Your favorite Web Hosting Evangelist and I just returned from a week in San Francisco at the ad:tech 2008 trade show. We returned older, wiser, and I for one learned many truths:

1. The estimated time for set-up and take-down of one’s booth is always two hours longer than your worst-case scenario
2. Booth babes, whether “babey” or not, major traffic at one’s booth and guarantee drool from sales guys
3. It’s probably in my best interest not to go along with any of Hazard’s ideas … and then let him film it

In what could probably be considered a lapse of judgment (I blame the delirium that settled in on the second day of the show), I actually let Hazard convince me to anchor a mock “World News from The Planet” show from our booth. The idea sounded innocently fun at 9:30 in the morning, before I had my coffee.

I put on my best “serious journalist” face (required: squinty eyes and permanent look of concern) and attempted to imbue the most banal statement with great importance (a combo of long pauses and squinty eyes here do the trick).

Check it out for yourself below as I give an “insightful” report on what you should look for in a data center, with a special bonus interview with The Planet’s Jeff Reinis. Meanwhile, I’ll be huddled in my cube, cringing from embarrassment … while Kevin cackles with evil glee on the other side of the partition.

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

At The Planet, we’re excited about the holiday season. We’ve had a great year, so this is a perfect time to look back on 2007 and store away the memories much like one would store server backups in our data centers. How’s that that for a convenient segue into a discussion about The Planet’s backup solutions?

We currently offer NAS, DiskSync, Dedicated SAN and Dedicated Backup Server options, and as the resident backup and storage guru on the Product Management team, I love sharing backup knowledge with our customers. What question do I get most often? Easy: What is the difference between

What is the difference between NAS, DiskSync and the Dedicated Backup Server?

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is storage space allows you access over FTP. You write or provide the software to create and send backups to your NAS, and it functions as a reliable external disk to protect your data and store information separate from your server. Think of it as a target disc, albeit a pretty small one. You can buy NAS space from The Planet in increments ranging from 20GB to 200GB, and our typical NAS setup accommodates many users on each of our available NAS devices.

Our DiskSync product offers a much more complete SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure backup solution with the ability to schedule full backups and perform restores in our managed environment. Rather than having to create the backup software, our DiskSync solution enables you to quickly and easily monitor and track your data backups. On the infrastructure side, we host the large storage network and maintain the integrity of all DiskSync user data. The SAN structure is significantly larger than a NAS device and is much more scalable. It’s able to accommodate a considerably higher number of DiskSync users and any additional space you may want or need. DiskSync backups are available in 10GB increments with unlimited capacity.

With our new Dedicated Backup Server (DBS) solution, you become the admin for the entire system. You get a dedicated server with the R1Soft CDP Server software/license installed, and full root access. You have the ability to manage backups and delegate authority to users and sub-users, and you manage the OS, which allows for true customization for any of your more complex backup needs. We’ve found that many customers want this complete control and the peace of mind that each DBS is individually encrypted for data security since no other users access your DBS. Our most popular Dedicated Backup Servers come equipped with 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB of data, but we’re always open to a challenge if you need more.

While that’s a quick rundown of our three main backup solutions, it succinctly explains a few of the key differences I like to communicate when asked to run through the options. We feel this array of products can meet the needs of almost any user, so if you have additional questions about backup solution implementation or if you would just like a little more information, visit our Backup page or post a quick comment to let me know.

-Brett

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

I was reading Thanh Tran’s blog post the other night and I realized that I had the other side of that story to tell. I joined Everyone’s Internet in 2001, as the original RAQ 4i servers were just starting to be deployed and most data centers were demanding a huge setup fee to go along with a monthly service charge of $600 or more. At the time, our core business was providing dial-up internet access and this “new hosting thing” was an experiment that the owners had decided to try out.

Our support started out with a focus on control panel guidance (who here remembers the Cobalt web interface?) and reboots (offered within 24 hours, when our sysadmin, Patrick Smith, would drive from the call center to the collocation facility and process a batch of requests). At the time, my primary job responsibility was to visit customer Web sites and make sure they did not contain any adult content, which they often did when you got beyond the home page. How’s that for a job description?

Things went along at a moderate pace until two things changed at roughly the same time. First, Sun purchased Cobalt and stopped playing nice, forcing us to expand our offering to white box dedicated servers. Second, we launched our first $1 setup fee sale. I remember that I had just taken over the Web Sales team, which was then part of our dial-up sales department.

All of a sudden our little six-person team was buried in inquiries, new orders and demands for upgrades. Heady time, especially when you consider how the rest of the “tech bubble” was in the middle of a serious meltdown, and all the economy pundits could talk about was the downturn in business and a growing recession.

Now that I think about it, the ride that started that day has never really ended. 1Ghz servers became 2.0GHz+; white box systems turned into all-Dell data centers; unmanaged dedicated hosting gave way to Custom Self-Managed Servers or Private Racks; and now EV1 has joined with The Planet.

What strikes me most about that last milestone is how we all thought we would be dealing with an alien race, and instead we found we were working with the same people we had always been working with. Sometimes literally, and yes I’m talking about you, Keith.

So here we are, just over a year later, and the company known for having the best data centers has joined forces with the company known for having the best network. We also have several new members of the family on board, determined to make sure we become known for having the best support ever. I only hope the next six years are exciting as the last six were. Then again, with a company like this, how could they be anything else?

- Aaron

This is my first blog post, so I thought I’d share a funny story about my first few days at The Planet. Coming from a predominantly networking background in the Internet service provider (ISP) world, I was thrown for a loop the first time I looked at our server descriptions.

As I browsed through, I noticed the labels for “bandwidth” and “uplink port speed” as two separate items. As I said, coming from the ISP side of the technology industry we defined “bandwidth” in a completely different fashion than the hosting industry. To me, bandwidth has always been defined as how big the pipe is that will transmit or carry data. So when I saw the “Bandwidth” and “Uplink Port Speed” labels, it really threw me for a loop (nothing like a routing loop to really screw up your day – HA!).

In the ISP world and more to the actual definition, bandwidth has meant the width or depth of allocated bands of frequencies in a transmission channel. It’s the width of the spectrum a signal occupies. Think of it in terms of tubes or pipes – a two-inch pipe or tube has less width or depth to carry or transmit things than say an 18-inch pipe or tube. In this example, the two-inch pipe would be an ADSL line vs. a DS-3 line.

“Bandwidth” always seems to be confused with data rate or capacity – otherwise known as how much “stuff” can I send at a given speed (usually measured in a per second time unit). This would be closely related to what we label as “uplink port speed” and “bandwidth,” respectively and as we define it, more than the definition of “bandwidth” as I have technically defined it.

So that brings me to the next thing that may come across your mind – what do “bandwidth” and “uplink port speed” mean with The Planet and the hosting industry?

Let’s hit “bandwidth” first. Most, if not all, of our listings show them in some thousands of GB (GigaBytes). Our Conroe’s come with a default of 2500 GB of “bandwidth” per month. From our definition, that means you can transfer 2500 GigaBytes of data in one month – it’s an aggregate of both inbound and outbound data to and from the Conroe server. But still, what does that mean?

We’ll, let’s say that you had a database that was 2500GB in size (massive database!). If you started transferring it from this server to say another server, outside of The Planet, and you wanted to do it over 30 days (approximately, one month), then using a nice little conversion formula (2500GB/month * 1 month/30days * 1 day/24 hours * 1 hour/60 minutes * 1 minute/60 seconds * 8 bits/1 Byte) we see that the minimum “uplink port speed” should be a 7.72 Mbps connection – a slower than 10Mbps link connection, which was the old de-facto standard that we used to use for connecting PCs and servers to LANs. But this gives you an idea of how your decision in “uplink port speed” can be directly proportional to how quickly you need to do business.

Now we all know that we have a faster connection than 7.72Mbps, especially when the Conroe is defaulted with a 100Mbps “uplink port speed.” So what does this mean when we run the formula this way? Let’s say that we use all of the “pipe” allocated to the 100Mbps “uplink port speed” for the entire month (to remain consistent with the above example). Plugging our numbers into the formula, but in reverse (100Mb/second * 1 Byte/8 bits * 60 seconds/1 minute * 60 minutes/1 hour * 24 hours/1 day * 30 days/1 month) we see that we can transmit inbound and outbound about 32,400GB or 32.4TB per month of data! WAY beyond the specified 2500GB or 2.5TB per month that we default to the Conroe server.

They are related, but do not necessarily equal one another in relation to their monthly ability. What’s important to see is that you know what both are capable of. One tells you how fast you can transmit data given the bandwidth (this is the “uplink port speed”) while the other caps or limits the amount of data that can be transmitted in a given month to and from that server (“bandwidth”).

This month, The Planet has launched its Cogent “unmetered bandwidth” offering and this is where customers can quickly learn how valuable even 10Mbps of “unmetered bandwidth” can be! A 10Mbps, unmetered “uplink port speed” would yield 3,240GB or 3.24TB of “bandwidth” per month! A very nice savings at $200/month!

- Paul

I was recently reminded of an old friend from India who moved to California a year back or so for a new gig as the networking guy at a mid-sized company. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call him Raj (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent). As are most people starting a new job, he was eager to make a strong first impression by doing all the standard stuff really well, and he wanted to be responsive to any end-user request, especially anything coming from his new boss. On his first day, he was invited to a senior staff meeting and took detailed notes of all the stuff that was going on. Raj wanted to figure out how he could help — from a networking perspective. Now my friend is not like Apu from The Simpsons or anything, but English is his second language.

He heard exec after exec talk about how they didn’t have enough “bandwidth” to finish some project or another, and if they just had more “bandwidth” they’d be so far ahead of the game. Raj decided this was his opportunity to spring into action. He dutifully began analyzing RTG charts and even started installing network response testing agents. He definitely found some bottlenecks with some congested segments. Raj began building a plan to move from a number of shared segments to switched fabric to the edge for some of these apparent power users that needed more “bandwidth.”

He took the proposal to his boss, who reviewed it and complimented him on a thorough job and well articulated argument. Raj’s boss then proceeded to calmly and very politely explain to him what the execs meant when they referred to “bandwidth.” His boss was just happy that Raj didn’t have signing authority for that much gear. Needless to say, Raj now calls me a fair bit to make sure he’s got English vernacular down.

It just struck me as funny because the story came up as we were launching our unmetered bandwidth by Cogent. We were going through the same discussions to figure out how much capacity we needed relative to demand from our customers. There has also been conversations about which of our multiple data centers we’d provision to accommodate growth. English is my second language, and let’s just say I chose my words carefully after talking with Raj.

- Urvish