The Planet Blog

The Planet’s Professional Services engineers are a rare breed. Send us any non-standard problem, and we’ll jump on it to find a solution. That kind of jumping is typically the only jumping you see from one of us, but last Thursday challenged that status quo: a few of us spent our day jumping … out of a perfectly good airplane … hurtling toward a small field just South of Houston.

Being the last line of support at The Planet can get a bit stressful with all the interesting problems that come our way. Sometimes it becomes necessary to cut loose and take some risks. Our group is fairly tight-knit, so we end up supporting each other through these brief periods of insanity and have a blast in the process!

On Thursday, the three of us in Houston – accompanied by our colleague Geraldine Fernando who works at our help desk – ended up taking a half day off of work to go sky diving. We were all new to the process, and needless to say, we were a bit nervous.

Skydive Spaceland would be our proving ground.

To be honest, the location didn’t assuage any of our fears … the letters on the front of the building were merely outlines of their initial glory (pictured above), and we couldn’t help but wonder if this was the result of some unfortunate sky diving accident or just a boring hurricane.

As we started to prepare for our jumps, the sign-your-life-away forms were a bit of a reality check. Each paragraph literally stressed that there is a possibility you can die from jumping out of a plane, followed by several paragraphs confirming that you actually read the paragraph prior and understand the risks. Five pages, and twenty “initial here” fields later, we were amply freaked out and excited to start training!

Our training program consisted of watching an instructional video on what to do once you were actually plummeting to your doom … err, skydiving is what they called it. As an aside: If you can get your hands on this training tape, we’d advise you to take note of the instructor’s beard: it’s epic. Seriously, he could have been wearing a tie, and we would have never known.

(Left to right: Shawn Lime, Christopher Gallo, Geraldine Fernando, James Jhurani)

After training, we met with our instructors, all of whom were surprisingly laid back. They had the luxury of knowing the feeling of a successful skydive. We were not that lucky. They helped us suit up, answered all of our nervous questions and walked through the “this is how it will really happen” version of our training.

The only thing we had left to do was actually do it. Given the most recent skydiving safety statistics, we were confident that most of us would make it back to the office on Friday, but our legs were pretty heavy as we climbed into the plane.

After takeoff, we went over some-last minute questions and reminders. We latched onto our designated instructors, and they assured us that each of the harnesses could support 2500 lbs … which strangely didn’t help with our fear about the parachute opening.

Then we hit fourteen thousand feet, and we had to scoot the longest 10 feet of our lives.

No turning back now … the only way to the ground was out the side of the plane.

Pictures don’t do justice to the rush: free falling to terminal velocity and trying to process the fact that the only thing between you and the ground is a few thousand feet of air. You don’t know whether to scream or smile or close your eyes or breathe … then you realize breathing is not optional.

At Skydive Spaceland, you are encouraged to pull your own ripcord after checking your own altimeter, so you get the full thrill of pulling the cord and waiting for the ‘chute to catch. In reality — based on the statistics — tandem skydives are very safe, and each one of us experienced a textbook jump … the last few thousand feet drifting under canopy to our landing zone.

The final phase of the tandem jump requires you raise your legs straight out in front of you and slowly pull down on the flairs as you approach the landing zone. Depending on the speed of your landing, the instructor may tell you to sit or stand as you reach the ground. Geraldine insisted that we include the fact that she was the only one in our group to land on her feet, while the rest of us slid in on our backsides.

It was blast, and we couldn’t have been more reassured by the professionalism of our instructors at Skydive Spaceland. We’ve all caught the skydiving bug, and after we got back to the office we heard that one of our coworkers is a skydiving regular, so we challenge her to give her perspective on a jump … Patricia?

- Shawn, Christopher, Geraldine and James

You’ve just rolled out a new version of your software for download, and the announcement hits the front page of Digg. You added a few new products, and they’re flying off your Web site’s virtual shelves. Your forums have reached record numbers of visitors the last four days straight. You are living the dream: You’re an Internet success. You treat yourself to a celebratory dinner and fall into a deep, contented sleep.

When you wake up, the sun isn’t shining and the birds aren’t chirping — your cell phone pierces the serenity of the night, and you answer, only to be treated to an exasperated monologue from your CEO, who says something to the effect of, “The Internet on our site is broken.”

Your site crashed an hour after your head hit the pillow, and the fields of green you painted in your dreams are immediately transformed into desolate wastelands of headache and heartache. You lost sales and visitors, and your online reputation took a hit … it’s all too much to think about. You wonder how this could have happened. You wonder why you didn’t get any alerts about the IP address not responding to pings. You wonder why your other sites and servers on the same rack were not affected. You wonder what you could have done differently.

If you’ve been in a similar position before, you can vividly recall the pain. If you haven’t been in a similar position, trust me … it’s not any fun. I ran a Web hosting company in college and occasionally the server would go down at 4 a.m. I’d wake up the next day to find a slew of angry customer e-mails. I desperately needed to monitor individual services on our servers, beyond whether or not the server is still responding to pings. So as I began to specialize in server management and support, I made sure my team focused on creating and maintaining a monitoring service to keep the horror story you just read from ever happening to our customers. The Planet Alpha Server Monitoring service was born.

Why AS Monitoring?

What are the advantages of Alpha Server Monitoring over standard server monitoring like IPAlert? IPAlert only provides e-mail and SMS notifications for down servers. Alpha Server Monitoring checks individual services on machines to make sure they are responding to requests and opening sockets, and it generally verifies service performance rather than its existence. Then, a highly trained Advanced Services administrator investigates the issue and takes corrective action.

We have a dedicated staff of 11 Systems Administrators who keep a vigilant eye on servers 24×7x365. Many of these SysAdmins have been in the hosting industry since before you could really consider hosting an industry, so our Advanced Services team has an exceptional amount of experience, from answering straightforward technical support requests to researching and solving complex problems.

How Does AS Monitoring Work?

Our custom monitoring system will check up to 15 services on your machine every five minutes. If there are any unresponsive services, your server will be flagged on our system. Our Systems Administrators will respond promptly with a service restart, server reboot, or we can follow a custom response procedure as you request or as needed.

Instead of losing sleep at night, worried about getting another frantic call from your CEO, you can rest assured knowing that the Alpha Advanced Services team is watching your server. With Alpha Server Monitoring, your night might look like this:

2 a.m. You finish coding and post your new update after a 22-hour marathon session. You go to bed.
3 a.m. The server starts to slow down and becomes unresponsive following a huge surge of traffic when you hit the front page of Digg.
3:03 a.m. Your server is checked by the Alpha Server Monitoring system, and an “HTTP down” alert is created because services are not responding as expected.
3:08 a.m. An Advanced Services Systems Administrator investigates an “HTTP down” alert.
3:12 a.m. The administrator finds that your MySQL database server and Apache have crashed so he restarts them both.
3:13 a.m. Your site is back online and responsive.
10 a.m. You wake up from your coding-induced coma to find a whole bucket of new orders to process and an Orbit ticket telling you what happened and what the Advanced Services team did about it.

Alpha Server Monitoring: Guaranteeing your uptime, sleep and sanity.

-Sean

P.S. We’re running a great promotion on Advanced Services right now: try any service on your servers for FREE for the first month.

#touch support
#ls -al
drwxr-xr-x root root ./
drwxr-xr-x root root ../
-rw-r–r– root root support

Thank you for the introduction, Kevin. What a warm welcome it has been!

If you’ve ever been a manager preparing for an acquisition, then you are well aware of the concerns your customers and your team may have about the upcoming changes. Customers are concerned about service disruptions, the team is concerned about acceptance, and naturally, managers are concerned about everyone else being concerned.

I’ve had a chance to meet and work with several people from The Planet to support this integration, and I couldn’t be more impressed with their helpfulness and professionalism. This cross section of The Planet’s family has made me excited to meet The Planet’s 500 or so other employees in the coming weeks.

Touch Support brings a tremendous support and administration services background to The Planet’s family and a reputation that is second to none. The Planet’s customers are going to be very excited about the new services we can help roll out, and existing Touch Support customers will see the fruits of all the new resources we’ll gain from The Planet, which will help our team provide an even higher quality of service.

Thank you to everyone at The Planet for being so kind and supportive in this on-boarding process.

Thank you to the existing Touch Support customer base for being patient and understanding while we integrate.

We truly believe that this acquisition is the best move for everyone involved, including our valued customers and great employees. You can expect us to do everything in our power to prove it.

-Sean

Since I shy away from vending machines, trans fats, Las Vegas and scary ingredients, I will stick to my favorite topic: Storage!

It took perhaps a day for our faithful customers to give us clear feedback on our Dedicated Backup Server (DBS) line when it shipped last September, and we listened. They wanted more space, a lower cost per GB and more power. It took us a little more than a day to answer those requests, but we hope our new addition is worth the wait.

We’re proudly announcing the newest addition to the DBS family, affectionately called “The Beast” by those of us who drool over 6 terabytes (TB) of usable and abusable space, dual quad core XEON power, 8GB of RAM and 8 massive TB of monthly bandwidth!

We actually have been building this configuration for a few months on a custom basis, and so it has been heavily tested and approved by our hard-core TB drinkers: They loved it, and you will too!

The regular monthly price is $1,099, and we are going to have a promotion at the launch to make sure these Beasts do not sit around for long. For a limited time, The Beast can be yours for $999/mo … that’s around 16 cents/GB per month, if my math is any good. This is by far the best value in the line, and comes with the same unlimited pool of client licenses, Continuous Data Protection and block level performance as the humble 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB DBS configurations we’ve had available since the product’s launch.

We did hit one problem: the dang things do NOT fit in our vending machines, and the silly machines didn’t accept $100 bills.

Don’t worry, we’ve got a call in to our facilities group.

-Brett

At The Planet, we’re excited about the holiday season. We’ve had a great year, so this is a perfect time to look back on 2007 and store away the memories much like one would store server backups in our data centers. How’s that that for a convenient segue into a discussion about The Planet’s backup solutions?

We currently offer NAS, DiskSync, Dedicated SAN and Dedicated Backup Server options, and as the resident backup and storage guru on the Product Management team, I love sharing backup knowledge with our customers. What question do I get most often? Easy: What is the difference between

What is the difference between NAS, DiskSync and the Dedicated Backup Server?

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is storage space allows you access over FTP. You write or provide the software to create and send backups to your NAS, and it functions as a reliable external disk to protect your data and store information separate from your server. Think of it as a target disc, albeit a pretty small one. You can buy NAS space from The Planet in increments ranging from 20GB to 200GB, and our typical NAS setup accommodates many users on each of our available NAS devices.

Our DiskSync product offers a much more complete SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure backup solution with the ability to schedule full backups and perform restores in our managed environment. Rather than having to create the backup software, our DiskSync solution enables you to quickly and easily monitor and track your data backups. On the infrastructure side, we host the large storage network and maintain the integrity of all DiskSync user data. The SAN structure is significantly larger than a NAS device and is much more scalable. It’s able to accommodate a considerably higher number of DiskSync users and any additional space you may want or need. DiskSync backups are available in 10GB increments with unlimited capacity.

With our new Dedicated Backup Server (DBS) solution, you become the admin for the entire system. You get a dedicated server with the R1Soft CDP Server software/license installed, and full root access. You have the ability to manage backups and delegate authority to users and sub-users, and you manage the OS, which allows for true customization for any of your more complex backup needs. We’ve found that many customers want this complete control and the peace of mind that each DBS is individually encrypted for data security since no other users access your DBS. Our most popular Dedicated Backup Servers come equipped with 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB of data, but we’re always open to a challenge if you need more.

While that’s a quick rundown of our three main backup solutions, it succinctly explains a few of the key differences I like to communicate when asked to run through the options. We feel this array of products can meet the needs of almost any user, so if you have additional questions about backup solution implementation or if you would just like a little more information, visit our Backup page or post a quick comment to let me know.

-Brett

If you follow the link, you’ll see that this number is unique in so many ways.

I won’t go into the specifics of the number, but will provide a general overview along with why I’d be proud to have anybody associate this number with The Planet and myself.

Continue multiplying with further integers and you can add the first number to the remaining 6 numbers to continue this cyclic permutation, or end up with the same nice high repeating number. What is a cyclic permutation? And why would one be proud to be associated with such a sequence? I’ll let you dive further into the details. What we have here is a number that repeats itself in cycles (cyclic permutation) when multiplied by integers.

1 × 142,857 = 142,857

2 × 142,857 = 285,714

3 × 142,857 = 428,571

4 × 142,857 = 571,428

5 × 142,857 = 714,285

6 × 142,857 = 857,142

7 × 142,857 = 999,999

What I see here is repetition at its finest. Repetition in a company is essential whether it be in support, accounting, information technology, networking, marketing or any other department. Repetition ensures that you end up with the same, or at least similar, results. The results should either be those that are expected or close to, with the ability to correct them. We can now associate the expected results to 142857 and the unexpected results to 1142856. When we end up with the figure 1142856, we know what needs to be done in order to correct it: 1 + 142856 = 142857.

In IT departments we should always follow this rule. While every project may be different, and require some fine tuning, we should get used to doing our job the same way every time. This ensures that if someone is sick or on vacation, any other team member can simply jump in and continue the work without breaking stride. Whether someone is evaluating new network equipment or a new control panel everything must be documented from start-to-end.

In our tech support, it’s a rule we work to follow so that we provide consistent service to our customers.

Let us know what you expect and what you were provided with support. This will help us to keep up with your ever-changing world, while we provide the infrastructure and support to ensure your business growth.

- Anthony

Before I get into the meat of this entry, I feel it is necessary to address the comment made by my esteemed friend and colleague Thanh Tran, general manager of our Houston operations. In his blog entry earlier this month, Thanh mentioned “I work with a bunch of geeks. But that’s ok, because I’m a geek myself.”

I feel that this might have been a light-hearted jab at my previous entry, which I will readily admit was steeped in a healthy dose of science geekery.

Now, Thanh says that he too is a “geek.” For the record, I would like to point out that keeping a MS Paint-drawn Buzz Lightyear image file archived on a hard drive somewhere for nearly ten years pretty much seals the deal on one’s level of geekishness.

Thanh, I don’t think you had to tell us you are a geek; consider it self-evidenced. Just kidding around, of course …

All kidding aside, I’ve been looking forward to this blog entry, because I wanted to take a moment to acquaint everyone with just a few of the many outstanding data center technicians that our customers have probably worked with in the past. The next time you are reading a support ticket, check the usernames of the employees working the issue with you, and see if you recognize any of these excellent technicians.

For example, Jac has been with The Planet for more than two years, and is currently a Level 2 data center technician. A few days ago I was reading a recent ticket that he was working on for a customer who was suffering from a bit of “new server syndrome.” That’s the critical window of time after someone orders a new server that we have all experienced at one time or another. The customer was hard at work attempting to get his configurations in place so the server could be usable for his business, but he was running into some pretty wicked permission errors that he simply could not deduce.

Jac responded to the customer’s questions quickly and effectively, adjusting the settings to address the issues. He then went above and beyond expectations, providing the customer with some very detailed documentation related to these permission configuration issues. The problem was wholly solved, and the customer was quite happy. But more importantly, the customer was enabled to address his server needs more quickly in the future as well. It’s all about responding to business needs precisely and rapidly, and Jac Lindley does an excellent job of helping our customers achieve just that.

Another Level 2 data center technician I wanted to “introduce” is Johnny L., who has been with The Planet for almost three years, and in that time he has proven to be a strong anchor of knowledge in our data centers. Johnny is a whiz when it comes to server hardware; I’ve seen him swap out bad drives and start degraded array rebuilds so quickly it would make your head spin.

The pace of work in our data centers can be dizzying at times, and seeing guys like Johnny work can be awe-inspiring. But in the midst of all this activity, the thing that makes a guy like Johnny stand out is his attention to detail. Anyone can whip through a dozen unique hardware upgrades in record time, but not many can do it with the level of accuracy and care that Johnny displays.

I’m proud of all the technicians we have working in the data centers, but I thought to would be great to introduce a couple of our techs to everyone. Keep an eye out for them in a support ticket coming to an Orbit portal near you!

- Britt