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

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many could I get for a video?

In a recent walkthrough of D6 Phase 3, I toted along a video camera to give you a first-hand look at what the data center looks like in motion. Not surprisingly, it looks exactly like it does in the pictures … only this glimpse relies much more heavily on my ability to multitask: holding a camera while guiding the tour.

If you haven’t been back to the D6 Phase 3 picture tour, head over there and check out the comment section where we answered a few key questions and explained a little more about the DC design.

One of the points I neglected to mention in the previous post is the positioning of the CRAC units in Phase 3. In other data center designs, CRAC units are positioned along opposing walls, pushing air toward the middle of the room. That positioning effectively cools the room, but our tests have shown that it can be done more efficiently by installing the CRAC units on one wall and in the middle of the DC, with the air flow going the same direction from both units … so the CRAC units are never fighting against each other.

As a bit of a bonus, the video also features a little bit of information about our power rooms and our UPS systems.

If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Which do you prefer: video tours or photo tours? What else do you want to see?

-Kevin

It’s been a whirlwind of a month already. We released several new server promotions, launched Alpha Professional “managed dedicated” services for private and virtual racks, had company-wide kickoff meetings in Houston and Dallas, and to top it all off, we pushed out a brand new Web site.

Just writing down the rundown of the first 23 days at The Planet this year makes me yearn for a George Costanza-inspirednap-friendly desk. A few weeks ago, I could have caught some shut-eye in my “seasonal office,” but now that my area is unwrapped, I’ll just power through this blog post … full pot of coffee in tow.

Avid blog readers will have already seen and loved Steve’s post about the new Web site, so I’m going to ride his coattails and focus on the message we built our site around: “The Power to Choose.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll try to boil it down to a few: The Planet offers an unrivaled hosting product and service continuum. If you are in the market for any flavor of hosting, you can find it at The Planet. In that service spectrum, you see our primary lines of business: colocation, dedicated servers, managed services (monitoring, security, backup, migration) and fully managed hosting. With that foundation, we are able to incorporate new products and services like our Content Delivery Network and Storage Cloud offerings.

Now for a fun little interactive game: Click on the above image to get to our Hosting Solutions page where you can go through our “Which hosting solution is right for you?” wizard … Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back …

See. I told you I’d still be here. If you’re in the market for a specific kind of hosting, the wizard probably told you exactly what you already knew … unless you just clicked through it with a few “what if” answers to see what our super-secret, proprietary and complex artificial intelligence would suggest for you. Maybe that was just me.

The power to choose is central to our hosting message, so if you can think of anything we should add or change to include in that message, let us know!

-Kevin

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about our continuum of products and services, head to our Hosting Services page to get a detailed comparison of our colocation, dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers and managed hosting offerings.

In WHIRtv’s fourth installment of The Planet’s feature coverage, Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR spoke with The Planet’s Vice President of Facilities Jeff Lowenberg about the company’s data centers, power efficiency and cooling techniques.

Jeff explains the significance of the “coefficient of efficiency” rating in a data center. You’ll hear first hand how the work we’ve completed over the past six months has decreased the proportion of power going to cool the data center’s IT load relative to the power used to run the IT load.

Watch the video below to learn more about the ways we are reducing our energy consumption and improving the way our data centers operate … you’ll also get some great footage from inside our H2 data center.

Earth Day typically inspires widespread environmental introspection. How can we cut down on waste? Can we be more efficient? Are we actively pursuing “greener” operations? And how can we reduce our costs and be fiscally responsible?

Houston is recognized as the energy capital of the world, so it may be a surprise to learn that amidst that distinction The Planet does its part to reduce energy costs. In fact, we have been featured in several “green technology” articles over the past few months and acknowledged for our common sense approach. Ultimately, we look to save money, reduce consumption and improve data center efficiency. And in the coming weeks, we’ll announce an expanded program that takes us to the next level in increasing those efficiencies.

Tier1 is a leading research firm, and Martin Levy is the firm’s “green” analyst. In his report on The Planet, his headline was simple: “Down-to-earth solutions help improve efficiency at The Planet.”

Martin goes on to say the following:

Not a word about carbon offsets. Nobody planting trees. Nothing about Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). No recycling bins at the entrance to the datacenters. Instead, today’s announcement from The Planet was all about core datacenter efficiency. The company runs six datacenters and because of a focus on efficiency, it expects to save over one million dollars during 2008 … T1R is impressed. The Planet has shown that going green can be done the old-fashioned way. Make the technology work better and the company sees a positive ROI. That’s still good for the environment and even better for the bottom line!

Our facilities team is always on the lookout for new ways to reduce energy costs, since it’s one of our biggest expenses. Our vice president of facilities, Jeff Lowenberg, took an interesting challenge at the end of last year: Cut power costs by $1 million dollars in 2008, while we continue to grow and provision new servers in our six world-class data centers.

In his Sustainable IT blog, Ted Samson reported on a few of the initiatives aimed at improving our efficiency:

• Rearranging floor tiles to better manage cold airflow
• Installing seals and grommets in the ceilings, walls, and floors to reduce bypass airflow
• Installing blanking plates in server cabinets to direct airflow more efficiently
• Sealing power distribution units to reduce bypass airflow

Ted also explained the significance of those “minor” improvements:

Cool air was going to only where it was needed: the server intakes … Six months later, the company finds that its efforts have paid off substantially. Even though critical server loads increased by 5 percent, the facility’s overall cooling power needs dropped by 31 percent … The Planet also improved its “coefficient of efficiency,” an EPA- and Uptime Institute-recognized measurement of the total power necessary to operate a data center, divided by critical power, which represents the energy required to operate its computers. The company increased its rating to 1.7 – a near-ideal number – from its previous “good” ranking of 2.0.

Matt Stansberry at Search Data Center also spoke with Jeff about our progress and shared a few additional details in the quest to improve data center cooling:

Data center cooling is where most of infrastructure energy efficiency is lost. The fundamental rule in energy efficient cooling is to keep hot air and cold air separate … The Planet uses a method of extending the height of its computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units’ return-air plenums to optimize air cooling … By extending the plenums higher, it ensures that the CRAC units are not sucking in any cold air from the cold aisles, as it allows for the hottest air to be sucked into the units. In this scenario, the top of the plenums must be at least 2 feet from the ceiling.

To get an idea of what “plenums” are, you can visit Matt’s post or Heather Clancy’s recent article about The Planet at ZDNet’s GreenTech Pastures … and while you’re there, be sure to check out the post’s opening line.

To stay in the loop about what is being done in the “green tech” sphere, keep an eye on Ted Samson’s Sustainable IT blog, GreenerComputing, The Daily T1R from Tier1 Research, ZDNet’s GreenTech Pastures and Search Data Center.

And watch for more news from us.

-Yvonne