The Planet Blog

In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn’t have a product line called Backup.

Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.

Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it’s important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.

Data Protection

The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers’ data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products’ goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities - and you’ll be seeing more products and services added soon.

Why do I need data protection? Doesn’t my storage protect my data?

Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.

Planet Alpha’s Data Protection Product Portfolio

Starting on the left side of the graph, you’ll see Network Backup (formerly known as NAS, or Network Attached Storage). Network Backup is purely storage space accessible over the network … we manage the storage hardware for your backups and you can access that space directly, through your own scripts or through third-party self-installed software.

To the right of Network Backup, you’ll see EVault™ Backup (formerly known as DiskSync). EVault™ Backup serves as a traditional backup product with software from a well-known vendor. In addition to the managed storage space provided by our Network Backup solution, the EVault™ software makes scheduling and maintaining regular backups of your data quick and easy.

Our Data Protection Server (formerly known as Dedicated Backup Server) uses R1Soft’s CDPServer software to regularly update and maintain iterative changes of data. Because the Data Protection Server maintains these block-level, up-to-the-minute changes, the software allows you to execute bare metal restores to recover your entire server.

To round out our current data protection product line, we introduced the ability to license and install R1Soft’s CDPServer software on your other servers in the event you don’t need a full dedicated server-worth of space.

Which Delivers the Most Value?

The beauty of this product portfolio is its flexibility to meet your needs, so the answer to the question for you depends on how much data you have to protect and how you want to do that. Network Backup is $1/GB, and EVault™ Backup is a little more expensive at $2/GB, as it includes backup software from EVault. Both these offerings are ideal for customers with less than 300GB of data to protect. Our Data Protection Servers are available in 4 capacities and start at $279 for the 500GB version, and the price per GB can be as low as $0.20/GB.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have some kind of data protection. You might not need the backups all the time, but when you DO, the preparation pays off exponentially.

Limited Time: Backup Bonanza

With the new lineup of Data Protection products, we recently launched a great new promotion to enable all of our customers to try Network Backup and EVault™ Backup FREE for 90 days, and if you’re interested in the Data Protection Servers, you can cut the price significantly by ordering with promo code pa-dbs.

-Rob

On May 14, 2007, The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin inaugurated the company’s first public blog, and over the past 441 days, we’ve come a long way. Today marks our 100^th blog post, so I thought I’d wax nostalgic about some of the key posts and changes that have kept this blog interesting, informative, entertaining and (sometimes) just plain crazy.

How do our 100 posts break down? I thought you’d never ask: 30 authors, 12 categories, 315 tags, 416 comments, 14 videos, loads of pictures, and according to WordPress 2.6’s “word count” feature, about 46,346 words (including this post). We’ve given technical tips, introduced crazy new team members, led photo tours of our offices and data centers, raced Dodge Vipers, welcomed you to our new HQ, and even launched new planets … all conveniently from one little URL: http://blog.theplanet.com.

What can you Expect in the Next 100 Posts?

We’re lining up several new contributors from all around The Planet who can give you even more insight into the day-to-day operations of our company. We’ve got a few surprises up our sleeves, so keep an eye out and enjoy!

-Kevin

The Planet’s Blog Feed mosaic created at Wordle.net

Continuing The Planet’s feature coverage on WHIRtv, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR sat down with our vice president of Customer Care Jim Picone.

Jim explains the major improvements we’ve executed in our customer care organization within the past two years and focuses on the benefits of our new phone, chat and ticketing systems. With these new systems, we can now track critical metrics to create best practices and monitor operational efficiencies.

Watch the video below to get additional insight into our call center and our vision for the continuous improvements we’re making in our customer care organization.

When Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR came down to Houston, she had a chance to meet with several people on our team to get a sense of where the company has been, where the company is, and where it is going.

Last week, we posted Anastasia’s interview with Urvish Vashi, which covered the recent launch of Planet Alpha, Planet Northstar and our Advanced Services. In the video below, she speaks with The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin about our company culture, building a solid business foundation through the merging of two successful companies, and his vision for The Planet over the next two years.

For a bit more insight on Planet Alpha and Planet Northstar, check out the video below by Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR and The Planet’s Director of Product Management Urvish Vashi.

Today, we’re excited to announce a few big changes at The Planet!

Planet Northstar Managed Hosting

First, we’d like to tell you about Planet Northstar Managed Hosting, the first and only managed hosting service to leave behind the reactive support attitudes of the past and present a proactive vision of the future.

Our goal with Planet Northstar Managed Hosting is to turn your current perception of reactive support in managed hosting on its head. By introducing you to the Anticipation Advantage — a visionary way to help you grow and leverage technology — that utilizes a proactive, best practices methodology for everything from architecting systems to change management, security by design, to reporting results and more. Executed by a designated team of certified and seasoned professionals who know your name and your business, you’ll always know who you’re working with because they are all personally accountable for your success.

Here’s what Mark Schmulen, co-founder of Nutshell Mail says about our new service: “Our Planet Northstar support team has been incredibly proactive managing our IT systems so we can focus on growing our business. I would recommend Planet Northstar to anyone looking for managed hosting services.”

Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers

Along with the introduction to our managed hosting division, we’ve been working so hard on our dedicated server business that it has become a new entity: Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers.

There’s a powerful force behind the birth of our Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers division: it’s the power to choose. Your dedicated hosting provider fits the needs of your business model instead of the other way around, and we agree. You’ll see that Planet Alpha has added new Ready To Go server choices, Virtual Racks with Gigabit connectivity — and most important — a new set of “a’ la carte” Alpha Advanced Services for monitoring and security that you can use either solo or bundled in any combination.

See for yourself by visiting our transformed Web site and be sure to check out our new shopping cart, along with lots of new dedicated server specials.

Special Launch Promotions

We are celebrating this new era in IT hosting with a constellation of great offers, and it starts with a Big Bang of Savings. Try our new Alpha Advanced Services server monitoring for only $12.50 for your first month or add our server security module for only $20 for your first month. Save 25% off our latest dedicated servers. Get incredible deals on our Data Protection Servers (formerly “Dedicated Backup Servers”). Check out our Planet Alpha Server Specials to see how much you can save.

What About “The Planet”?

Keep in mind that our new stars — Planet Northstar and Planet Alpha — still orbit around The Planet, our corporate core of management and infrastructure that powers and sustains our success as a world leader in IT hosting. Our core infrastructure and processes have been designated as SAS 70 Type II certified: this includes in-depth studies in each of our six data centers, our network, provisioning systems, operations, physical and environmental security, and problem management through our customer portal. Visit the The Planet Corporate section of our Web site to learn more.

Join us on this unique journey through a new universe of IT hosting. Remember that you can contact us at any time through Live Chat on our Web site at www.theplanet.com or call us at 866-325-0045.

Welcome to the new world of IT hosting. It’s made possible by your input, your loyalty and your energy.

Take a good look around. You’ll be in a whole new place soon.