Katie brought up some great points about an IT infrastructure provider checklist in her recent “World News from The Planet” video from ad:tech. Regardless of where you’re planning to host, you should always ask probing questions to determine just what, exactly, your provider brings to the table. Here are some points to consider:

Network

How does the provider’s network compare to the competition? Can it survive multiple bandwidth partner failures? Can it neutralize a multiple-Gbps DDOS attack?

Support

Is support staff available whenever I need it? Can I talk to a human immediately if I have an emergency? Does the provider employ certified staff that can help me with advanced issues?

Facilities

Can the provider host my IT infrastructure in multiple data centers and in more than one city? Does the company own its own facilities (or is it renting)? Is the data center entirely within the hosting provider’s control?

Power

Can the company survive a catastrophic power event such as being cut off from utility power for more than a week? Is the provider on a dedicated power grid within its facility or does it share a power infrastructure with other companies? Is the company’s power generation and distribution infrastructure regional (i.e., one unit per section of a data center) or is it integrated, providing true N+1 or better redundancy?

Vendors

Does the company use high-quality, name-brand vendors with equipment under warranty or does it offer generic, off-brand solutions? Do its vendors consider the company one of their top customers?

Product Portfolio

Does the provider offer a wide range of upgrades and add-ons or am I limited to its predefined packages? If the provider doesn’t have exactly what I need, can I special-order it?

Without definitive answers to questions like these, a price quote alone is pretty meaningless. After all, it’s the total value of the service — and not just the monthly fee — that is the true measure of any service offering.

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

Our CEO, Doug Erwin keynoted Day 2 at ISPCON! Are you surprised? His topic was Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT Infrastructure for the SMB, and he shared a The Planet’s perspective on the evolving IT marketplace, including several suggestions to effectively keep up with it.

I’ll dive deeper into what he shared at the conference in a future blog post, but I wanted to submit a quick update on the happenings from Day 2 at ISPCON.

In addition to Doug’s keynote, I joined three very interesting breakout sessions and continued my trek through the conference Exhibit Hall. The breakout sessions I graced with my presence? “30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed,” “Five Ways to Boost Profits without Increasing Costs: Customer Services” and “Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers.” Needless to say, I was like a kid in a candy store.

My Key Takeaways

From the “Website Wins” session: Several of the “wins” really jumped out at me as key features in efficient site design. With an increased emphasis on simplicity and clarity to the paradigm shift of “site construction” to “site gardening,” the site development process is clearly in a period of transition to best facilitate the customer experience, search engine friendliness and cross-browser compatibility.

From the “Customer Services” session: Customer service is at the heart of a host’s business. Web hosts should have a customer-centric mentality rather than a product-centric mentality to truly be successful in the industry. That underlying mentality will bleed into every aspect of your business, and will be conveyed both implicitly and explicitly through all of a company’s communication.

From the “Guerrilla Marketing” session: There are countless ways to differentiate and market your company outside of the traditional marketing techniques, and the question featured in the conclusion of the presentation embodied the guerrilla marketing mentality: “Is your message one in a million or is your marketing message just another one of the millions?” I enjoyed the session because it investigated many effective “outside the box” opportunities to generate interest and improve the customer’s buying experience (or at least the experience they have while they are receiving marketing information).

We’ve got one more day worth of sessions here in San Jose, so look for more stellar insight soon!

-Kevin

Surprise! I’ve got some data center pictures for you. I’m sure this post caught you completely off-guard, so I’ll give you a moment to let your heart rate settle. If you want to call all of your friends to let them know that another incredible picture post is now available, I will wait for that as well.

…

Everyone ready for me to proceed? All heart rates back in the normal 60-100 beats per minute range? I can’t promise that your heart won’t race again as you get a partially serious tour of one of our Houston Data Centers, but for right now, we are safe. A couple months ago, Brooke posted a note about our Virtual Data Center Tour, and in the comments, a “real life” data center tour was requested, so here we are. I’ll give you a more focused picture tour of the data center, and if THAT isn’t enough, I’ll dust off the transporter and start taking reservations.

This row is one of our “hot rows.” I could have taken a picture of the fronts of all of the servers with all of the pretty lights, but this side of the servers is what you really want to see from your data center. Every cable is individually marked and designated for a specific server on that rack.

See … I told you. Because the labeling and organization of each of the cords is harder to capture up-close with the larger boxes, this picture was taken behind one of our rack-mounted server racks. Don’t worry … I didn’t unplug boxes 2 and 3 on this rack to show more of the cords, but I can’t promise that I didn’t unplug ANYTHING …

This picture was taken immediately after I finished taking some crazy pills, and when I look at it, I can’t help but think of Mitch Hedberg’s “Bigfoot” observation:

I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry. And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run. He’s fuzzy. Get outta here.

In this case, it was the photographer’s fault.

It can be argued that this picture isn’t really showing a whole lot, but I find the detail to cleanliness and organization extremely impressive. I had to recruit Aaron to give me a run-down on what each of the wires carries, and here’s the run-down:

• Pink: Local Switch to Regional Switch
• Yellow: Regional Switch to Distribution Router
• Blue: Primary Network
• Brown: Isolated Network
• White: Remote Reboot Unit to Remote Reboot Controller
• Orange: Out-of-Band Network
• Black: Environmental Sensor
• Purple: Lunar Module Recharge Antiquantifier

I’ll let you guess which one of those I made up.

This cage houses our transport equipment. You thought I was joking about the transporter in the second paragraph? Pshaw… I don’t joke around with Star Trek references. If you look closely at the top left of the picture, you can see an orange plastic protective sleeve; that’s where the “interwebs” come from. More technically, that tube is the “pipe” or transit fiber that connects our data centers to the World Wide Web.

This picture features some of our edge routers (in blue) and core routers (in black, to the right of the edge routers).

When I walked into the data center, I felt like I was in a Sierra Mist commercial. If I had to guess the temperature outside in Houston, I would guess that it’s in the 120-130 degree vicinity (highly exaggerated), but as soon as you open the 3rd or 4th locked door to enter the data center, you get a wave of 68-70 degrees (not exaggerated).

This is the third phase of this data center’s space. When I came to Houston a few months ago, this phase was just getting raised floor installed, and I was surprised to see that the floor was “raised” about three feet from the ground. What goes under the floor in that three foot gap? Well, magic and rainbows, of course … along with power cables and the under-floor A/C vents.

This room has a caution sign on its door: “ACID.” As I was walking through the data center, snapping these pictures, one of my coworkers (who shall remain nameless), saw the sign and in a quizzical tone said, “A. C. I. D.? … I wonder what that stands for.”

While I was trying to come up with a smart-ass response to poke fun at that question, he (or she) sheepishly realized that “A. C. I. D.” might actually spell “acid.” The picture you see above is in the Uninterrupted Power Source room… which happens to be filled with batteries which happen to have battery acid which happens to lend itself to a warning sign. If the data center loses power for any reason, the batteries in this room immediately shoulder the energy load while the generators start-up.

This picture — and the next picture — were taken in the power transfer switch room. This area is the brain deciding where power is coming from (outside electricity, battery or generator) and where it is going (which phase of the data center).

These are the power transfer switches for each of the three phases of this data center. Needless to say, I didn’t touch anything in this room.

Generators. Four of them. Big ones. With such a large data center requiring so much power (and so much redundancy), our power backup couldn’t be a hamster in a wheel or a lawn mower engine. To get a perspective of how large each of these generators is, please see the picture below where I shamelessly cameo again.

Now, I’m anywhere between 6′3″ and 6′9″ depending on which convenience store I’m leaving (joke reference: Ron White), so these generators each have to be around 18 feet tall and 10 feet wide.

This picture features one of our data center NOCs (Network Operations Centers). These folks monitor the data center and are the “hands” that work with our server hardware.

As PBS would say, these tours were made possible by viewers like you. If you’ve got any more requests for pictures or brilliant insight from me, don’t be shy about sharing them.

- Kevin

The first time I saw the inside of a data center I had already worked in Web hosting sales for nearly two years. A member of our executive management team had decided that if we were going to sell dedicated servers we should probably have some concept of what they looked like.

I knew the building well; we’d once had a company-wide meeting in the lobby at 7:00 AM on a Saturday, so until our field trip I associated data centers with stale coffee and discontent over early weekend meetings. Although the data center and I had shared a less-than-stellar first encounter, when I finally stepped through the door that separated our then 14,000 or so servers from the rest of the world I never wanted to leave.

For those who have never had the pleasure or opportunity, visiting a large data center is something akin to a religious experience. Everything is so clean and sanitized. There are thousands of machines lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows and racks that tower above you, all connected by miles upon miles of a brilliant cable rainbow. The words you speak die in mid-air, absorbed by the sound of an electrified, whirring wonderland.

But in spite of the majesty of our data center’s sights and sounds, the part that struck me most was the smell. Imagine the new-plastic smell your CPU gives off when you plug a home computer for the first time, multiplied by many thousands, floating through perfectly filtered air. Within the first five minutes I wanted every customer to come and visit. They had to see and hear and, most importantly, smell what I was experiencing.

So when I read this article about the rising popularity of rub and sniff marketing my first thought was that we needed a way to recreate the smell of our data centers and include it in our print ads. We would be pioneers in olfactology for IT businesses!

Before this idea could come to fruition, it was pointed out to me that the smell of the data center really doesn’t do it for everyone. Although I cannot imagine why, some people even find it downright unpleasant, preferring smells like vanilla and sandalwood to plastic and electricity. One of our data center managers has even told me that while the CPUs and the electricity were contributing factors, most of what I smell is the fan belts on the air conditioning units, but that sounds much less romantic.

Still, the data center experience is more widely available to our customers than ever before. We now have a data center tour, starring actual Planet employees and filmed in our very own data centers. Click the button that says, “Take the Tour” on http://www.theplanet.com/ and enjoy our video, scent not included. For that part, you still need to make the trip to Texas and schedule a guided tour … break room coffee included.