At The Planet, we work in a continuous-improvement environment, always looking for new ways to improve our operations and our service. One of the recent changes we’ve implemented in Data Center Operations is a new 12-hour schedule for all data center technicians and supervisors.

With the new schedule, our employees work 12 hours each day in a two-week rotation. In one week they’ll work three days, followed by four days the following week. These schedules actually provide more people on each shift throughout the entire day, and also eliminate wasted time overlaps between shifts and days with double staff.

Every technician affected by the schedule change alternates three- and four-day weekends. Because the shifts are longer, each technician comes into the office seven out of every 14 days, compared with 10 out of every 14 days with the old schedules. The new schedule also streamlines our support communications, especially with regard to ownership and handoffs. We’re eliminating a few shift changes in the middle of the day, so projects and tickets aren’t as likely to bounce between shifts. Not only is this a benefit to our customers, our employees like the additional freedom it provides.

The efficiencies gained from the new schedules will reduce our data center operations costs by approximately $500,000 a year. With that savings, we can fund new positions and projects to improve service. It also increases our efficiency and effectiveness, which are two of the most important mantras in any “operations” handbook.

We’ve implemented the new schedules in four of the six data centers so far, with the final two migrating to the new schedules within the next few weeks. The feedback from the technicians and management staff in the first four data centers has been overwhelmingly positive.

I’d like to personally thank all of our helpful and open-minded technicians who have allowed us to make a significant change in their lives. Our success is fundamentally tied to the team’s 100 percent commitment to the new structure, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

-Scott

Apparently, a few folks here at The Planet have a knack for photography. On Monday, we asked everyone to send in their favorite photos from our dragon boat race last weekend. We assumed a few people would pass along a few snapshots from the event and we could quickly and easily organize the pictures on one blog page …

However, the floodgates opened and immediately, we were up to our ears in JPEGs — over 300 of them. The “problem” we ran into was that all of the pictures were phenomenal. We wanted to include them all, but entering 300 lines of HTML didn’t seem like much fun — especially when the lines of code look like this:

<a href=”Dragon Boat Large Picture URL”><img class=”centered” src=”Dragon Boat Small Picture URL” alt=”Picture Title”/></a>

With the help of a useful Wordpress plugin, we linked the blog to a newly created Flickr account, and we’ve been playing with the newfound functionality ever since. You’ll notice the new photostream widget in our sidebar, and you can click on any of our photos to see other pictures from our Flickr pool in a gallery layout or in a slideshow.

If you’re a Flickr user, come join our group and contribute your favorite pictures: www.flickr.com/groups/theplanet! I’m still getting pictures from last weekend and sifting through them, so keep an eye on our photostream for updates: The Planet’s Flickr

Check out the Dragon Boat Race photo set:

You’ve seen a few glimpses of our company culture in recent blog posts, so it’s only fitting that you hear about a little boating competition last weekend, care of the Texas Dragon Boat Association.

Our CFO Kevin Klausmeyer threw down the gauntlet a couple months ago in a team-wide email: “Let’s pit the managers against the rest of the company, and see who wins in a 250-meter dragon boat race down Buffalo Bayou.” Most of the folks around the office had never heard of dragon boating prior to Kevin’s email, but as soon as the inter-office challenge was put on the table, everyone made a point to find any relevant YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and start training for what was sure to be an epic showdown.

The Texas Dragon Boat Association’s May Festival course accommodates three 22-person dragon boats at a time — each dragon boat having one “drummer,” twenty paddlers and one steersperson. Each team races at least three times and needs a minimum of 8 females and 8 males in the boat for each race.

Before you write off the athleticism of the event and start humming “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” you should note that these dragon boats can range from 30 to 100 feet long and only a few feet wide (just enough for one paddler on each side), each race is less than two minutes, and it’s a full-body workout. Teamwork and technique are the two most important components in a dragon boat race, so each of our teams had several practices to get everyone on the same page.

The managers chose to race under the name “The Planet Big Dogs,” so it was only fitting that the non-managers entered the competition as “The Planet Underdogs.” The other teams in the event couldn’t help but fear us as they read our team’s description in the program:

The Planet is widely regarded as an industry-leading IT Infrastructure provider. With multiple data centers, an incredible network and stellar support, we provide small- and medium-sized businesses with customized hosting solutions to fit their needs. We also harbor a secret: The Planet’s recent move to the Bayou Place in downtown Houston was not as innocent as it seemed … it was a strategic move to attract the former Olympians currently slated to paddle for us in the dragon boat races. Following a recent trip to the Yangtze River in China where we practiced our craft on the backs of real dragons, The Planet’s teams have consistently averaged 63 mph in nightly training races at a secret underground facility. In the interest of sportsmanship (and because we hate making our opponents cry), we will disguise our teams as a couple of rag-tag groups of first-time dragon boaters for this event. Autographs, training tips and a dragon boat DVD/Blu-Ray lecture series will be available to the losing teams at a nominal fee following the event.

Saturday rolled around, and everyone showed up to our luau-themed tent in their team shirts, and it was finally time to back up all the inter-office smack talk. Immediately prior to the race, the Underdogs were confident, the Big Dogs were creative: Doug came over to let us know “The winning team is accepting a 10% decrease in salary,” and the rest of the managers were quick to remind us that our yearly performance reviews were coming up soon.

Undaunted, the Underdogs took to the boat, and we made our way to the starting line. Apparently, the pride of the victory wasn’t going to be reward enough, so a last-minute wager was placed: the losing team has to buy and serve lunch to the winning team. The race was on: a team from Cafe Express in boat #4, the Underdogs in boat #5, and the Big Dogs in boat #6.

Always bet on the Underdogs.

The Big Dogs were very gracious in defeat, and we had a great time cheering for each other in rest of the day’s races.

In addition to the awards given to the fastest boats of the day, the TDBA gave a special “Spirit of the Dragon” award to the team that showed the most energy, involvement, and excitement. I’ll save you the suspense:

We won!

We had more than 100 participants, family, friends and cheerleaders throughout the day, so we’ve got a LOT of pictures from the event. I’ll be posting them on a dedicated “Dragon Boat Pictures” blog page so you can retroactively participate vicariously.

-Kevin

One of the great aspects of being in a new operations role is the ability to take a look at policies and procedures with a fresh eye. As the new senior director of Data Center Operations at The Planet, that’s been one of my first priorities.

I have never been a fan of policies written by senior executives and then simply rolled out with a directive to follow. For any policy to be effectively implemented, I contend that the team that must follow these policies should have a hand in helping to craft the policies or at least understand why the policies were created. More importantly, these processes come together through the team, rather than from a single individual’s effort. The best method I have seen for this comes from the Six Sigma Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) methodology.

In our data centers, we have created a Continuous Process Review (CPR) team made up of technicians, supervisors and managers across multiple cities. This team is solely responsible for the review and creation of all operations policies, processes and procedures across our six data centers.

The results from our team’s work together have been outstanding. In the last two months, we have produced new and/or updated policies for operational functions like ticket prioritization, technical escalations and management escalations. Since all levels of the data center operations organization are represented, the response to the new policies has been fantastic.

I owe many thanks to all the people who have participated on this new CPR team. None of this could have been achieved without their hard work and dedication.

The Planet’s goal is to provide the best customer experience in the hosting industry, and the data center operations team plays a huge role in that experience. Our ability to adapt to the evolving hosting landscape and respond directly to customer feedback is instrumental in improving the way our data centers run, so if you have any suggestions with regard to our data center policies and procedures, please let me know.

-Scott

Katie brought up some great points about an IT infrastructure provider checklist in her recent “World News from The Planet” video from ad:tech. Regardless of where you’re planning to host, you should always ask probing questions to determine just what, exactly, your provider brings to the table. Here are some points to consider:

Network

How does the provider’s network compare to the competition? Can it survive multiple bandwidth partner failures? Can it neutralize a multiple-Gbps DDOS attack?

Support

Is support staff available whenever I need it? Can I talk to a human immediately if I have an emergency? Does the provider employ certified staff that can help me with advanced issues?

Facilities

Can the provider host my IT infrastructure in multiple data centers and in more than one city? Does the company own its own facilities (or is it renting)? Is the data center entirely within the hosting provider’s control?

Power

Can the company survive a catastrophic power event such as being cut off from utility power for more than a week? Is the provider on a dedicated power grid within its facility or does it share a power infrastructure with other companies? Is the company’s power generation and distribution infrastructure regional (i.e., one unit per section of a data center) or is it integrated, providing true N+1 or better redundancy?

Vendors

Does the company use high-quality, name-brand vendors with equipment under warranty or does it offer generic, off-brand solutions? Do its vendors consider the company one of their top customers?

Product Portfolio

Does the provider offer a wide range of upgrades and add-ons or am I limited to its predefined packages? If the provider doesn’t have exactly what I need, can I special-order it?

Without definitive answers to questions like these, a price quote alone is pretty meaningless. After all, it’s the total value of the service — and not just the monthly fee — that is the true measure of any service offering.