Are you familiar with the “slow clap” phenomenon?

It’s basically a crescendo of applause in a crowd that starts with a single hand clap. A few seconds after that first clap, you hear the second. A slow rhythm takes shape. A few people join in. The rhythm is contagious, and it starts to spread through the crowd. As more people join in, the natural tendency is for the pace to speed up as the volume increases, and within about a minute, a single hand clap becomes a huge roar of applause. In the movie Rudy, one character starts a “slow clap” on the sideline of a football game, and the cheer ends up filling the entire stadium … And that’s the visual that comes to mind when I think about the upcoming “go live” date for our Singapore data center.

Start a slow clap in your mind and think of each successive milestone getting faster and exponentially louder applause:

• In July, George Karidis posted a high-level overview of SoftLayer’s international growth.
• About a month later, I blogged with details about our network expansion into Japan.
• Three days after that post, you got your first glimpse at the Singapore data center build-out process.
• A week later, you saw updated pictures of the data center and office space.
• Last week, racks were installed and wired up by the time a press release hit the wire announcing the launch of our Asia-Pacific operations.
• From that press release, you learned that SoftLayer’s Singapore data center will go live on October 3, 2011.

If you imagined correctly, the applause in your mind should be borderline deafening … And I didn’t even mention the fact that we enabled pre-orders on select servers in Singapore last week with a Triple Double special exclusively for servers in the new SNG01 facility.

AND I haven’t said anything about the progress of our first European data center in Amsterdam. We already have a team of people there working to get that facility ready, and it’s coming together just as quickly. Don’t be surprised to see a few sneak peeks at the build-out process there in the next few weeks.

It’s almost unfathomable that we’re so close to the launch of our first facility outside the United States, and when you consider how quickly Amsterdam will come online after Singapore, you probably think you’re taking crazy pills … Or that we are. I don’t want to take any of the wind out of the sales of our launch day, so I’m just going to share a few more glimpses into the data center.

On Monday, you can light your first server at the end of this Singaporean hallway:

All of the racks are powered:

The server rails are installed:

And we thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and install a few servers:

Now all we need to do is flip the switch … Are you ready?

-@toddmitchell