SoftLayer has advanced its backend systems, upgrading its fully redundant data warehouse storage arrays and adding an application layer processing cluster to enable a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

The data warehouse expansion included the installation of multi-petabyte storage arrays from EqualLogic (now Dell) in its Dallas, Seattle, and, when launched, Washington D.C. facilities to serve as the backend data storage powering all of SoftLayer’s on-demand service offerings. Servers from SuperMicro provide the processing power for the new SOA infrastructure.

Together, these improvements will accelerate deployment of new features and increase performance for all SoftLayer customers (whether they use the SoftLayer Application Programming Interface (API) or the SoftLayer Portal to manage hosted IT infrastructure) and allow the company to maintain its leadership in bringing new products and services to market.

“Delivering world-class services on time, every time, requires an internal infrastructure that, up to now, simply did not exist in the market place,” said Nathan Day, SoftLayer Chief Technology Officer. “We have created a new model for the industry that combines scalable and flexible data storage with scalable and flexible application processing.”

SoftLayer used industry-standard best-practices to create its SOA to deliver on the architectural style’s two fundamental concepts:

• Enable a set of simple, ubiquitous, and open communication interfaces
• Deliver data using an open schema (e.g. XML) through the interfaces

SoftLayer’s SOA allows data to be captured, processed, and presented to users in a form chosen by the system administrator, delivering on the company’s commitment to give customers total control. The architecture is highly scalable, with the capacity to process millions of transactions per hour across thousands of physical and virtual servers, as well as with any number of related services.

Mr. Day continued, “Our goal is to virtualize all datacenter elements including the hardware, security, network, and embedded services to drive our vision of Serverless IT.”