The Planet Blog

Do you have any plans for Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 11:00am?

Well … cancel them.

You’re invited to join us as we celebrate the opening of our new 106,000-square-foot colocation data center facility in Plano, Texas!

How often to do you get the chance to witness the ceremonial shearing of a beautiful ribbon by the blades of comically large scissors? Whatever your answer is to that question, I would suggest that’s not often enough, so you should take advantage of this opportunity.

The grand opening event for this data center — our eighth — will feature remarks from The Planet Chairman & CEO Douglas J. Erwin and Plano City Manager Thomas H. Muehlenbeck. A light lunch and refreshments will be served, and you, as our guests, will have the opportunity to tour the ultra-secure, “green” facility.

On the technical front, the new data center uses the latest modular cooling technology from Turbine Air Systems (TAS), with high-efficiency, water-cooled chillers that eliminate the possibility of an interior water leak. The facility meets SAS 70 Type II standards and is protected by biometric security access.

If you’re keeping track at home, the addition of this raised-floor real estate brings The Planet’s footprint up to 224,000 square feet … more than five acres of enterprise-class server space.

For more event information and to register to attend, visit http://www.theplanet.com/New-Data-Center-Grand-Opening/.

If you wait too long to register, your “light lunch” might end up being a package of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, so sign up today!

-Kevin

Today, we announced the availability of a new report from market research firm Stratecast which supplies conclusive evidence that The Planet’s enterprise-grade hosted IT infrastructure reduces operating costs for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) by 51 percent over a three-year period.

Naturally, this report is monumental for small business owners — especially in a period of economic uncertainty. Understanding that I couldn’t do the significance of the report justice, I decided to get a little help from the United States of America’s forefathers … A Hosting Declaration of Independence for the Small Business Owner:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for small business owners to establish presences online that will connect them with their customers and to assume among the powers of the hosting industry, the separate and equal station to which they are entitled as a competitive company in this day and age, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation from hosting their infrastructure in their closets.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all businesses are created equal, that they are endowed by their owners with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Cost Savings, Infrastructure Flexibility and the pursuit of Competitiveness. —

That to secure these rights, hosting companies are instituted among Men and Women, deriving their powers from the consent of their customers, — That whenever any Form of Hosting becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Small Business Owners to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Hosting Paradigm, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its business in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Budget and Peace of Mind.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that In-Home Hosting Models long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while their current environments are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the hosting to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of paying too much and worrying about downtime, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a Hosting infrastructure, and to provide a new Platform for their future security. —

Such has been the patient sufferance of many Small Business Owners; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Methods of Hosting their Servers. The history of the present Do It Yourself Hosting Model is a history of repeated delays, overpayments and outages, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Small Businesses.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:

SMBs can dramatically cut IT costs by more than 51% when comparing a DIY infrastructure with a hosted option.

A hosted infrastructure offers elements that characterize an enterprise-grade data center, one that meets best-practices criteria for data backup and storage, as well as provides a robust business continuity plan in case of disruption of service. These elements would need to be added to the costs for a DIY data center.

Hosted IT infrastructure places more control into the hands of the SMB. For many businesses, on-site proximity to IT infrastructure and in-house dedicated or contracted personnel provides a comforting sense of control. The truth is the physical location of IT infrastructure is immaterial to users, reputation and credibility are paramount to hosted IT Infrastructure providers, and application control remains in the hands of the business organization.

An IT infrastructure provider brings experienced and trained personnel responsible for choosing infrastructure equipment and suppliers on behalf of all of its subscribers.

Hosted IT infrastructure solutions reduce business risk for the SMB. The hosted provider’s business size, years in the hosted business, and diversity of subscribers that represent multiple vertical industries will, in many instances, exceed similar measurements of its individual subscribers. Also, subscribing to a hosting provider offloads SMB spend and attention to non-core but mission-critical functions.

In every stage of these Oppressions Small Business Owners have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A DIY solution, which is thus marked by every piece of evidence that may define a Poor Business Decision, is unfit to be the hosting infrastructure of a business.

We, therefore, the Representatives of The Planet, in The Planet Blog, Assembled, appealing to the Internet At Large for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good Customers of this Company, solemnly publish and declare, That the Small Business Owners are, and of Right ought to be Free to choose a hosted infrastructure, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to their Legacy DIY Solutions, and that all business connection between them and their server closets, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Customers, they have full Power to choose their Services, conclude Peace of Mind, contract Alliances with Hosting Partners, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Customers may of right do. —

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Service Level Agreements, we mutually pledge to give our businesses Enterprise Hosting Environments, to Save Money, and to enjoy the Freedom and Flexibility that hosting provides.

- Kevin Hazard (but mainly these guys)

To download the full Stratecast white paper (sans US History positioning) and to learn more about how hosting can save you money, visit http://www.theplanet.com/Hosting-Reduces-Costs/.

-Kevin

You’ve probably been on pins and needles since you read our last blog post … anxiously anticipating the inside information of how we built a better-than-ideal-efficiency data center.

If you’re familiar with data center design, you’ve probably heard the terms “cold aisle” and “hot aisle.” A cold aisle is an aisle between racks of servers that sends cool air up through the floor (in the case of raised flooring data centers) and into the fronts of the servers. The air cools the server components and is exhausted through the back of the server as warm air, creating a hot aisle behind the server. Data centers are typically set up with racks of servers arranged front-to-front and back-to-back so that for every 2 rows of servers, only one cold aisle is needed. (If you’d like to see this setup in action, check out our popular Data Centric post.)

D6 Phase 3 uses those principles in a different way: hot and cold air are completely isolated.

Let’s take a look at how the phase is built to see what that looks like and why it is much more efficient.

In a raised-floor data center, your air conditioner blows air down under the floor into an air-tight compartment, and you insert vented floor tiles in the areas you want to cool. The large black unit in the image below is one of this phase’s air conditioners.

The metal posts you see on the ground are the braces used to create the grids upon which flooring tiles are installed.

The photo below is the bottom of a flooring tile. You’ll notice that there are no screws or bolts on the tile … it is simply laid on top of a grid of braces to make an air-tight seal. Each of the tiles is partially made out of concrete and is relatively heavy, so when a tile is installed, it’s not going anywhere unless you really want it to.

Below, you can see what the flooring grid looks like without floor tiles installed.

As we continue building the flooring, the data center appears to be taking shape … pretty standard process up to this point. But now, take a look at the air conditioning units below. Notice anything strange (aside from the fact that the covers aren’t installed)?

The return air plenum extends all the way to the ceiling of the room … now we’re getting somewhere.

I only retained a few things from my elementary school physics lessons, but one of them was that warm air rises and cold air sinks. This natural phenomenon is used in data center cooling: the air conditioners send the cold air down under the floor to cool the servers, when the servers send out warm air, the warm air rises to the top of the room, and the air conditioners pull the warm air from the top of the room to process and send back down as cold air. As Jeff mentioned in his interview, the higher the air conditioner pulls the air from, the warmer that air will be, and you don’t want to cool already cold air, so you should try and pull the hottest air in the data center.

Phase 3 goes a step further: it creates an airtight space above the ceiling tiles where all the warm air is exhausted and pulled in by the air conditioners.

So once we’ve got the floor tiles and the ceiling tiles installed, our fresh data center phase (without any server racks) looks like this:

This begs a big question: if the cold air is being sent through the floor to the servers and the warm air is being pulled from the ceiling, how do the servers pull the cold air and push the warm air without the heat being disseminated into the other areas of the data center?

Enter our new custom-made rack-mount cabinets.

The cabinet above is pulled out in one of our other data centers to demonstrate the design of the Phase 3 cabinets. The servers will pull cold air from the floor in front of the server but instead of exhausting the warm air out into an open aisle, the warm air will rise through a vent sealed to the ceiling (the sides, front and back of the cabinet are closed when the covers are installed).

So a completely installed server row looks like this:

One noticeable difference between this data center and the other data centers we’ve shown you in Houston and Dallas are the servers themselves: all rack-mount, no towers.

The rack-mount servers allow for a better power density throughout the data center, so we’ve got to make sure we can provide the power to all of our new servers in the event of a utility power outage.

We’ve got N+1 power redundancy, so for every phase, we have a dedicated backup generator, and for every data center we’ve got an extra backup generator in case any of the other generators fail. New phase = new generator. It’s pretty interesting to see the generator without its skin, right?

Now that power is accounted for, we can install our PDUs for each aisle and prepare to get servers up and running in the new phase.

A little networking and wiring, and D6 Phase 3 is ready for business! In the first picture below, you can see the orange tubes which are primary network drops into the phase … and yes, even those are sealed in the ceiling.

Head over to our The Planet’s Flickr page for a few more pictures of the new data center phase.

-Kevin

I think I’ve officially become a geek. I just got a few of the pictures from the build-out of our newest data center phase, and I’m almost ashamed to admit how excited I was to write this post as an opportunity to showcase them.

The Planet has six data centers between Houston and Dallas, and some have been built out in “phases” or semi-independent sections. This phased construction process allows us to invest our time and money more efficiently because we can create space as we need it, rather than building out an entire data center shell and having to heat/cool/power the excess space that may not actually house servers for months. Following a very welcome ramp up in demand for our dedicated servers and managed hosting, we recognized an impending need for more data center space, so our facilities team fired up their engines and began planning Phase 3 of our D6 data center … and that’s when the fun started.

Jeff Lowenberg, our vice president of facilities, spoke with WHIRtv about the progress we’ve made in improving our data center efficiency over the past year, and the new data center phase is a testament to the work Jeff and his team have done in researching and designing new data center space. With a few of these innovative ideas, we worked directly with our vendors to create custom DC solutions, and the results are beyond ideal … literally: the new phase’s coefficient of efficiency (the total power necessary to operate a data center divided by the power necessary to operate the servers alone) will be approximately 1.5, which is below (better than) the “ideal” ranking of 1.6. With a lower coefficient of efficiency, a greater percentage of our power is running servers rather than heating/cooling/lighting the data center space while maintaining a perfect operating environment for the servers.

Tune in tomorrow for a tour of the new phase’s construction where we’ll “show and tell” HOW this is possible.

-Kevin

P.S. You may have seen that we announced a new data center earlier this week – D7 – to be built out in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas. We’re preleasing it and expect to have it ready in May, so you can expect to see a bit more info about that space on the blog as that facility takes shape.