Though there's not been much press, SoftLayer is quietly opening a new Washington DC location. This will give them a presence in Seattle, Dallas and DC. I've not seen any announcement but you can now pre-order DC-based servers.
If you've read some of our other posts, you will know that we like SoftLayer's way of handling IT infrastructure. Their stuff just works.
By adding an East Coast location, they continue to expand their US presence. Their data centers are connected over private networks, so you can do some pretty cool things like put a backup server in Seattle and run a production box in Dallas or DC.You can then sync them up over a private GigE network.
If a major disaster struck, a quick flip of DNS and you would be up and running again. Using a service like DNS Made Easy, could even automate or accelerate your DNS changes.
With multiple locations, I would expect global load balancing type of solutions to be possible as well. So hopefully they will roll that out soon.
If it is uptime, redundancy or disaster recovery, this presents some very good options, especially if you have a larger operation. For example, you could put half of your operations in Seattle and the other half in DC. You could then use something like R1 Soft's CDP system to do on-site and off-site backups. We already do this between our server at 111 8th and at SoftLayer.
