The highlight of any customer visit to a SoftLayer office is always the data center tour. The infrastructure in our data centers is the hardware platform on which many of our customers build and run their entire businesses, so it’s not surprising that they’d want a first-hand look at what’s happening inside the DC. Without exception, visitors to a SoftLayer data center pod are impressed when they walk out of a SoftLayer data center pod … even if they’ve been in dozens of similar facilities in the past.
What about the customers who aren’t able to visit us, though? We can post pictures, share stats, describe our architecture and show you diagrams of our facilities, but those mediums can’t replace the experience of an actual data center tour. In the interest of bridging the “data center tour” gap for customers who might not be able to visit SoftLayer in person (or who want to show off their infrastructure), we decided to record a video data center tour.
If you’ve seen “professional” video data center tours in the past, you’re probably positioning a pillow on top of your keyboard right now to protect your face if you fall asleep from boredom when you hear another baritone narrator voiceover and see CAD mock-ups of another “enterprise class” facility. Don’t worry … That’s not how we roll:
Josh Daley — whose role as site manager of DAL05 made him the ideal tour guide — did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to feedback from our customers about whether this data center tour style is helpful and/or entertaining.
If you want to see more videos like this one, “Like” it, leave comments with ideas and questions, and share it wherever you share things (Facebook, Twitter, your refrigerator, etc.).