The Planet Blog

As an avid reader of The Planet Blog, you’ve probably noticed some consistency in the 164 articles published here since Doug’s inaugural “Welcome to The Planet’s blog… I think?” post on May 14, 2007. We focus on our company culture, support, data centers and network to help you step through the looking glass and get an inside perspective on our business. With a continuous stream of changes and improvements, it’s tough to feature even a fraction of the work our team is doing to improve our service, so we keep an eye out for opportunities to “show” what we’ve “told” you about in the past. This is one of those opportunities.

On September 2, 2008, we announced the results of our lights-out energy efficiency initiative. A few days ago, I was sorting through a batch of data center pictures, and I came across a few great examples of what this news looks like in practice:

This is Phase Two of our H1 data center. With all the posts you see from H2 and D6, you might be curious about what our other data centers look like, so hopefully the picture above doesn’t surprise you. We have extremely high standards for our data centers, and you should expect the same enterprise-level quality across the board.

If you took a guided tour through H1, you’d see it all lit up as it is above. If you walked in during a normal DC shift, you’d probably find it a little different:

When the data center is unoccupied, the lights are switched off to save energy. How much energy? Well, across the board, we estimate the program saves more than 1.4 million kilowatt hours in a given year – or about $140,000 in power bills. It’s no small change.

As you’ve seen in our other posts about data center innovation and operational efficiency, we take a common-sense approach to energy conservation. It’s incredible to see the significant impact such simple changes can make.

It’s also pretty cool to see servers glowing in the dark:

-Kevin

Do you want to meet your server?

Here’s your chance.

If you complete ALL THREE tasks included below within one hour (by 3:30 p.m. CDT today), we will head out to one of our DCs with a camera to give your server a well-deserved close-up. While getting a picture is not the same as meeting your server face-to-faceplate, it’ll at least tide you over until you can make it to Houston or Dallas for an “in real life” data center tour.

Your Mission (you should choose to accept it):

1. Post a Tweet saying “I’m Powered by @ThePlanet. #showmemyserver”
2. Post a comment on this blog that includes “My website is _________, and I’m Powered by The Planet.”
3. Send an email to twitter @ theplanet.com with the name you want included in the picture (or we’ll default to your Twitter name), your The Planet account number* and the IP address** of the server you want pictured.

*This is to help verify your account.
**This information will not be shared or included in the picture. It is simply being used to target your server.

Because this is our inaugural #ShowMeMyServer event, we’re limiting each qualifier to a single server – in case we get slammed with a request from each of our 25,000+ customers in the next hour. If you have a private rack, we can make an exception and snap a couple pictures of the servers on your rack if you’d prefer.

Once we close the window for submissions, we’ll start the photography process. The turnaround will depend on the volume of requests, but we’re aiming to get pictures back to you (replying to the e-mail you sent twitter@theplanet) by Thursday afternoon at the latest. While we employ a lot of talented folks, the people taking your picture might not be professional photographers, but we’ll get the best picture we can … and if a reshoot is necessary, just let us know.

Are you ready?

Go!

-Kevin

EDIT: Comments are Closed as of 3:31pm CDT. Scroll through the comments section and check out some of the awesome sites our customers host with us!

Apparently, a few folks here at The Planet have a knack for photography. On Monday, we asked everyone to send in their favorite photos from our dragon boat race last weekend. We assumed a few people would pass along a few snapshots from the event and we could quickly and easily organize the pictures on one blog page …

However, the floodgates opened and immediately, we were up to our ears in JPEGs — over 300 of them. The “problem” we ran into was that all of the pictures were phenomenal. We wanted to include them all, but entering 300 lines of HTML didn’t seem like much fun — especially when the lines of code look like this:

<a href=”Dragon Boat Large Picture URL”><img class=”centered” src=”Dragon Boat Small Picture URL” alt=”Picture Title”/></a>

With the help of a useful Wordpress plugin, we linked the blog to a newly created Flickr account, and we’ve been playing with the newfound functionality ever since. You’ll notice the new photostream widget in our sidebar, and you can click on any of our photos to see other pictures from our Flickr pool in a gallery layout or in a slideshow.

If you’re a Flickr user, come join our group and contribute your favorite pictures: www.flickr.com/groups/theplanet! I’m still getting pictures from last weekend and sifting through them, so keep an eye on our photostream for updates: The Planet’s Flickr

Check out the Dragon Boat Race photo set:

According to Time Magazine’s blog, yesterday was the 40th birthday of the beloved Cubicle. We’ve all had them at one time or another. Some good and some … well … I’d rather work in a hole.

At The Planet, we have an open-concept work environment filled with fabulous “newbicles”—cubicles that are neither drab, dreary or soul-sucking. We have shelves, fun white boards and a really large workspace to spread out on.

I wasn’t sure I was going to be thrilled with the arrangement when I first heard about it, but I’ve grown to love it. They are big enough that we aren’t squished on top of each other and the white noise that’s piped in really helps give you privacy. I like being close to my team, too. I just have to roll around on my chair to talk to them!

So, in celebration of the birth of these little gems, I thought we’d pay homage to our friend the cubicle—picture style.

Some prefer a really business- like atmosphere. *cough* …Accounting… *cough*

Some like to show off achievements. (Hi Phil!)

Others prefer to decorate with some panache… (Guess whose sits there? w00t!)

Some need a sufficient place to primp or get food out of their teeth.

Most love to display their collectibles (better known as toys).

Note: We obscured some super-secret plans on the white board.

Beware of this dude. He’ll pelt you with that giant koosh ball or nerf gun when you least expect it.

Never fear. Scully and Mulder are here to protect us from the abnormal… well, extra abnormal.

Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler…

Happy Birthday, cubicle! Don’t worry, 40 is the new 30. You still look fabulous.

-Ali

As promised, I’ve got a few pictures for you contrasting our upgraded workplace with our old offices. Doug explained why we made the transition to a new, consolidated office, so you can consider this post a continuation on how we’ve changed our work environment to advance The Planet’s pursuit of providing the best customer experience in the industry.

Jimi Hendrix once said in an interview, “In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.” I could creatively weave in a “the world/ The Planet” pun, but I’ll spare you the cheesinesses and simply show you some of the ways the move has upgraded our work environment, enabling us to provide better service.

The Call Center

If you’re speaking with Billing, Technical Support, or Abuse, you are probably talking to someone in this room. In the new call center, the screens in the front of the room show statistics like real-time ticket counts and statuses, call lengths and hold times, live chat requests, and quality assurance statistics like support ratings, escalations, and new policies.

The Network Operations Center

If you have a chance to swing through Houston to visit us, the new Network Operations Center will probably catch your eye. You’ll see the NOC staff hard at work under a blue glow with its new nine-workstation, stadium-seating configuration (above right). It faces nine monitors with switchable sources that track various statistics and status reports over time. As you can see in the old NOC (above left), everyone worked along a single aisle in the middle of the room, so the monitors on the back wall were behind half of the staff . With the new configuration, everyone can keep an eye on the monitors and respond to notifications accordingly.

In the near future, I’ll sit down with The Planet’s new VP of Network Operations Stan Barber to explain the NOC’s role in The Planet’s day-to-day service (like monitoring and filtering DoS and DDoS attacks, tracking and notifying customers about the network status, and addressing network-affecting issues).

The Cubes

The picture shows the sales area to show the general contrast between the old (above left) and new (above right) work spaces. Lower partition walls, higher ceilings and quad-cubes make collaborating a lot easier, and it’s much more conducive to me throwing a Nerf ball at Kevin Landreth.

Did I forget anything? … Oh yeah:

The People

Smiling faces. It looks like I don’t have to report any unhappy employees to Doug.

Because a few of you have asked for more on the other areas in which we are investing, I will have a new post for you soon about The Planet’s most recent data center and network improvements and retrofits; the company-sponsored education and certification programs in Technical Support and the Network Operations Center; and our investments in new server hardware.

-Kevin