A couple of months ago we sent out a survey to all of our customers to get a barometer on how we’re doing. The response rate was way better than we expected and way beyond typical survey response rates. So thanks to everyone who took the time to let us know what’s on your mind. It really helps us do a better job, which is always on our minds here at The Planet.

I’m going to throw this out and see what happens. If you have ideas about what we can do to grow our business with new products and services for our dedicated servers that are important to you, let me know. Like for instance are there servers our competition offers that we don’t and you want? Is there an application you’d like that we don’t provide?

For the first and best ideas that we decide to pursue, I’ll send a $250 American Express gift card. With your feedback, we can consider how we might be able to include it in our offerings and at prices that are spread across a lot of companies, which means a big costs savings for you. I’ll be sure to pass the credit along to those who provide the ideas too.

Thanks for letting me know what’s on your mind.

- Steve

Here at The Planet, I think a lot about our data centers since it’s my job to ensure that our servers are up and running 24×7x365. What keeps me up at night is the continuous power and cooling required to keep your servers and systems up and the preventive maintenance that’s required to run six world-class data centers. You could say I live and breathe data center maintenance. And with more than 44,000 dedicated servers depending on our infrastructure systems, it keeps me and my team hopping.

One of things we focus on is N+1 redundancy. It’s really a math equation that ultimately boils down to having backup systems in place so that we’re able to deliver a seamless experience for customers. We’re always working to improve the processes and equipment we have in place to maintain continuous uptime which is why we have redundant UPS (uninterrupted power supply), generator and HVAC systems in place.

Customer experience is important to all of us. That’s why we take N+1 redundancy so seriously. Preventive maintenance helps us ensure uptime. Maintenance and redundancy really go hand-in-hand. At The Planet, we offer N +1 redundancy of critical infrastructure components. This ensures that in case of a component failure, another system is in place and will automatically take over for the failed component. This provides a seamless transition from one component to another, and it’s completely invisible to customers and their servers.

Redundancy is also necessary to properly test and maintain these critical systems. There’s no way to fully and properly test and maintain them without redundancies, since we would run the risk of leaving customers exposed. During maintenance and testing we have to take these critical systems/components completely offline. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an HVAC unit or a UPS module or a generator. When a system is down without a redundant system in place, customers are exposed to the possibility of the in-use system failing with no back-up available. Now that’s a scary thought.

If you haven’t seen the data center tour on our Web site, I invite you to see what my team does. Click on the “Take the Tour” button at: http://www.theplanet.com/. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

- Jeff

Looking for a cool deal on servers? Welcome to the inaugural edition of my “Cool Deals” blog, where I’ll highlight the latest and greatest server deals and contests from The Planet. Who doesn’t love saving and winning money?!

We’ve just launched the unmetered bandwidth deal – truly one of the best deals ever on bandwidth. For just $50 per month, you can sign-up for unlimited access to a 10 Mb/s uplink with The Planet’s multiple Tier-1 providers. This pricing is only available until Tuesday, June 12, or while capacity is available. So sign-up soon for this stellar deal.

With The Planet’s “Peer Pressure” referral program, we pay YOU to refer your friends (pressure your peers, if you will) to sign-up for servers at The Planet. For every server purchased by your friends, you’ll be placed in a random drawing for a $500 American Express gift card.

The grand prize? The individual with the most referrals leasing a server with The Planet wins a $1,000 American Express card! And if you’re a generous friend, you’ll use that newly minted gift card to take your friends who leased a server from The Planet out to dinner. Now that’s a win-win situation.

Start the “Peer Pressure” soon. You have until September 3 to sign-up as many friends as possible. The grand and first prize winners will be announced on October 31, 2007.

Stop by again soon for another update from “Cool Deals” central.

- Katie

Managing operations in a data center can be pretty stressful, so one of my favorite ways to relax is reading scientific literature. I know it doesn’t sound like a very riveting hobby, but I’m rarely happier than when I have a copy of New Scientist or Scientific American in my hands. I consume the material with a voraciousness that might cause some to question my sanity. Mental health aside, I was reading an interesting article in Discover this month that provided one of those really great “ah ha” moments that related to The Planet’s data centers. Or more intimately, the place where your server lives.

The article covered some math that had been performed to determine the true, actual weight of the data that makes up the Internet. Starting with the weight of a single electron (2 x 10^-30 pound), the author broke down the number of electrons required to charge a single capacitor (the charge equaling a “1” in binary) in a computer’s memory (40,000), assuming a roughly 50 – 50 split on 1’s and 0’s in a typical 50 kilobyte e-mail. The resulting sum can then be used to determine an electron count per message (8 billion), landing us at a weight for a single e-mail of two ten-thousandths of a quadrillionth of an ounce. Now extrapolate that math across the whole of all Internet traffic; all the e-mail, Web pages, music, videos, instant messages and everything else we all contribute to the Internet. Data-wise you arrive at a mind-blowing 40 Petabyte number. However, that 40 Petabytes only equates to a weight of 1.3 x 10^-8 pound. That’s right … in real-world terms, all that data equals the weight of the smallest possible grain of sand, one measuring only two-thousandths of an inch across.

It’s pretty bewildering to think that all the effort and energy we contribute to this industry equates to such an infinitesimal true weight. Pondering that breakdown about the Internet, my thoughts drifted to another possible dissection: the data center. However, I wasn’t thinking in terms of the sub-atomic, but rather of the cellular. Let’s move from physics to biology.

Data centers are huge installations with myriad of moving parts that work to keep your server online and operational. So much so that you could liken the whole amalgamation to a living, breathing entity. Breaking down those parts to a cellular level proves to be an interesting exercise.

All organisms need sustenance, just as the data center needs AC power to survive. Think of the servers as cells in a body, varied infinitely, and specialized in both form and function. Striated muscle or peptidergic neural cells … MySQL database back-end or Battlefield 1942 server, the variations are vast. Communication is achieved via neurons arranged in a systemic network, just as the data center’s network interconnects dedicated servers to each other and to the outside world. Organelles that give metabolic function to a cell are comparable to RAM, hard drives and RAID cards, all of which are vital working parts of your server. You can even think of The Planet’s network security technicians as white blood cells fighting infection, and our DC technicians like powerful enzymes performing repairs on the cells. I guess you could refer to a RAM change out as an “organelle swap.”

But as anyone knows, the most important piece of any entity is its DNA: the core code that provides instruction, design and ultimately life to the organism. Paralleling that vital piece of the organism, a data center has DNA as well, which comes in the form of our customers. Without customers providing pattern and direction, the data center remains a nebulous blob of power, wiring and equipment without purpose or consciousness. But infused with our customers’ DNA, the data center springs to life, demonstrating utility and structure, ambition and organization.

So the next time that you are sweating a data migration or pushing code changes, stop to think about the part you play in this grand scheme and the amazing interrelation you have with this “data center organism.” But if that proves to be a bit too mind-expanding, then you can revert that tiny grain of sand that makes up all the information on the Internet. Large or small, we all have a part to play.

The organization responsible for allocating IPv4 space in the US (ARIN) issued a resolution on May 7 that has managed to stay way below the radar of most. It reads:

WHEREAS, community access to Internet Protocol (IP) numbering Resources has proved essential to the successful growth of the Internet; and,

WHEREAS, ongoing community access to Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) numbering resources can not be assured indefinitely; and,

WHEREAS, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) numbering resources are available and suitable for many Internet applications,

BE IT RESOLVED, that this Board of Trustees hereby advises the Internet community that migration to IPv6 numbering resources is necessary for any applications which require ongoing availability from ARIN of contiguous IP numbering resources; and,

BE IT ORDERED, that this Board of Trustees hereby directs ARIN staff to take any and all measures necessary to assure veracity of applications to ARIN for IPv4 numbering resources; and,

BE IT RESOLVED, that this Board of Trustees hereby requests the ARIN Advisory Council to consider Internet Numbering Resource Policy changes advisable to encourage migration to IPv6 numbering resources where possible.

I know - it looks like a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo. I’m no lawyer, but allow me to attempt to summarize these point by point:

The success of the Internet has been dependent on the community’s access to IP addresses.

The total number of available addresses are finite (4,294,967,296 to be exact) and there is no guarantee that they will last indefinitely.

IPv6 addresses are available (generally) and work (again - generally).

It’s time to plan migrating to IPv6 if you’re planning to continue to get address space from ARIN.

ARIN’s staff is being instructed to *REALLY* scrutinize all new applications for IPv4 space from service providers.

ARIN’s Board of Trustees is requesting that the ARIN Advisory Council consider policy changes that will “encourage” migration to IPv6 where possible.

So is the day finally upon us where we no longer have the luxury of postponing our IPv6 deployment until the market demands it? Perhaps.

Consider the chart (from CAIDA) below:

What this tells us is that in the next year or so, we’ll start eating into the space that was set aside for “future” use. Soon after that, we’ll be into the reserved “multicast” space, and shortly after that - the “special” use space.

Does this mean doomsday for IP service providers? Probably not. It’s likely that the next wave of action you’ll start seeing from your providers is new guidelines for allocating IP addresses and increased pricing for said IP addresses. Additionally, providers may come back to users with large amounts of IP space and demand that they justify having them or return them. That may extend the need for migration out another 2-3 years. But the short answer is that sooner or later we will be faced with migration to IPv6 (and it will probably be sooner rather than later).

The good news is that of late adoption of IPv6 has accelerated as the graph below indicates:

We’ve already secured an IPv6 Allocation (for you propeller-heads, we got a /32 which represents 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 unique IP addresses) and have enabled IPv6 in our Dallas core network (try pinging 2610:40::3:1:2 to verify if you don’t believe me). My hope is to extend IPv6 to the rest of our network in the coming months, and shortly after that into our customer network, eventually allocating IPv6 space alongside IPv4 space automatically.

Is there huge demand for this? Not yet. But this is one of those times where being ahead of the demand curve isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps you need to make sure that whichever provider you decide to work with has a plan to get there.

- Will

The first time I saw the inside of a data center I had already worked in Web hosting sales for nearly two years. A member of our executive management team had decided that if we were going to sell dedicated servers we should probably have some concept of what they looked like.

I knew the building well; we’d once had a company-wide meeting in the lobby at 7:00 AM on a Saturday, so until our field trip I associated data centers with stale coffee and discontent over early weekend meetings. Although the data center and I had shared a less-than-stellar first encounter, when I finally stepped through the door that separated our then 14,000 or so servers from the rest of the world I never wanted to leave.

For those who have never had the pleasure or opportunity, visiting a large data center is something akin to a religious experience. Everything is so clean and sanitized. There are thousands of machines lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows and racks that tower above you, all connected by miles upon miles of a brilliant cable rainbow. The words you speak die in mid-air, absorbed by the sound of an electrified, whirring wonderland.

But in spite of the majesty of our data center’s sights and sounds, the part that struck me most was the smell. Imagine the new-plastic smell your CPU gives off when you plug a home computer for the first time, multiplied by many thousands, floating through perfectly filtered air. Within the first five minutes I wanted every customer to come and visit. They had to see and hear and, most importantly, smell what I was experiencing.

So when I read this article about the rising popularity of rub and sniff marketing my first thought was that we needed a way to recreate the smell of our data centers and include it in our print ads. We would be pioneers in olfactology for IT businesses!

Before this idea could come to fruition, it was pointed out to me that the smell of the data center really doesn’t do it for everyone. Although I cannot imagine why, some people even find it downright unpleasant, preferring smells like vanilla and sandalwood to plastic and electricity. One of our data center managers has even told me that while the CPUs and the electricity were contributing factors, most of what I smell is the fan belts on the air conditioning units, but that sounds much less romantic.

Still, the data center experience is more widely available to our customers than ever before. We now have a data center tour, starring actual Planet employees and filmed in our very own data centers. Click the button that says, “Take the Tour” on http://www.theplanet.com/ and enjoy our video, scent not included. For that part, you still need to make the trip to Texas and schedule a guided tour … break room coffee included.

I ran across an interesting article today that highlights an important question that any individual should ask themselves before selecting a hosting provider: “Can I grow my business with this company?”

Quoting the article:

Forty-three percent of data centers are running out of physical space and power density in racks is at an all time high, a survey by the Aperture Research Institute shows.

The survey of over 100 enterprise data managers, representing over 600 data centers, covered a spectrum of company sizes and industries, including banking, insurance, healthcare, data services, retail and telecommunications.

Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed indicated that 75 percent or more of the space in their data centers was already allocated to IT equipment. More than 43 percent of respondents reported that 90 percent or more of their data centers were in use, which may suggest that future needs are being planned with the rapid growth in processing and storage across all industries.

Additionally, the study reveals that power consumption is at an all-time high and power density is one of the biggest concerns out there.

This should come as no surprise to most people in the industry. The data center capacity glut that existed just a few years ago has totally disappeared, with companies like Digital Realty Trust snapping up just about every property worth owning. Once again we’re seeing significant investments in new data center builds. These are not the data centers of yesteryear. These have two or three times the power and cooling capacity of data centers built just 4 - 5 years ago. Building these data centers requires huge amounts of capital – which many in the hosting industry simply do not have.

Did you know that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build new data centers simply to house their own IT infrastructure? The reason behind this is because supply is low, demand is high – and they need to be able to control their costs. The only way to do this is to own and operate your own facilities.

So whether you’re purchasing your first dedicated server and shopping for the best deal or purchasing your 100^th dedicated server and looking for the next hot server technology, it’s important to ask your provider if they’re going to have the capacity to meet your needs as your business continues to grow. Failing to do so will either result in your ability to grow being limited, or having to plan a possibly painful migration later down the road.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20070501PR206.html

- Will