accessibility and bandwidth efficiency. Administrators can also access servers via VPN over carriers that are not connected to our public network. This can segregate public and private traffic, making it harder for external parties to access server functionality and helping administrators to more securely transfer data and manage servers without sacrificing public bandwidth to their sites. The level of automation built into the SoftLayer solution can make the entire global network of computers operate as if it were a single massive computer. SoftLayer’s management-specific network uses separate network providers and different switch ports than do our public or private networks. This helps reduce the impact of potential distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks because administrative access is not impacted by the DDoS attack. If a client server is targeted for a denial-of-service attack or a particular ISP fails to route traffic to a server correctly, clients effectively are locked out of their server if they do not have another way to access it. o AWS has seen a number of their unguaranteed services suffering notable outages (such as Elastic Block Storage (EBS) in April 2011, outages in June, July and October, 2012, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in December, 2012, multiple networking outages in August, 2013 and network outages again in September, 2013), clients are rightly concerned about moving critical applications to the AWS platform. o AWS suggests that their clients mitigate the risks of possible service disruptions by deploying their applications across multiple AWS Availability Zones. When AWS clients deploy in multiple Availability Zones, those clients must use the Internet or AWS optional Direct Connect service to integrate their application
16Source: Nathan Day, SoftLayer, Chief Scientist: http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2013/10/softlayer-delivering-real-performance-in-the-cloud/
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and replicate their data across AWS data centers. Remember, if transferring data between availability zones regional data transfer rates apply.17 SoftLayer’s network topology provides clients with the ability to build out and manage their own global infrastructure without overly complex configurations or significant costs, but the benefits of this setup are often overlooked. 18 End users can access content from a server over the public network, while the server transfers data across the private network to another server in a different SoftLayer data center. All the while, a client can be administering its server via a VPN tunnel over the management network, and the traffic does not have to compete with the other categories of traffic for bandwidth. SoftLayer has a separate management network to segregate management traffic from application and end-user traffic and cloud services traffic. o To fully replicate the functionality provided by the SoftLayer private network, competitors with legacy single-network architecture would have to essentially double their networking gear installation and establish safeguards to guarantee that clients can only access information from their own servers via the private network. Because that process can be very daunting (and expensive), many of our competitors have opted for "virtual" segmentation that logically links servers to each other. The traffic between servers in those "virtual" private networks still travels over the public network, so they may often charge for "private network" bandwidth at the public bandwidth rate.19 SoftLayer supports the segregation of unique network VLANs. SoftLayer clients can create multiple VLANs within each SoftLayer Point of Delivery (PoD) data center by utilizing a network gateway appliance such as a Vyatta Network OS for x86 servers (subscription edition) on a SoftLayer Bare Metal Server. SoftLayer clients can deploy multiple VLANs in multiple SoftLayer PoD sites, and configure their applications to communicate with each other in different SoftLayer PoD sites utilizing SoftLayer's global, robust, resilient, security-rich private network at no additional charge by enabling SoftLayer’s VLAN spanning via the SoftLayer customer portal and/or SoftLayer API. o AWS places all of its clients in one network (VLAN), with no segregation between AWS clients and no segregation between application and end user, and services and management network traffic, unless a client specifically sets up a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instance.20 o Amazon offers their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service as an option to create a single-tenant solution. However, to protect from data center disasters or avoid potential network latency issues when serving clients on different continents, Amazon clients might consider deploying their application across multiple Amazon regions. That said, the AWS VPC “peering” implementation does not allow a VPC to extend globally to Amazon data centers in other regions. AWS VPC "peering" is only available within AWS regions. VPCs deployed in multiple Amazon regions are like isolated ‘islands’ with private IP subnets.
17Source: AWS portal – Amazon EC2 FAQs; Availability Zones: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ 18Source: SoftLayer web portal: http://www.softlayer.com/about/network 19Source: “Deconstructing SoftLayer’s Three Tiered Network” blog entry from Kevin Hazard, July 24, 2013: http://blog.softlayer.com/2013/deconstructing-softlayers-three-tiered-network 20Source: AWS web portal: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ and http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/overview-of-security-processes/
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Communication between those VPC islands is only possible when using Amazon Internet Gateways, traversing over the public Internet and back through another Amazon Internet Gateway, thus compromising security and subjecting the application's communication between two AWS regions to the variability and congestion of the Internet.21
While there is no additional charge for using Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), aside from the normal Amazon EC2 usage and internet data transfer charges, if clients choose to create a hardware VPN connection to their VPC using a virtual private gateway, they are charged for each "VPN connection- hour" that their VPN connection is provisioned and available. Each partial VPN Connection-hour consumed is billed as a full hour. Users also incur standard AWS data transfer charges for all data transferred via the VPN Connection.22 o SoftLayer servers and devices provisioned into the same SoftLayer VLAN are connected to the same "logical switch." For multiple servers in the same data center and behind the same router, they could all be on the same VLAN, and all traffic between the servers would be handled at the layer-2 network level. SoftLayer clients have the ability to name their SoftLayer VLANs and have increased visibility into their resources (servers, firewalls, gateways and subnets) that reside inside each of their specific VLANs, therefore allowing more simplified management. o When SoftLayer clients provision their virtual servers, they can choose the uplink speed for the connection to the SoftLayer public network and private networks. In addition to the choice of uplink speeds, both SoftLayer Bare metal servers and SoftLayer private cloud services can be provisioned with single or dual connections to SoftLayer public and private networks. SoftLayer’s public network segregates end-user network traffic from private network traffic such as communication between servers and SoftLayer facilities. This helps provide better network performance as well as better security for our clients. Replications of iSCSI volumes can be sent to another SoftLayer data center in the U.S., Asia, or Europe to enable geographical resiliency and strong disaster recovery. Point-in- time snapshots of iSCSI volumes can be scheduled, stored locally or remotely and later accessed for data recovery or current data comparison.23 o AWS charges for data transfer between their Availability Zones24 and pricing can vary depending on the Availability Zones and Edge Locations involved. o SoftLayer offers services which can reduce the resource-contention problems (such as “noisy neighbors” contesting for resources) for latency sensitive applications (such as e- commerce and analytics) due to our powerful network and our client’s choice of using our bare metal servers, x86 virtual servers and our private cloud services.
21Source: http://fortycloud.com/interconnecting-two-aws-vpc-regions/ 22Source: AWS portal, VPN Connection Pricing: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/pricing/ 23Source: SoftLayer web portal: http://www.softlayer.com/services/storagelayer/ 24Source: AWS web portal: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#If_I_transfer_data_between_availability_zones_using_public_IP_addresses_will_I_be_charged_twice_for_Region al_Data_Transfer_once_because_its_across_zones_and_a_second_time_because_Im_using_public_IP_addresses and http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#If_I_have_two_instances_in_different_availability_zones_how_will_I_be_charged_for_regional_data_transfer
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o SoftLayer clients and prospective clients can see near-real time inside SoftLayer’s public network and peer into our global backbone (SoftLayer IP Backbone Looking Glass technology: http://lg.softlayer.com/ and http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/topic/looking-glass). SoftLayer Looking Glass is an interactive resource that can be used to test latency between SoftLayer data centers, between a router location and target address, subnet or host name. The SoftLayer Looking Glass is updated at five-minute intervals. SoftLayer Looking Glass users can even test download speeds or the network speed between a workstation and a data center. o AWS is not as transparent about network bandwidth speed and latency. To go beyond the icon status symbols (such as AWS Service Health Dashboard25), clients may have to use external tools to help manage their network.
Security SoftLayer has over 120,000 physical nodes and 22,000,000 domains worldwide today. Plus, they are supported by the same network topology, the same infrastructure, cabling design and infrastructure processes … so a client’s global network can be better secured and managed from a single client portal. SoftLayer can then, add on top of that, security tailored to the application requirements—and, optionally, clients can also add on the IBM suite of security services. No matter what business or industry, IT infrastructures can benefit from multiple, overlapping tiers of security for total protection. This is the driving principle of SoftLayer’s multi-level security-rich strategy for helping to shield clients against physical and electronic threats— SecurityLayer® Services. Through certified operational procedures and practices, a wide range of software and hardware security solutions, the multi-level approach helps shield clients against physical and electronic threats, with practices and a range of options for physical, operational, network, system, application and data security. SoftLayer options for storage and backup services provide multiple technologies, allowing clients to select the desired level of security, reliability and flexibility for their environment and applications. SoftLayer clients’ enterprise-grade solutions include automated backup, high- availability storage, and data replication—all automated and accessible through SoftLayer's industry-leading client portal and API. SoftLayer’s bare metal servers and private cloud service offers an advantage for running “sensitive workloads” with a greater level of security and control. This may be important to clients who are very security conscious. Sensitive workloads at SoftLayer The surge in connected devices (such as, 1 trillion by 2015 adding an estimated 2.5 gigabytes of data every day26) is contributing to the rapid growth in the volume and types of data companies are now managing (including digital, audio, sensor, social and unstructured data). As cloud is a logical step to make the volume of data more consumable, there needs to be a security-rich way to use clouds for all the data and sensitive workloads. As an example, healthcare data (such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA) can make cloud infrastructure an ideal platform for healthcare solutions. In the United States, regulations including HIPAA127 and
25Reference: AWS web portal: http://status.aws.amazon.com/ 26Source: IBM Annual Report 2013 (The IBM Strategy, page 13) 27Reference: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/
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Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH2)28 control how personal healthcare information (PHI) is protected. o SoftLayer’s single-tenant, private virtualized offerings, but ideally bare metal servers can be used for regulated HIPAA-HITECH workloads. Any cloud provider‘s multi-tenant option for regulated workloads introduces too much risk for most clients. Once SoftLayer has provisioned the dedicated environment, overall management of the servers and storage—including monitoring and updating—is handed over to the client. In this scenario, SoftLayer retains responsibility for the security management of the facilities; that is, the data center hosting the SoftLayer-provided infrastructure.
Note: This whitepaper is not legal advice. All clients should work with their own regulatory compliance subject matter experts and legal advisors with respect to HIPAA and HITECH compliance.
Layer 1: Physical and operational security Physical and operational security is the foundation of SoftLayer security. Every SoftLayer data center is fully audited based on American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA’s) Trust Security Principles and reported on in a yearly Service Organization Standards 2 (SOC2) report to meet industry-recognized requirements for security. SoftLayer’s physical and operational security measures include secured and monitored facilities with no client markings of any type within the data center. The SoftLayer client portal access offers an optional two- factor authentication. SoftLayer data removal from servers and storage conducted using drive- wipe algorithms (DOD 5220.22-M) developed by the United States Department of Defense.
28Reference: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/enforcementrule/hitechenforcementifr.html
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Layer 2: Network security SoftLayer’s “network-within-a-network” topology is designed to provide true out-of-band management to help prevent exposures to external threats. The network integrates three distinct and redundant network architectures into the network topology. This helps make systems accessible to clients’ administrative personnel but not available to others. This is standard with the SoftLayer solution, at no additional charge, and is a key distinction and differentiator of SoftLayer compared to AWS. o AWS places all of its clients in one network (VLAN) with no segregation between AWS clients and no segregation between application and end-user services and management network traffic.29 An AWS client who wants the security of having their VMs instances separated from every other AWS client use the optional AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service with additional usage charges for other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon EC2, internet data transfer charges or VPN network connection charges, if used.30
The SoftLayer “network-within-a-network” consists of three distinct and redundant architectures as part of the multi-tiered network topology with a wide range of security options. 1. The public network has multiple 10 Gbps connections from multiple top-tier backbone carriers, automated IP routing and management, exceptional resiliency, and superior traffic management and end-user experiences, with unmetered inbound bandwidth. 2. The private network provides fiber-based access on separate carriers from our public network. It can provide seamless connectivity to services in SoftLayer data centers around the world, and allow clients security-rich access and control of the services out of band for exceptional security, accessibility and bandwidth efficiency. This is a standard option that is included in the base offering charge. 3. The management network provides for true out-of-band streamlined access to update and patch servers, software repositories, backend services and more, all with unmetered traffic through a distinct stand-alone third carrier over secure socket layer (SSL), point-to- point tunneling protocol (PPTP), or Internet protocol security (IPSEC) VPN gateways.
Layers 3–5: System, application and data security Beneath the layers of SoftLayer’s physical and network protection, our clients’ individual computing systems, applications, and data are further safeguarded by several tiers of standard security features. A dynamic range of additional security options are available for on-demand deployment and management through our client portal, so SoftLayer clients can further customize their enterprise's security profile based on changing requirements or needs.
SoftLayer’s included security services For SoftLayer clients who also have SoftLayer-managed hosting services for some or all of their Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, SoftLayer managed hosting
29Source: AWS web portal: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ and Overview of Security Processes: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf 30 Source: AWS portal - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud FAQs - http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/
April, 2014 v1.2 21 WU612345-USEN-01 SoftLayer – CLOUD BUILT TO PERFORM assesses clients’ needs and collaborates with them to help them create an optimal security strategy for protecting their environment while providing flexibility for peak performance. o Microsoft Windows and Red Hat “update servers” within SoftLayer’s private network have the latest operating system security patches and upgrades to allow SoftLayer clients to initiate and install patches and updates on demand. SoftLayer’s patching service is designed to be easier to use and is therefore more likely to be completed by the owner of the SoftLayer server instance versus other cloud competitors. o AWS clients assume responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches) and other associated application software, as well as the configuration of the AWS-provided security group firewall.31 o SoftLayer servers can be provisioned with Microsoft Windows Operating System and McAfee VirusScan at no additional charge to SoftLayer clients. McAfee VirusScan combines anti-virus and anti-spyware technologies to help prevent and remove malicious software from servers. o AWS does not offer an integrated anti-virus server protection solution. AWS users wanting an anti-virus offering included must select it from an independent software vendor (ISV) web site, buy any required licenses for that software then install and configure it on their AWS server. o Amazon’s relationship with Symantec requires the AWS user to purchase a Symantec Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the Symantec software installed on that OS image.32 o Rescue Kernel for Microsoft Windows servers allows SoftLayer clients to boot failed servers into a RAM-disk recovery kernel with the failed server’s regular IP addresses, giving it full access to private and public networks, network-attached storage (NAS) and back-end service network servers, a wide range of tools and disk recovery utilities, onboard file systems and locally attached storage. This tool, which is included as part of the service, can enable a SoftLayer client to run anti-virus, spyware and root-kit scan utilities for a failed server.33 o SoftLayer clients can schedule or manually run Nessus vulnerability assessment scans at no additional charge and review reports for their SoftLayer servers by accessing the “Security” tab in the SoftLayer client portal. o AWS allows its users to run their own vulnerability scanning software provided they first submit a request for approval. Clients may request permission to conduct vulnerability scans as required to meet their specific compliance requirements.34 o KnowledgeLayer® is SoftLayer’s searchable knowledgebase; it provides continuously updated articles about known security risks and contains best-practice information based on operating system type to help users safeguard their systems.
31Source: Amazon security whitepaper – November 2013 (p 19): http://aws.amazon.com/maintenance-help/ http://media.amazonwebservices.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf 32Source: http://www.symantec.com/page.jsp?id=amazon 33Source: SoftLayer web portal: http://www.softlayer.com/about/media/release/159 34Source: AWS security whitepaper – November 2013 (p 12): http://media.amazonwebservices.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf and: http://aws.amazon.com/security/penetration-testing/
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SoftLayer’s optional security services The combination of SoftLayer’s included security services, standardized, rate-carded-optional security services and IBM IT Security Services35 can offer a key advantage for SoftLayer when compared to Amazon’s security cloud services. o SoftLayer offers McAfee Host Intrusion Protection with reporting and with full white- listing and black-listing monitoring of client applications as a paid-for service. For simplicity, it can be monitored from within the existing SoftLayer portal. In contrast: o AWS protects its server by requiring a user to select a host intrusion protection product from an ISV web site, buy any required licenses for that software, then install and configure it on their AWS server. o SoftLayer offers standard “shared-and-multi-tenant” hardware firewalls to help protect individual cloud, dedicated or virtual computing systems. These can be provisioned on demand without service interruptions. o SoftLayer offers standard hardware firewalls to protect one, multiple or even all servers that share the same VLAN to help provide the highest assurance of uptime. These can be provisioned on demand without service interruptions. o SoftLayer also offers clients customizable gateway appliances by Vyatta, which can sit in front of a client’s environment. Vyatta can act as a firewall, VPN, load-balancing or network address translation servers (NAT, private subnets) to handle IP traffic. o SoftLayer offers clients the convenience of bringing their own secure socket layer (SSL) certificates or buying Symantec (VeriSign) and GeoTrust SSL Certificates from SoftLayer. SoftLayer prices range from approximately US$20 to US$900 for one year. o AWS does not offer the convenience of one-stop shopping for cloud-based services and SSL certificates. AWS does have their CloudFront content delivery service, which offers “Custom SSL Certificates”; it is priced on Amazon's web site at US$600 per month. AWS users must bring their own SSL certificates except for users of Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery service, who can select “Custom SSL Certificates” for US$600 per month.36
Workload-based solutions
Agility is not a word that is always associated with many businesses and IT service providers. However, cloud computing is changing this. In particular, C-suite executives are increasingly viewing cloud as an innovative way to deliver service to consumers through analytics, social and mobile. As a result, many forward-looking clients and partners are seeking out areas of opportunity that deliver agility, simplicity, reduced cost and faster time to market. SoftLayer’s automated services helps clients to create the right hosting environment for applications ranging from basic to complex or compute intensive, so that they can build their business at Internet scale. From hybrid hosting to virtualization, security and highly scalable web service solutions, wherever business needs go, the SoftLayer infrastructure can help clients and IT providers address their requirements.
35Additional information - IBM’s IT Security Services: IBM web portal: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/it-security-services-ab.html 36Source: AWS web portal: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
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SoftLayer is well suited for a wide variety of client workloads. Its solutions and services satisfy most needs of small businesses as well as those of large-enterprise clients for unmanaged infrastructure capability. As an example, this document will go a bit deeper on several key workloads for many clients.
SoftLayer is the default infrastructure for all of IBM cloud and the IBM Software as a Service (SaaS) development teams’ default infrastructure to use for any new offerings unless there is a compelling reason not to use it.
Big data and business analytics Big data and analytics present big opportunities to help companies gain a competitive advantage. Companies using analytics can drive business outcomes and capture the time value of data to create core differentiators. SoftLayer's platform helps give big data applications their best performance. The big data solutions at SoftLayer can provide businesses with the robust storage, network and bare metal compute resources required to help deliver on the opportunities of big data in an on-demand fashion. If clients don’t have a big data strategy, SoftLayer offers standard big data configurations and SoftLayer-managed hosting database services by senior data base administrator resources who collaborate with clients to help design, implement and administer big data or database architectures that are positioned to help meet current and future requirements. Additionally, SoftLayer can offer high-performance computing (HPC) servers to provide a highly accessible, on-demand solution for users who want to meet compute-intensive requirements. Use cases include computation-intensive projects such as data mining, numerical and seismic analysis as well as advertising agencies and interactive media and game developers who need video processing and three-dimensional (3D) rendering. Examples of key client requirements that SoftLayer supports: o Helping to reduce the effort to manage the big data middleware and infrastructure o Meeting the requirement for a globally diverse big data solution to fit specific requirements o Providing the flexibility to support a broad scaling of data size requirements that can span structured and unstructured data types
Finally, when bare metal physical servers and virtual cloud instances are treated as equal and relatable devices, workloads can leverage the resources that best suit their needs. A client with a big data application might choose to provision web servers on public cloud instances while storing and accessing data on bare metal servers with sold state drive (SSD) hard drives.
Note: IBM closed on the acquisition of Aspera, Inc. in January, 2014. Their offerings can help IBM clients more effectively and efficiently move large files to and from the cloud and within the enterprise to where individuals can extract real business insights from that data. Aspera’s Extreme File Transfer (patented fast and secure protocol or fasp) accelerates the security-rich transfer of large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent. It is planned to be integrated into SoftLayer’s cloud infrastructure later in 2014.37
37IBM press release (01/17/14): IBM Closes Acquisition of Aspera: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/42965.wss
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Social business Social business applications tend to vary in nature due to specific business operational requirements, and therefore make good candidates for being hosted on a cloud platform like SoftLayer’s IaaS. SoftLayer can provide a unique network design, automated platform solution— physical or virtual—that is managed through a single web interface.
Examples of key client requirements that SoftLayer supports: o Collaborating—project and activity management, WiKis, forums, blogs and file sharing o Supporting instant messaging o Facilitating online meeting services o Hosting email servers o Helping enhance document management
Mobile Clients can build their mobile applications on a global cloud infrastructure at Internet scale. Whether designing software applications to run on smartphones, tablets or other devices, SoftLayer can help provide the right platform to build and host mobile applications. SoftLayer’s unique network design and automated platform helps clients unify our platform services— physical or virtual—into a solution controlled through a single management system.
Examples of key client requirements SoftLayer supports: o Providing more robust performance and application demand resources available to serve high-traffic applications o Distributing redundant, fault-tolerant resources o Delivering more rapid application load times and automated backend infrastructure services o Providing scalability to meet dynamic web needs
DevOps DevOps workloads are highly elastic; they are regularly brought up and taken down, and the number of instances at any one time can vary widely based on the development phase. Placing these workloads on the hosted cloud allows clients to scale capacity to match demand and pay only for what is used. Another benefit is the ability to tailor the infrastructure to the workload; the next development and test workload to come along could have radically different hardware requirements.
Clients can develop and test business applications more quickly using their development toolset. Using SoftLayer’s platform-neutral imaging solution, Flex Images, users have the ability to capture an image from a physical or virtual device and create a new machine based on the image (such as, a physical machine from a virtual device's image and vice versa). SoftLayer can also help clients deploy with APIs and DevOps runtime services environment on SoftLayer’s infrastructure, which supports bare metal and virtualized infrastructures in a single management model.
SoftLayer can offer the ability for business applications to be developed and deployed in the same operating environment, which can help support increased speed, scalability, and
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Examples of key client requirements SoftLayer supports: o Deploying on-demand resources to help meet the application performance requirements o Helping to more quickly and efficiently clone and replicate new development images from previous testing into a new environment o Enabling testing environments that are identical to the planned deployed production hardware environment o Providing a complement of security controls to help protect user information
New IBM announcement (February 2014) – IBM announced the IBM PureApplication® Service on SoftLayer beta. It uses best practice patterns (such as mobile, web, analytics, database) to rapidly deploy specific applications. Patterns set up, deliver and manage the infrastructure plumbing for a given application. Instead of having to piece together all of the ingredients, clients get pre-formulated virtualization, operating system, middleware, wiring, and installation patterns that dramatically slash the time it takes to stand up an application. Also, it makes it easier for client and IT providers to support a hybrid IT environment that’s consistent regardless of where the application resides.
Web-based applications As an example, the entertainment and media industry (which includes online gaming) is extending its value propositions by using web-based cloud computing as a growth engine that incorporates a seamless hybrid cloud computing global infrastructure with analytics, mobile and social computing. One SoftLayer client, an advertising company, serves over 10 billion media- rich ads per month and must be able to quickly deliver its content to millions of end users around the world. Online gaming is another example, which today represents over 130 million users37 who rely on the SoftLayer infrastructure to deliver a near-flawless experience. Social network games have revolutionized the gaming industry and some estimates say that by 2014, more than one third of the Internet population will be playing online social games.
Today, Fortune 2,500 companies are advertising products inside the games. Some gaming companies are doing big data solutions for mining that data, trying to build profiles on their users depending not only on how they play games but also on what kind of soft drinks they pick up in the game, what kind of cars they drive in the game, and all kinds of things—trying to build profiles on the users so that they can somehow monetize them.38
The cloud gaming marketplace (online, streamed and downloaded games will be an estimated a US$111 billion business by 201539) is closely akin to high-end enterprise. The mission-critical and latency requirements, the performance requirements—all of those attributes are the same,
38Source: Why Game Developers Are Choosing IBM Over Amazon (The Street – Andrea Tse, November 14, 2014): http://www.thestreet.com/story/12364713/1/why-game-developers-are-choosing-ibm-over-amazon.html 39Source: SoftLayer Press Release – January 15, 2014: http://www.softlayer.com/about/media/release/2122/
April, 2014 v1.2 26 WU612345-USEN-01 SoftLayer – CLOUD BUILT TO PERFORM from a very high-end enterprise to the gaming world. Now what they do with it is two different things—but they do share very common attributes.
Examples of key client requirements that SoftLayer supports: o Delivering virtually uninterrupted, global, almost-instant access across a wide range of mobile devices o Providing a near-flawless overall experience o Helping to ensure consistently high cloud performance o Delivering rapid scalability of resources to help meet dynamic web requirements
SoftLayer’s platform allows businesses to scale both vertically (upgrading hardware, adding RAM, and so on) to scaling horizontally (spreading the work intelligently across multiple nodes) to more easily meet dynamic and extensive workloads requirements, with physical and virtual cloud servers available in near-real time on a massive global network.
Summary
SoftLayer provides a set of key features that are defined to set its cloud services apart in the industry. Its services include the ability to deploy public cloud (multi-tenant, virtualized servers); private cloud (single tenant, virtualized servers); and bare metal (single tenant, physical server). All can seamlessly be intermixed into a single solution that is available on demand, via a web interface. SoftLayer's API provides clients with a high granularity of control and transparency to system information, plus access to the powerful automation and management system capabilities. SoftLayer’s triple network architecture spans the globe with a high-speed internal network, providing a more robust and faster way to move data. The resilient and highly security- rich network connecting all SoftLayer data centers enables cross-data-center replication and distributed systems for companies to create their own alternate site disaster- recovery solution. Client data traffic between SoftLayer data centers is provided at no additional charge. Many other cloud providers make core assumptions and mandate that all resources are virtualized and all resources are shared. With SoftLayer, neither is mandated, giving clients more flexibility and helping open up cloud computing to new applications and use cases. The client has the ultimate choice—virtualization is a choice with a flexible set of options and resources that can be shared, dedicated or mixed. SoftLayer simplifies the choice for organizations who want to move to a cloud model while at the moment still having non-cloud-native applications running on dedicated on-premise hardware. These organizations can start by leveraging SoftLayer bare metal or virtual server delivery models for cloud-enabled workloads for performance or cost reasons, while maintaining in-house resources for other workloads. For newly built applications, starting from a cloud-native architecture, application development and test can be built from scratch based on the API, using SoftLayer bare metal or virtual servers. And as soon as the remaining in-house resources reach the end of their usable life (or need an upgrade), these workloads can be
April, 2014 v1.2 27 WU612345-USEN-01 SoftLayer – CLOUD BUILT TO PERFORM shifted onto bare metal or virtual servers under the same management portal and API. The result will be a mixed environment of cloud-enabled and cloud-native applications running on either bare metal or virtual servers, all under a single management system and API. According to Lance Crosby (SoftLayer CEO), “When we look at the comparison, fundamentally, Amazon does about one-third of what we do. They basically have virtual servers and simpler storage. And then all the ancillary things they do on top of those are all just in support of those two core components. In our world, virtual servers in a public cloud are one third of our core business. We have private clouds predicated on any technology you prefer to use: VMware, Citrix, Parallels, Hyper-V, and OpenStack. And then we layer literally hundreds of services on top of that. Add on the 100-plus IBM SaaS solutions, and you’re talking multiples of add-on services, not only to the infrastructure, but also to pure-play business processes.”40
To continue to learn more about SoftLayer’s robust, open infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or to sign-up for a free 30-day trial for new clients, visit www.softlayer.com
Beyond SoftLayer’s self-service IaaS, IBM Cloud can offer a broad cloud computing portfolio and deep cloud expertise. To learn more, visit: www.ibm.com/cloud
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40Source: Seven Questions for Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, IBM’s New Cloud Company (11/13): http://allthingsd.com/20131111/seven- questions-for-lance-crosby-ceo-of-softlayer-ibms-new-cloud-company/
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Appendix
SoftLayer data center expansion plans: 2014 SoftLayer Dallas (6), Houston (2), San Jose, Seattle, Washington DC, DC sites* (13) Amsterdam and Singapore SoftLayer Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, POP sites* Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Toronto and Dubai (2H14) SoftLayer DC Hong Kong (2Q), London (2Q), Mexico City (2Q), expansion plans Australia (2), Brazil, Canada (2), China, France, Germany, India, Japan USA (2 - FISMA/FedRamp) 2014 (15) *Current: DC is data center location and PoP is network point-of-presence location only. Note - Current SoftLayer data center locations include 1 PoP per location. Disclaimer: This overall plan was developed and approved, but each data center has its own business case and stands alone. The specific locations and timeline may likely change over the course of the year, as any number of external factors may impact the plan (such as availability of suitable space, work visas, network or power requirements and so on).
IaaS workload analysis tests The following table provides additional information on the IaaS workload analysis table found in this document.
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Key contributors and subject matter experts (SMEs) for this document: o Scott Dillingham – IBM Computer Services Industry (CSI), Program Director for Cloud Initiatives o Dave Rhinehart – IBM Global Technology Services® Enablement Manager for Cloud Services o Jeff Klink – IBM Global Technology Services®, Cloud Ecosystem – Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) o Heather Hinton, PhD – Cloud Services Division, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Master Inventor, CTO - Security and Compliance Infrastructure o Rakesh D. Kumar – Manager, Market Development and Insights o Santhosh S. Reddy – Analyst, Cloud Computing, Market Development and Insights
IBM Corporation 2014 . IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, DB2, IBM SmartCloud, Global Technology Services, Maximo, PureApplication and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with the appropriate symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate US registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml . Flex Images™, KnowledgeLayer®, SecurityLayer® and SoftLayer® are trademarks or registered trademarks of SoftLayer, Inc., an IBM Company. . Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. . Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. . Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. . This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. . Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. . THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON- INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.
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