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

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading a book called Pushing Ice (by Alistair Reynolds). It’s a hardcore sci-fi novel that follows a team of comet miners as they’re asked to push beyond their normal mission to explore strange happenings with one of the moons of Saturn, and how their work affects the galaxy. One of the more intriguing plotlines is how no matter what obstacles they face, the group is able to fall back on their motto - “We push ice, it’s what we do.”

As you may have seen, we’ve recently announced that we now have in excess of 100GB of transit Internet capacity. This is a staggering amount of bandwidth, and thinking back to just 4 or 5 years ago I never really envisioned that we would need that kind of capacity.

But these days I talk to vendors in terms of 10G ports (it was 1G ports as late as a year ago), and I’m now starting to look at the 100G standards that are being developed and trying to figure out when I’ll be able to evaluate and deploy them into our network.

Internet bandwidth growth has been on a nearly exponential growth curve for years, and as our connections get larger the threats we have to deal with get larger as well. We’ve seen DDOS attacks that exceed 10Gbps in the last few months, and other attacks that have been as large as 6-8Mpps. Attacks of this scale would have crippled backbone networks just a few years ago, but these days they simply raise eyebrows.

I’ve read many articles about the approaching Internet crunch - and how the Internet is just a few steps away from a massive implosion. These kind of articles seem to pop up every year or two - and every time I see them I chuckle. It reminds me of the doomsday predictions of Y2K - and what a non-event that was. The simple fact is that contrary to what some of these reports seem to indicate, there are a lot of smart people out there working on solving some of the problems before they manifest.

This is not to say that there aren’t issues out there. I recently wrote about ARIN’s declaration regarding IPv4 space exhaustion, and the need for providers to start looking at moving to IPv6. This issue poses some serious problems for all Internet users. Perhaps it’s my inherent trust in man’s ability to overcome any issues that he encounters through his ingenuity but I don’t see this as a doomsday scenario but rather as a great challenge that we can and will deal with and overcome.

This brings be back to my opening. As network engineers we’re constantly faced with daunting issues related to scale and traffic growth. The Internet routing table is now over 240,000 routes (it was less than 40,000 just 10 years ago) and the bigger that routing table gets, the more we have to squeeze out of our routers to accommodate the growth. No matter what dire predictions are made, or obstacles we encounter out there, we’ll just keep pushing packets, because that’s what we do.

Despite having traveled a fair bit and having been born in India, I’ve never been to China. I’ve always really wanted to go. Heck, my wife and I even considered getting married at the Forbidden Gardens here in Texas. As cool as that place is, I have to believe that the real deal is much more impressive.

While no one ever really needs one, it seems to me that the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing might just give me the perfect excuse to go. If going to Beijing by itself wouldn’t be cool enough, its even more interesting when you hear about the preparation the city is going through, whether that be far fetched attempts at weather modification to stamping out bad translations on street signs all the way to mass education on etiquette in preparation for a global flock of visitors.

As ridiculous as this might sound, the work of the Olympics organizing committee reminds me a lot about my work here at The Planet. In preparation for the Olympics, this group has analyzed and anticipated the needs of their visitors/customers, built out solutions to meet those needs and ultimately are in the process of building out a scalable infrastructure that can accommodate a glut of demand.

Now, you’ve heard Will and Jeff talk about meeting our customer needs through building scalable networks or having N+1 redundancy within our data centers. While I’m always interested in what those guys are up to, my job is really about identifying needs and helping build solutions, which may sound pretty unbelievable when I say that I work in Marketing. In any case, many of you may remember we did a customer satisfaction survey and followed up to get a better view of what products and services our customers. Remember the banners in the customer portal?

First of all, I want to thank the thousands of you that took time to respond. There were a lot of quick hits that we learned and responded to. For instance 49% of you said that you were concerned about bandwidth prices and overages and we launched a promotion on unmetered bandwidth, or that 70% of you rated increased storage capacity as Important or Very Important, which led us to release our Managed Dedicated SAN offering . We heard you loud and clear on a number of others products and services, but some of them will take a bit longer before we can rollout, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I wish we could get a little weather modification here before the summer heat really sets in.

- Urvish

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