By the end of the year, SoftLayer’s global network will include points of presence (PoPs) and data centers throughout Europe and Asia. As George explained in Globalization and Hosting: The World Wide Web is Flat, the goal is to bring SoftLayer’s network within 40ms of everyone on the planet. One of the first steps in reaching that goal is to cross both of the “ponds” between our US facilities and our soon-to-open international facilities.

The location and relative size of Europe and Asia on that map may not make them viable resources when planning travel (Seattle actually isn’t geographically closer to Tokyo than it is to San Jose), but they illustrate the connections we’ll make to extend our network advantages to Singapore and Amsterdam.

Since I’m currently on-site in Singapore, I can give you an inside look at our expansion into Asia. The data center is coming along very nicely, but before I show off pictures from that build-out, I thought I’d give you a glimpse of our first official network point of presence in Asia: Tokyo!

If you’re familiar with SoftLayer, you’re probably aware that we build our data centers in a pod concept for a number of reasons, and our network points of presence are no different. If you manage to sneak by about 15 levels of security at any of our network PoPs, you’d find identical hardware (with different labels).

By the time you get to this paragraph, you’ve probably spent a while geeking out on the hardware pictures, and by reading the labels, you’ve inferred correctly that we’ll have nameservers and VPN online in Tokyo, and the Juniper routers already look poised and ready to start passing traffic … The logical conclusion you should draw is that you need to get poised and ready to order your server in Singapore.

SoftLayer VP of Network Operations and Engineering Will Charnock is in Hong Kong to build out that PoP, and you might see a few (similar looking) pictures from there in the near future, and I’ll be sure to sneak a few shots of the Singapore DC progress for you too.

Sayonara!

-@toddmitchell