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 you’ve ever been on a tour of The Planet’s data centers, you’ve probably noticed a server segregation of sorts. In one aisle, you see big breadracks of tower servers that resemble desktop computers, and in the next, you find rack-mount servers stacked on top of each other in cabinets. Both form factors can connect to the same Internet with the same speed and performance … and they can even share identical hardware specifications. It may be confusing to see both up and running right next to each other. In fact, as a DC manager, I’m often asked about why we elect to use one over the other. Because the explanation is pretty straightforward, I thought it would be a great topic to cover in my blog debut.

Quite a bit has changed in the way we’ve built data centers over the last four years. When we opened our H2 data center, we only deployed racks of tower servers, and in our newest data center phase, D6 Phase 3, we only provision rack-mount servers. You might assume this shift to imply the complete dominance of rack-mount servers over its tower-chassis relative. Let me suggest that you’d be making an incorrect assumption.

To understand when one form factor may be better than the other, let’s look at the hardware, flexibility, space requirements and costs for each. There are no umbrella claims about rack-mounted and tower servers because each comes in different sizes/variations. Tower servers will generally share the same width, but their heights and depths can vary. Concurrently, rack-mount servers are measured by their heights in “rack units.” The rack-mount server we’ll compare is a 1U – a server that takes up one rack unit of height.

Tower Servers

Hardware/Flexibility: Given the tower server size and layout, it can accommodate a greater number of large components like hard drives, RAID and network cards.
Space Requirements: The benefits of having more space for drives and components come at the cost of taking up more data center space. A breadrack of towers can hold 20 servers, while 30 1U rack-mount servers fill a cabinet less than half the width of the tower racks. There are fewer tower servers in a given square-foot area, so we say that the data center space is less dense. When a data center is dense, it requires more power and more cooling, so a data center with only tower servers will generally require less power and cooling.
Cost: In the early 2000’s, rack-mount servers were nearly twice the price of tower servers, so the use of towers could have been a purely economical decision. Now that the rack-mount equivalent of a tower is available only a few hundred dollars more, a data center’s use of the tower form factor will likely be based on one of the other differentiators.

Rack-Mount Servers

Space Requirements: As we noted, rack-mount servers can be installed more densely in a data center than their tower counterparts. To fit more servers in the same amount of space, the rack-mount servers offer less available interior real estate. Because the server uses less space, it tends to run hotter – the heat emitted from the processor and components is contained in a smaller area – so cooling and air-flow are critically important.
Hardware/Flexibility: A 1U rack-mount server’s decreased real estate often limits the types of components that fit in a given layout and the number of drives that can be installed … it’s not likely that the server above will be employed as a huge network storage repository.
Cost: While the difference in cost between form factors isn’t egregious, the cost of running a data center filled with one or the other is significant. That’s one of the main reasons why you see the focus on efficiency in D6 Phase 3. With more rack-mount servers in a given space, inefficient use of power and cooling means thousands of additional dollars in utility bills.

When it’s all said and done, the form factor of the server you have with The Planet shouldn’t matter to you. You’re connected to the same network, in the same enterprise-class data centers, and you’re getting the same level of service and support regardless of what your server looks like. If you are interested in more the nitty-gritty details from the data center operations side of our business, leave a comment and let me know what you want to see or learn more about, and I’ll do my best to cover it.

-Jon

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!