SoftLayer made our way to San Francisco for another great year of digital marketing fun at ad:tech. This event is always a blast because it allows us trade show roadies to change up our usual dialogue and talk about SoftLayer in a unique way … Instead of fielding technical questions about our platform, we get to talk about our cloud hosting solutions from a “big picture” perspective. This year, the bridge between those “big picture” discussions and the hardware and technical side of our business was the Server Challenge II.
This isn’t the first time the advertising-focused crowd at ad:tech has seen the Server Challenge, but with the competition’s new retro arcade game design, it was much more of a focal point this year than it has been in years past … And it didn’t hurt that we were in an awesome location right at the entrance of the expo floor:
Given the fact that most people who stopped at our booth were drawn to us as part of a crowd around the Server Challenge, the first question we heard was subtly different than the “What does SoftLayer do?” question we’re used to answering at ad:tech. This year, most of my conversations started with an attendee asking, “What in the world does this game have to do with SoftLayer?” Luckily, the graphic on the front of the Server Challenge with three simple objectives provides a great outline for the competition’s relevance to our business:
- Load the Data
- Connect the Network
- Save the World
1. Load the Data
Game Application: Insert all 24 of the drive trays into the drive bays of two Supermicro servers.
SoftLayer Significance: We have more than 100,000 Supermicro servers in our 13 data centers around the world. When you walk into one of our facilities in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Jose, Amsterdam or Singapore, you’ll see racks filled with servers just like the ones in the Server Challenge II, and those servers are loaded up with the hard drives you choose when you order from us.
2. Connect the Network
Game Application: Connect the 18 network cables into the three network switches.
SoftLayer Significance: The three different colors of network cables are the same colors you’ll see in our data centers. The red cables carry public network traffic, the blue cables carry private network traffic, and the green cables carry out-of-band management network traffic. This is a huge differentiator for SoftLayer because those three physical networks allow for much greater flexibility for our customers. While the public network is serving public traffic to your websites, games and apps, you could be running an off-site backup of your database over the private network (where you don’t incur bandwidth charges), and you can manage your server over SSL, PPTP and IPSEC connections via the out-of-band management network carried by the green cables.
3. Save the World
Game Application: Win a MacBook Air!
SoftLayer Significance: SoftLayer provides the flexible, scalable platform on which you can build your application, run your game or push an advertising campaign. The fact that all of our servers are racked, networked and ready for your order means that we’re ready to “Save the World” for you by provisioning on-demand bare metal cloud servers and virtual cloud computing instances.
At least four or five times per show, I hear attendees talking about how the Server Challenge is the most fun game at the conference (even at GDC … where the entire expo hall is filled with gaming companies). While it draws crowds for being fun, the best part of the competition is that it helps us tell our story and creates memories at the same time. When Server Challenge competitors hear that their companies need a new server, they’re going to have a flashback to stepping up to a SoftLayer server rack and learning what makes SoftLayer the best choice as a cloud hosting provider. With the crowds we see at every show, that means we’ve got a lot of future customers:
Thanks to all of the ad:tech attendees who took on the Server Challenge II this year. The show actually had one of the most dramatic conclusions of any we’ve ever had before! Yuki Matsumoto broke the one-minute mark early on Day 2 of the expo with his first attempt of the day, and John Li managed to squeak by him with a time of 0:58.05 less than five minutes before the show floor closed:
Yuki had one shot at redemption as the last competitor of the show, but he wasn’t able to beat John’s 58-second completion, so the MacBook Air went to John Li! Keep practicing your server-building skills and come look for SoftLayer (and the Server Challenge) in an expo hall near you!
-Summer
