The Planet Blog

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

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

The Planet hosts more than 25,000 customers worldwide. Right now, I am looking through an abridged customer list — with about 5,000 of the thirteen million-plus Web sites we host — and I am blown away by the diversity of our customer base, both geographically and functionally. We’ve got customers from Houston to Dubai selling web hosting, running video game leagues, offering online marketing solutions, hosting high-traffic forums, and building new social media platforms.

The basics of web hosting are simple: The Planet provides knowledgeable tech support, data centers, servers, power and bandwidth. Our customers have businesses, Web sites and ideas that require quality IT infrastructure — from colo to dedicated to partially managed to fully managed solutions (check out The Power to Choose for a look at that spectrum). The most surprising dynamic is how customers build from our services. It’s not uncommon to see two customers with identical hardware configurations running completely different businesses … One might be hosting a 5,000-attendee conference call while the other is consolidating information from social networks and personal e-mail accounts to deliver regular updates to 150,000 users.

If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend you read a few of our Planet Alpha customer success stories and Planet Northstar customer success stories or check out our video testimonials to get a sense of the broad spectrum of business we host every day.

Because this blog is a great avenue to share with you what is going on inside The Planet, it is also a perfect place to share what’s happening on The Planet’s servers on a day-to-day basis. Enter “The Planet Customer Spotlight” series. Every other week, we plan to feature a different customer who is using our service to change the face of the Internet. I’ve got the first few “Spotlights” planned, and I’m looking for nominations to continue the series indefinitely. If you’re interested in getting a little face time on The Planet blog (and some Page Rank link juice), drop a comment at the bottom of this post or shoot me a quick e-mail (khazard AT theplanet.com), and I’ll be in touch.

All Customer Spotlights will be approved by the featured customer prior to posting. We want to use this venue to share your message with the rest of The Planet’s community, so you can be as involved in the process of drafting as you’d like.

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