The Planet Blog

If you weren’t able to attend the cPanel Conference 2009 last week in Houston, you missed out on a great show. With all the networking events, educational sessions and vendor booths to visit, it was pretty tough to keep up as a participant, so the cPanel team deserves a high-five or two —physical or virtual — for having everything so well prepared.

As you may have heard, I led a session about “Disruptive Technologies: The Road from Disruptive to Sustaining.” Instead of copying the bullet points from my presentation into this blog post, we recorded the whole session on a Flip MinoHD. If you’ve got a little time and you’re interested to hear my take on the effects of the Cloud and Virtualization on hosting, go grab a bag of popcorn, turn up your computer speakers, sit back and enjoy:

I opened the floor for Q&A in the session and for additional follow-up after the session after we ran out of time, so I want to do the same for you: When you watch the video, if you’ve got any questions, please post them in a comment below and I’ll be happy to respond.

-Todd

As an avid reader of The Planet Blog, you’ve probably noticed some consistency in the 164 articles published here since Doug’s inaugural “Welcome to The Planet’s blog… I think?” post on May 14, 2007. We focus on our company culture, support, data centers and network to help you step through the looking glass and get an inside perspective on our business. With a continuous stream of changes and improvements, it’s tough to feature even a fraction of the work our team is doing to improve our service, so we keep an eye out for opportunities to “show” what we’ve “told” you about in the past. This is one of those opportunities.

On September 2, 2008, we announced the results of our lights-out energy efficiency initiative. A few days ago, I was sorting through a batch of data center pictures, and I came across a few great examples of what this news looks like in practice:

This is Phase Two of our H1 data center. With all the posts you see from H2 and D6, you might be curious about what our other data centers look like, so hopefully the picture above doesn’t surprise you. We have extremely high standards for our data centers, and you should expect the same enterprise-level quality across the board.

If you took a guided tour through H1, you’d see it all lit up as it is above. If you walked in during a normal DC shift, you’d probably find it a little different:

When the data center is unoccupied, the lights are switched off to save energy. How much energy? Well, across the board, we estimate the program saves more than 1.4 million kilowatt hours in a given year – or about $140,000 in power bills. It’s no small change.

As you’ve seen in our other posts about data center innovation and operational efficiency, we take a common-sense approach to energy conservation. It’s incredible to see the significant impact such simple changes can make.

It’s also pretty cool to see servers glowing in the dark:

-Kevin

A few weeks ago, we ran a one-hour contest for avid blog readers and @ThePlanet Twitter followers who wanted a picture of one of their actual servers in our data centers, and the results were phenomenal. We had more than 50 people contribute on the blog and on their own Twitter streams, and about 35 thrill-seeking adventure junkies completed all three tasks required to qualify for their picture.

The DC operations crews in Houston and Dallas were great sports about adding this photography project to their normal responsibilities, and we had the pictures out to customers within 48 hours of the contest’s conclusion. Here are a few of the snapshots we took during the contest:

As I warned, some of the pictures didn’t come out as professional photography masterpieces, but that just adds to their authenticity. We couldn’t be happier with the community’s participation, and we’ve heard the repeated requests to rerun the contest. We’ll be offering another opportunity in the near future for customers who missed out on this one. We’ll be tweaking it a little to allow more people to get up close and personal with their servers … even if they live half a world away and happen to be sleeping during the Texas workday.

Thanks to everyone who joined us in the inaugural #showmemyserver experiment! If you have any suggestions on other ways we can give you insight into our business, leave a comment below … We’re all ears.

-Kevin

P.S. If you have some time to kill, visit the #showmemyserver blog and click through to visit some of our customers’ sites in the comments section. The “My Web site is ______, and I’m powered by The Planet” list is a great snapshot of the diversity of our customer base and what they do with their dedicated servers.

A few weeks ago, Russ Capper, one of the co-hosts of The BusinessMakers Radio Show, interviewed The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin for Episode 197 and for a Web Xtra. Since then, we’ve had several business-focused listeners contact us to ask for a broader explanation of what IT hosting means for them, so we put together a few vignettes covering the basics of hosting.

In Episode 203 on Saturday, The BusinessMakers ran the first of six installments in the series, recorded by our very own Web Hosting Evangelist Kevin Hazard. The topic: What business owners should consider when evaluating IT hosting for their business.

The show airs on Houston’s KPRC-AM 950 every Saturday at 8:00am, and Momentum Broadcasting just announced plans for syndication nationwide! Russ does a great job, so if you haven’t listened in, he conducts some terrific interviews with business thought leaders.

-Yvonne

P.S. Kevin says he is available to sign autographs now that he’s as big as Steve Jobs, Fred Smith and Steve Forbes.

Hosting companies often operate their data centers with The Wizard of Oz’s “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” mentality, so you never know what the data center operations look like on a day-to-day basis. You might say I’m one of The Planet’s “behind the curtain” employees … not only do I work in one of The Planet’s data centers, I’m also the overnight supervisor. While some of these activities may seem a bit mundane, each is designed to provide our customers with the very best operational environment. The processes and procedures documented here are performed by all shifts in all of our data centers.

Shift Change

Our overnight shift begins daily at 7:00 PM (CDT), with a hand-off of issues from the previous shift which may need special attention. These hand-offs are typically “work already in progress” issues like operating system reloads and a system upgrades.

Once this “shift change” is complete, and the new shift’s operations staff is in place, each member of the team has specific tasks to perform. These tasks include the assessment of scheduled maintenance during the shift, a review of pending customer orders and server upgrades, and response to reboot requests that were submitted during the shift change.

Following these initial checks, we move into normal operational status for a majority of the night. During this period, we monitor and respond to high priority issues (usually in the form of tickets) and undertake any scheduled maintenance work. In addition to this technical work, a staff member will also perform a perimeter patrol every four hours.

Perimeter Patrols

While the name doesn’t sound like much, the perimeter patrol is an integral part of our data center operations designed so our staff can constantly monitor and control the data center’s status and its operational readiness. Each patrol takes around an hour to perform and is a top-to-bottom inspection of our facility and server environment. To better understand the significance of the patrol, take a look at some of the system and facility checks.

- Temperature and Humidity Readings for all Environmental Units

Each phase of our data centers have as many as 18 heating, ventilation and cooling units. These units are operationally independent from the others and use a dual-compressor technology to provide heating, air conditioning, and humidity environmental control. Our data centers are kept at or below 76 degrees Fahrenheit, and if temperatures exceed that threshold on any one unit, redundant units are brought online and a facilities engineer is immediately contacted regardless of the time of day.

- Commercial UPS System Status Displays

Our data center is fully protected by redundant, commercial-grade uninterruptible power systems. In the unlikely event of an interruption to electricity supplied to our facility, these UPS systems provide stop-gap power and automatically signal our generators to start. Within seconds, our generators are running and providing power. In my data center, we’ve got 10 display panels to check for operational readiness on each patrol.

- Generator System Panels and Status Displays

There are two levels of generator monitoring in our data center. The first is a remote set of annunciation panels installed in our monitoring center. These displays provide an instant status of our power generating system. The second and more comprehensive set of screens we check are in our power generation and transfer control room. On those displays, we check important generator operational parameters such as engine coolant temperature, fuel level, and battery voltage. An interesting fact about our generators: the engines are temperature controlled, even when they are not running. If you ever win Jeopardy with that information, I’ll expect a cut of your prize.

- Electrical Power Transfer Switch Status Displays

Each one of our power transfer switches has a detailed display that shows us the status of the power entering our facility, whether backup power is online and available, and other, more detailed parameters. Here, we also check the total amperage in use by the facility for any abnormal variances.

- Life Safety System Status, Piping Pressures, and Fire Suppression Tank Levels

Our data center uses combined methods of fire suppression technology, so we regularly verify their operational status by reading air and water pressures, inspecting the piping for integrity and checking the master status panel in our monitoring center. Our fire suppression system is constantly monitored by our data center staff and an outside monitoring company. In the event of an alarm, emergency units are automatically dispatched to our facility.

- Exterior Doors and Intrusion Detection System Panels

All entry points are physically verified as being closed and locked on a regular basis. We have an intrusion alarm panel in our monitoring center which shows the status of our entire facility which is constantly monitored by data center staff.

- Closed Circuit Video Monitoring System

We employ a comprehensive video monitoring system in our data center with remotely controlled cameras mounted at strategic points both inside and outside of the data center.

- Outdoor Generator Enclosures and Engine Components

On each patrol, we actually open the generator compartments and peer inside at the massive engines which supply our data center with power during utility power outages to check the area around the generator for leaks, debris, and manually verify fuel level indicators. To get a sense of the size of the generator, check out Kevin’s “Data Centric” post.

- Outdoor Air Conditioning Condensers

For each of our heating, ventilation, and cooling systems inside the data center, there is a corresponding condenser outside the facility. We walk by each condenser and make sure the fans are running at optimal performance.

I’d love to sit and chat a little longer, but I’ve got some work to do. Assuming that this post is helpful and informative, I’ll start thinking of a few of the other tasks in the data centers that you might enjoy learning about.

-Eric
H2 Data Center Operations Supervisor (overnights)

In WHIRtv’s fourth installment of The Planet’s feature coverage, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR spoke with The Planet’s Vice President of Facilities Jeff Lowenberg about the company’s data centers, power efficiency and cooling techniques.

Jeff explains the significance of the “coefficient of efficiency” rating in a data center. You’ll hear first hand how the work we’ve completed over the past six months has decreased the proportion of power going to cool the data center’s IT load relative to the power used to run the IT load.

Watch the video below to learn more about the ways we are reducing our energy consumption and improving the way our data centers operate … you’ll also get some great footage from inside our H2 data center.

Over the course of the last several months, we’ve been working with Weaver & Tidwell, L.L.P., a highly-regarded certified public accounting firm out of Fort Worth, to complete an exhaustive Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS 70) Type II audit. Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the widely recognized auditing standard certifies that The Planet has been through a rigorous evaluation of its internal processes and controls through an independent third-party auditor.

Voluntarily undergoing an exhaustive audit by a third-party that takes months to complete.

A SAS 70 Type II audit is certainly a big-time undertaking. Some even think starting the process of a future review is worthy of a dedicated blog post … we just got it done.

In the process of the audit, we checked and evaluated the controls and processes for our network, customer provisioning systems, physical and environmental security, problem management and resolution through our customer portal, human resources department organization and administration, data center operations, and most importantly, our data centers themselves.

Daniel Golding, vice president and research director for Tier1 Research explains the significance of SAS 70 compliance in the context of the hosting industry:

Hosting providers that want to offer meaningful IT services to larger enterprises see SAS 70 as the means of both meeting Sarbanes-Oxley auditing requirements, while reassuring IT decision makers that their processes, facilities and staff are capable of providing true enterprise-grade services.

The Sarbanes-Oxley legislation consists of standards required of every public company and important to any company considering/anticipating an IPO. In searching for additional reference information on the significance of SAS 70 to SOX compliance, I came across a great resource: www.sas70.com. The site has a dedicated Sarbanes-Oxley page, where the significance of a Type 2 audit masterfully described:

Section 404 [of Sarbanes-Oxley] draws attention to the significant processes that feed and comprise the financial reporting process for an organization. In order for management to make its annual assessment on the effectiveness of its internal control, management is required to document and evaluate all controls that are deemed significant to the financial reporting processes. If the organization uses a service provider to process transactions, host data, or other signficant services, management may need to evaluate the design and test the operating effectiveness of the service organization’s controls.


Management will either need to conduct an evaluation of the service organization’s controls, or management may obtain a Type II SAS 70 service auditor’s report from the service organization, if a service auditor has been engaged, to gain an understanding of the service organization’s controls. The relevant audit guidance for SAS 70 already requires that a service auditor’s report contain information on the five components of internal control as it relates to the service organization.

The difference between a Type I audit and Type II audit is pretty significant: Both say “we have well-designed processes, controls and goals,” but the Type II audit must show that the controls and processes have been practiced and they were successful in achieving the initial goals. The proof is in the pudding.

What Does It Mean?

It’s clear that the successful completion of the SAS 70 Type II review is important to all of our customers. It reinforces our commitment to providing the best hosting experience in the industry. Our processes, practices, procedures and controls have been tested and have been proven successful in helping us achieve our operational goals.

-Kevin