Lucky number 4: San Jose

Announced earlier today in this tweet, our infrastructure provider Softlayer has opened their San Jose facility. This is a long awaited announcement for us, as we’ve been extremely eager to open up our now fourth location.

From information posted on the Softlayer website, the San Jose facility (SJC01) has a total of 3 pods providing a 12,000+ server capacity. These numbers are right in line with other Softlayer facilities, again proving just how power efficient and economical Softlayer is from the ground up. This is the first of three new facilities Softlayer intends on opening in 2011. The second facility will be housed in Amsterdam, and the third will be in Singapore. Both facilities are projected to be ready for orders in Q3.

Initially, we’ll be offering shared hosting services in San Jose and eventually expanding to reseller and maybe VPS. As of this post we’ve worked out some great deals with our sales rep at Softlayer and are preparing systems for production. Our aim is to have our first machine online and ready by the end of the week.

The reason we’re so excited about this is we expect the routing from Asia to San Jose to be much better than it is to Seattle. Since we have so many users from Asia and that region of the world using our services, we’re excited to see the performance gains and connectivity advantages a location like San Jose provides. Currently, the way most traffic from across the Pacific is routed is that it enters into the San Jose / Los Angeles areas and is then handed off to a carrier which takes it’s to its destination. So in a case where a user from China is hosting in Seattle, their route will come into the US and then haul up the coast to Seattle, adding approximately 50ms of latency. By eliminating the need for the traffic to move up the coast we’re cutting a major chunk of latency off the route, leading to a snappier response time and a better user experience.

This also gives us the option to light up additional, geographically diverse nameservers for our new machines and locations. While there’s no immediate plans to do something like this, it’s definitely on our radar.

Once we do put our first machine live, we’ll probably end up offering a special discount or coupon code for San Jose only. We’ll update this blog post once that happens, so check back in :)

Edit: We’ve launched San Jose! Coupon code “sjc50” (without the “”) can be used to save 50% off your first payment for all orders in the San Jose location only. This coupon is valid until May 15th :)