Monday, December 10, 2007

Softlayer Continues to Better Itself

December 5, 2007, Dallas, TX – Today SoftLayer, the industry’s fastest-growing web hosting provider, said that its string of significant product and service releases over the past months highlight the company’s vision and its course for the future. Since September, SoftLayer has announced a number of noteworthy launches and milestones.

“All of our recent additions are part of our overall strategy to automate managed services that have traditionally been performed manually and, as a result, have been labor intense and costly,” said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer Chief Executive Officer. “We firmly believe the only way to scale managed services is to automate installation, management, and monitoring.”

Mr. Crosby said that SoftLayer’s portfolio of services will continue to expand rapidly, and that the company has many other major growth opportunities on the way. “We’re well on track to have 15,000 servers deployed by the end of the first quarter in 2008. And I’m pleased to say that we’re launching a site in Seattle, our first additional geographic location,” he said.

SoftLayer has formed a 5-year, $16-million deal to deploy as many as 10,000 servers at Internap’s Seattle data center. The new site will give SoftLayer customers geographic diversity and allow them to locate their servers for optimal speed and performance. Softlayer will provide global load balancing between locations via two independent 10-gigabit high-performance IP network circuits connecting the Seattle and Dallas data centers.

SoftLayer’s latest automated services extend the flexibility and control its customers have over their systems. RescueLayer, a server recovery solution, restores failed servers by rebooting the systems into a RAM-disk rescue kernel with the server’s regular network access. A new automated, hardware-driven load-balancing solution can distribute work across servers, improving scalability and provisioning. Additionally, StorageLayer, a comprehensive storage and backup service, integrates multiple storage technologies including iSCSI and EVault. StorageLayer will soon be expanded with scalable virtualization technologies, disaster recovery options, and several enterprise services that take advantage of SoftLayer’s new Seattle site.

SoftLayer’s recent additions also have included relationships with best-in-class technologies and leaders. Softlayer released PassMark® BurnInTest™ hardware testing at no-charge to customers. They also began providing Urchin by Google Analytics, an enterprise-class website analysis package. The company also announced it became a Microsoft Gold Partner with certification in Networking Infrastructure Solutions, Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions Specialization and Storage Solutions Specialization.

“We’re proud of how much we’ve brought to market and how quickly,” said Mr. Crosby. “We’ve built an enormous amount of momentum. And we’re picking up more speed every day.”

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