The Planet Blog

A few weeks ago, I received an interesting email. The sender claimed to be from CNN, and he wanted to chat about The Planet’s #showmemyserver experiment. Before I filtered the seemingly surreal opportunity into a folder typically reserved for emails that say, “Dear Sir, I will send you $1million dollars if you send me $25.93 for postage,” I did a little snooping around. To my very pleasant surprise, this John D. Sutter guy is not only a real person, he actually writes and produces for CNN!

We exchanged a few phone calls, and I learned that he spoke with Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge for a CNN Tech article about “The Cloud.” As they discussed the mechanics of the cloud in terms of data centers and servers, Rich pointed out the juxtaposition of this hyped demand of virtualized products with an old-school desire to have the data in a visible, tangible location. Enter The Planet’s #showmemyserver project.

John was very interested in our take on the social media experiment’s success, so it was great to share a little of what we heard from our customers … and we were even able put him in touch with Nate Tallman at HealthTeacher.com to give him a direct customer perspective. Thanks for your help, Nate!

Long story short: John posts A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’ to quite a bit of fanfare … which isn’t surprising, given its great introductory video:

From the heart of that article, he links to a “Behind the Scenes” blog about The world of ’server huggers’ and investigates his subconscious desire to find the “real” location of his digital data. As any customer who visits one of our data centers can attest, he’s not alone.

If you’re interested in “hugging” your server, stay tuned to The Planet Blog over the next few weeks, and keep your keyboard at the ready. We’ll offer another opportunity just in time for the holidays.

-Kevin

At the 2009 Cloud Computing Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., The Planet Director of Product Management Rob Walters was one of five experts invited to participate in a panel discussion about enterprise-level cloud computing – whether it’s a far-off dream or a present-day reality. Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan covered everything from whether the term “cloud” was too broad to be useful to whether private clouds and public clouds can coexist.

I caught up with Rob in the expo hall to have him weigh in on each of the questions for our loyal blog readers (you!):

I love the analogy he uses to explain why “the cloud” is such a difficult concept to explain. It seems to be a paradigm shift unlike any we’ve seen in recent memory, so the transition from hype and confusion to understanding and adoption should prove to be an interesting adventure over the next few years.

One of the most interesting questions asked of the panel was whether or not we’d be talking about cloud computing in 10 years. The unanimous answer: No. Why? The resounding sentiment is that shift toward “the cloud” will be so pervasive that a given platform’s “cloudiness” will be implied. This opinion is shared by a group of experts at a “cloud computing conference,” so there may be a little bias here … What do you think? Will the cloud take over and become the de facto standard or will demand for traditional IT remain in the midst of the cloud’s surge?

-Kevin

Have you heard of “The Cloud”? It’s the end-all hosting solution that balances your checkbook, gives massages and keeps all the items in your kitchen cabinets alphabetized and sorted by size and category.

The term “cloud” has been around the block once or twice on the Internet – one of its first technological uses was a description of the Internet as a whole. Comparisons to “webs” or “series of tubes” have received a bit more fanfare, but the root of the metaphors is consistent: We need to be able to explain and visualize what this “Internet” thing is beyond bits and bytes and ones and zeroes.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: The Internet is everywhere and the Internet is nowhere.

The fact that we can’t point to anything tangible to define the Internet forces us to conceptualize an image that helps us understand how this paradox is possible. A lot of information is sitting around on servers somewhere out there, and when we connect to it, we have access to it all. Cloud, web, dump truck, tubes … It doesn’t matter what we call it because we’re not defining the mechanics, we’re defining the concepts.

A Cloud by Any Other Name

These days, the term “cloud” has made a resurgence in a different context: Because we’re more intimately familiar with the Internet these days, we’ve come to understand it in terms of servers and connections, but technology has forced us to break free from that interpretation as well … Instead of content being hosted on a single server somewhere, it’s theoretically floating around independent of all hardware. It’s like a grid of servers acting as one … or a cluster of servers … or cloud of servers on the Intercloud (I’m going to trademark that).

Breaking free from hardware limitations is huge. Cloud computing and cloud storage theoretically offer the ability to wave goodbye to those artificial processor and hard drive constraints and move toward a new, never-failing, infinitely scalable platform that cleans your room and pays your taxes. Wait. What?

-Kevin

It’s been a whirlwind of a month already. We released several new server promotions, launched Alpha Professional “managed dedicated” services for private and virtual racks, had company-wide kickoff meetings in Houston and Dallas, and to top it all off, we pushed out a brand new Web site.

Just writing down the rundown of the first 23 days at The Planet this year makes me yearn for a George Costanza-inspirednap-friendly desk. A few weeks ago, I could have caught some shut-eye in my “seasonal office,” but now that my area is unwrapped, I’ll just power through this blog post … full pot of coffee in tow.

Avid blog readers will have already seen and loved Steve’s post about the new Web site, so I’m going to ride his coattails and focus on the message we built our site around: “The Power to Choose.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll try to boil it down to a few: The Planet offers an unrivaled hosting product and service continuum. If you are in the market for any flavor of hosting, you can find it at The Planet. In that service spectrum, you see our primary lines of business: colocation, dedicated servers, managed services (monitoring, security, backup, migration) and fully managed hosting. With that foundation, we are able to incorporate new products and services like our Content Delivery Network and Storage Cloud offerings.

Now for a fun little interactive game: Click on the above image to get to our Hosting Solutions page where you can go through our “Which hosting solution is right for you?” wizard … Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back …

See. I told you I’d still be here. If you’re in the market for a specific kind of hosting, the wizard probably told you exactly what you already knew … unless you just clicked through it with a few “what if” answers to see what our super-secret, proprietary and complex artificial intelligence would suggest for you. Maybe that was just me.

The power to choose is central to our hosting message, so if you can think of anything we should add or change to include in that message, let us know!

-Kevin

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about our continuum of products and services, head to our Hosting Services page to get a detailed comparison of our colocation, dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers and managed hosting offerings.