Photos: Inside Softlayer's Singapore pod data centre

US company SoftLayer is building a pod data centre in a Digital Trust Realty facility in Singapore, plus small cabinets of telecommunications equipment in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The standard turnkey data centre pods SoftLayer orders from Digital Realty Trust offer 2mW of power, and enough space (8000 to 10,000 square feet) to host 4000 servers.

SoftLayer's Singapore pod has two separate data halls, presumably for redundancy.

The company is looking to build a pod in Australia after it opens this facility in Singapore and another in Amsterdam.

The plant and facilities provided by Digital Realty Trust costs around $3 million, but SoftLayer fills the space with around $20 million worth of servers, switches and storage.

The intersection between a modular data centre facilities provider like Digital Realty Trust and a service provider like SoftLayer is an interesting model. Once the shell of the data centre is turned over to SoftLayer, services can be made available within 60 days. SoftLayer owns everything from the PDU (power distribution unit) up and DRT everything underneath. DRT provides SoftLayer read-only access to status data on all its plant, whilst SoftLayer provides a rich API to customers so that they know exactly what data centre, what pod, even what rack their workload is running on.

Looking up.

And now down at the raised floor.

This gives some idea of the height of the raised floor.

Lets take a look under the floor.

Almost ready for racks.

Racks in waiting. To get an idea of how the facility will look once racks and servers are installed, lets jump across to SoftLayer's San Jose pod (see next photo).

To get an idea of how the Singapore facility will look once racks and servers are installed, here are some shots from the build of SoftLayer's San Jose pod in the US.

This is one of SoftLayer's 13 US data centres. The company has decided to expand internationally after surveying customers and realising that half of them were foreign companies serving the US market. Many expressed a desire to bring workloads closer to home in Asia and Europe.

SoftLayer has 100,000 servers in just about every conceivable configuration, according to CEO Lance Crosby. Dedicated servers can be provisioned in under four hours, virtual servers in under two, and multitenant cloud instances in under 15 minutes. The latter accounts for only ten percent of SoftLayer's revenues.

SoftLayer offers a 'Build your own cloud option' in which customers can choose how many cores, how much RAM and local and network storage, rather than the typical "instance" sizes offered by cloud computes.

Provisioning with such flexibility comes down to building scale, repeatable processes and a great asset management system. SoftLayer's asset management system takes in a customer order from the web and scans the available inventory. If there is an exact match, it provisions and presents it to the customer. If there isn’t an exact match, it looks at the closest options and opens a ticket for the engineer on the data centre floor to add or remove whatever component is required to run the workload. That manual intervention is the difference between the two and four hour delivery windows.

CEO Lance Crosby describes SoftLayer as a “software company dressed up as a hosting company” – with a focus on automation and complete transparency of infrastructure for customers. SoftLayer hires 75 full-time software developers and has 2.5 million lines of production code. All that to offer an API that SaaS providers can use to feel in control of their workloads.