The Planet Blog

We’ve been talking about terabytes (TB) a lot – specifically with regard to our newest special, offering 10 terabytes of bandwidth at no additional cost. In fact, today through Aug. 31, we’re offering a deluxe version of the promo: 10 TB of free bandwidth on top of our discounted server prices and FREE setup.

We talk about how great a deal the 10 TB bandwidth promotion is, but what does 10 terabytes of data look like, anyway? We all know it’s a lot… but I decided to figure out just how much it would be in terms of other measurements.

After a little Googling, I learned that 10 terabytes is equivalent to:

• 10,995,116,277,760 bytes
• 87,960,930,222,080 bits
• The data in 800,000 phone books
• 4 billion single-spaced, typewritten pages
• 16,000 audio CDs
• The memory capacity of eight human brains (we’re not saying whose)
• The entire Library of Congress

Those are interesting, but we wanted to come up with our own visual, so we enlisted our calculators: Picture a small craft bead (an 11 mm x 8 mm cylinder), and imagine that the bead represents one bit (1 b) of data. Eight beads would equal one byte (1 B); 8,192 beads would equal one kilobyte (1 KB); 8,388,608 beads would equal one megabyte (1 MB); etc.

To hold the equivalent of 10 terabytes worth of “bit beads,” you would need more than 1.75 billion 10-gallon tanks. If you piled the beads one foot deep, they would cover 84.7 square miles. If they were used to cover Houston’s 579.4 square miles, we’d have a bead carpet 1.75 inches deep within the city limits.

It’s incredible, right?

Let’s think of it in terms of servers: What is a real-world example of what you can do with 10 TB of bandwidth every month? I’m glad you asked.

You can make an MP3 of yourself singing to your dog and make the file available on your server. When it becomes the latest viral phenomenon, your 10 TB of bandwidth would cover about 3.5 million downloads. You’d be well on your way to your own reality show by the time you got your next month’s server bill … where your 10 TB promo server wasn’t charged a penny of bandwidth overages.

No matter how you measure it … 10 terabytes is a lot.

Help us think big: How would you visualize and explain 10 terabytes?

-John

We don’t often post promotions on our blog, but the deal we launched today is worthy of an exception: Until July 31, 2009, almost every new dedicated server ordered in one of our Houston or Dallas data centers will include ten terabytes of bandwidth at no additional cost.

Yes, you read that right … ten terabytes of bandwidth for no additional cost on The Planet’s network.

When you’re evaluating a new server or hosting provider, one of the most important deciding factors is bandwidth. From the hosting provider’s available bandwidth to your server’s uplink port speed — or the server’s bandwidth — to the volume of bandwidth allotted to that server for a given month, the general rule is that more is better … being able to accommodate more traffic at a given second or over a given month without worrying about the additional cost is peace of mind in the hosting world.

This limited-time bandwidth promotion tacks on the 10TB data transfer allotment to our current server special pricing, so you don’t have to weigh our current deals against this offer to decide which will work better for you. You get the best of both worlds.

There are some limitations, of course: This offer is for our standard dedicated servers, and certain models like Monster configurations and ready-to-go servers are excluded, but with the range of servers we offer, you’re still sure to find a model that meets your needs perfectly and takes advantage of this phenomenal deal.

Get all the details here: http://www.theplanet.com/10TB-Bandwidth or chat with one of our representatives, and they’ll get you set up. Remember, this offer ends on July 31 – so don’t miss out.

– John

To the tune of The Clash’s classic with the same name:

London calling via Internet routes
The Planet’s connected, and you shouldn’t have doubts
London calling to the hosting world
Come check out our servers, all you boys and girls
London calling, now come look at us
Our new data center is causing a fuss
London calling, and it ain’t just a fling
Our network’s a ring on the international scene

CHORUS
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A 10-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

London calling, but not on the phone
Don’t worry, brother, your site can have a new home
London calling and it speaks like Macbeth
A Queen’s English accent accompanies each breath
London calling – and I don’t wanna shout
But you started reading – and I saw you nodding out
London calling, and this ain’t no guise
So go get the attention of someone who buys (servers)

CHORUS (x2)
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A ten-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

Now get this
London calling, yes, you’ll be there, too
An’ you know what I said? Well, all of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
So after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
London calling

We think this is new you’ll like … you’ll like … you’ll like

Yes. The song is true. The Planet just announced a new data center in London. It features up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through our Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

We’ll be offering virtual racks in the space starting in April, and we’ve already begun preleasing servers there! This announcement is made possible by the colocation agreement we made with London-headquartered TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries.

Check out our London Data Center Expansion press release for more details!

-Kevin

P.S. I bet that tune will be stuck in your head for at least an hour.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed an interesting trend: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

While I never questioned these assertions, I can’t say that I really investigated to see if Moore’s Law actually held true in the world of storage, especially with regard to the two key storage characteristics: capacity and throughput. Sure, prices for the same technology get lower over time – we all know that – but that’s just because no one wants the old stuff, right? Does Moore’s observation about the doubling of transistor density actually relate to hard drive capacities? What about throughput rates?

Once I started looking into historical storage-related statistics, it became clear that Moore’s Law doesn’t completely explain the evolution of storage technology. The primary driver for hard drive capacity – the disk’s areal density – has been increasing at 60 percent per year (or around 1.6x every two years), so that key metric of storage appears to correlate with Moore’s transistor observation, but drive speeds and seek times have not improved in a similar exponential manner.

This dichotomy may seem a little strange, but I think capacity limitations have been a more significant problem for the industry as a whole than throughput rates, so drive manufacturers have thrown more of their R&D budgets into improving that key characteristic first. The proven, constant increase in storage capacity reflects a focus on meeting user demand for that storage capacity, and if the incremental value of an additional gigabyte of storage decreases, I think we’ll see a similar improvement in throughput rates as manufacturers turn their focus to that other key storage characteristic. Moore’s observation focused on manufacturing with the single goal of more transistors on an integrated circuit, so we can’t really say Moore’s Law “doesn’t apply” to storage since hard drive manufacturers have several key measurements to improve at a given time.

Thanks to the trend Gordon Moore recognized 48 years ago, we were recently able to drop the prices on several of our backup products. EVault Backup is now priced at $1 per GB, down from $2, and Network Backup product is now priced at 50 cents per GB, down from $1, and they are both free for 90 days. If you’re interested in learning more about our data protection and backup options, check out my “What is Data Protection?” blog or leave me your questions in the comments section here.

-Rob

The Planet is widely recognized as an industry leader in network performance, reliability and capacity, so for our loyal customers (and soon-to-be customers), we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our network great.

Terms like “Tier 1 bandwidth” and “fully redundant” are tossed around in networking circles, but to the uninformed, those terms may make about as much sense as “dual layer lunar module connections” and “space-time transfer warps.”

Have no fear, though. The video below should give you a good education on The Planet’s network, and you’ll avoid the typical Network Engineer initiation (which typically involves multiple pairs of socks and a gallon of peanut butter … I’ll spare you the details).

Stan Barber, our vice president of network operations, gave me a great network walkthrough, and because I think everyone could benefit from his tutorial, I did my best to transcribe the simplistic overview on video a la the UPS Whiteboard commercials.

Video Disclaimer: We are continuing to build our network, so the final schematic is forward-looking and will be fully realized shortly. The connections and their explanations have been simplified to best communicate a high-level understanding of the network … Oh, and I am not an actor nor a Network Engineer.

Right about now, you’re probably expecting me to say something like “The Planet: It’s the Network,” but I doubt Verizon would find that message very original.

We take a lot of pride in our hosting network, so if you have any questions, please let us know and we’ll be happy to answer them for you.

-Kevin

The YouTube link: The Planet Network

This is my first blog post, so I thought I’d share a funny story about my first few days at The Planet. Coming from a predominantly networking background in the Internet service provider (ISP) world, I was thrown for a loop the first time I looked at our server descriptions.

As I browsed through, I noticed the labels for “bandwidth” and “uplink port speed” as two separate items. As I said, coming from the ISP side of the technology industry we defined “bandwidth” in a completely different fashion than the hosting industry. To me, bandwidth has always been defined as how big the pipe is that will transmit or carry data. So when I saw the “Bandwidth” and “Uplink Port Speed” labels, it really threw me for a loop (nothing like a routing loop to really screw up your day – HA!).

In the ISP world and more to the actual definition, bandwidth has meant the width or depth of allocated bands of frequencies in a transmission channel. It’s the width of the spectrum a signal occupies. Think of it in terms of tubes or pipes – a two-inch pipe or tube has less width or depth to carry or transmit things than say an 18-inch pipe or tube. In this example, the two-inch pipe would be an ADSL line vs. a DS-3 line.

“Bandwidth” always seems to be confused with data rate or capacity – otherwise known as how much “stuff” can I send at a given speed (usually measured in a per second time unit). This would be closely related to what we label as “uplink port speed” and “bandwidth,” respectively and as we define it, more than the definition of “bandwidth” as I have technically defined it.

So that brings me to the next thing that may come across your mind – what do “bandwidth” and “uplink port speed” mean with The Planet and the hosting industry?

Let’s hit “bandwidth” first. Most, if not all, of our listings show them in some thousands of GB (GigaBytes). Our Conroe’s come with a default of 2500 GB of “bandwidth” per month. From our definition, that means you can transfer 2500 GigaBytes of data in one month – it’s an aggregate of both inbound and outbound data to and from the Conroe server. But still, what does that mean?

We’ll, let’s say that you had a database that was 2500GB in size (massive database!). If you started transferring it from this server to say another server, outside of The Planet, and you wanted to do it over 30 days (approximately, one month), then using a nice little conversion formula (2500GB/month * 1 month/30days * 1 day/24 hours * 1 hour/60 minutes * 1 minute/60 seconds * 8 bits/1 Byte) we see that the minimum “uplink port speed” should be a 7.72 Mbps connection – a slower than 10Mbps link connection, which was the old de-facto standard that we used to use for connecting PCs and servers to LANs. But this gives you an idea of how your decision in “uplink port speed” can be directly proportional to how quickly you need to do business.

Now we all know that we have a faster connection than 7.72Mbps, especially when the Conroe is defaulted with a 100Mbps “uplink port speed.” So what does this mean when we run the formula this way? Let’s say that we use all of the “pipe” allocated to the 100Mbps “uplink port speed” for the entire month (to remain consistent with the above example). Plugging our numbers into the formula, but in reverse (100Mb/second * 1 Byte/8 bits * 60 seconds/1 minute * 60 minutes/1 hour * 24 hours/1 day * 30 days/1 month) we see that we can transmit inbound and outbound about 32,400GB or 32.4TB per month of data! WAY beyond the specified 2500GB or 2.5TB per month that we default to the Conroe server.

They are related, but do not necessarily equal one another in relation to their monthly ability. What’s important to see is that you know what both are capable of. One tells you how fast you can transmit data given the bandwidth (this is the “uplink port speed”) while the other caps or limits the amount of data that can be transmitted in a given month to and from that server (“bandwidth”).

This month, The Planet has launched its Cogent “unmetered bandwidth” offering and this is where customers can quickly learn how valuable even 10Mbps of “unmetered bandwidth” can be! A 10Mbps, unmetered “uplink port speed” would yield 3,240GB or 3.24TB of “bandwidth” per month! A very nice savings at $200/month!

- Paul

I was recently reminded of an old friend from India who moved to California a year back or so for a new gig as the networking guy at a mid-sized company. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call him Raj (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent). As are most people starting a new job, he was eager to make a strong first impression by doing all the standard stuff really well, and he wanted to be responsive to any end-user request, especially anything coming from his new boss. On his first day, he was invited to a senior staff meeting and took detailed notes of all the stuff that was going on. Raj wanted to figure out how he could help — from a networking perspective. Now my friend is not like Apu from The Simpsons or anything, but English is his second language.

He heard exec after exec talk about how they didn’t have enough “bandwidth” to finish some project or another, and if they just had more “bandwidth” they’d be so far ahead of the game. Raj decided this was his opportunity to spring into action. He dutifully began analyzing RTG charts and even started installing network response testing agents. He definitely found some bottlenecks with some congested segments. Raj began building a plan to move from a number of shared segments to switched fabric to the edge for some of these apparent power users that needed more “bandwidth.”

He took the proposal to his boss, who reviewed it and complimented him on a thorough job and well articulated argument. Raj’s boss then proceeded to calmly and very politely explain to him what the execs meant when they referred to “bandwidth.” His boss was just happy that Raj didn’t have signing authority for that much gear. Needless to say, Raj now calls me a fair bit to make sure he’s got English vernacular down.

It just struck me as funny because the story came up as we were launching our unmetered bandwidth by Cogent. We were going through the same discussions to figure out how much capacity we needed relative to demand from our customers. There has also been conversations about which of our multiple data centers we’d provision to accommodate growth. English is my second language, and let’s just say I chose my words carefully after talking with Raj.

- Urvish