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

At the beginning of the month, Rob Walters, The Planet’s general manager of storage and data protection, had a chance to sit down with Mitch Keeler of The Web Hosting Show to chat about the benefits of cloud storage and how The Planet differentiates itself in the midst of so many other cloud providers.

Given the fact that the cloud platform is still in its infancy, Rob and Mitch approach the topic from a very high level — starting with the definition of cloud storage in relation to Gartner’s definition of cloud computing, then diving deeper into the benefits of cloud storage specifically. Rob explains how our cloud storage platform was designed to create a holistic customer experience, leveraging our resources and some of the newest technologies to make adoption of the new platform as seamless as possible.

One of the most interesting parts of the interview is the discussion of the utility of Storage Delivery Networks: locating your data “in the cloud” in specific locations for disaster recovery or end-user speed concerns. Often, cloud providers serve “the cloud” as an ethereal, “out there somewhere” destination, which doesn’t help customers who are trying to design their own internal networks to put data where it needs to be.

If you’ve got a few minutes, head over to The Web Hosting Show to listen to Episode 188 … You can finally put a voice to the posts you’ve read from Rob in the past. And yes, that voice has a British accent.

-Kevin