The Planet Blog

Do you have any plans for Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 11:00am?

Well … cancel them.

You’re invited to join us as we celebrate the opening of our new 106,000-square-foot colocation data center facility in Plano, Texas!

How often to do you get the chance to witness the ceremonial shearing of a beautiful ribbon by the blades of comically large scissors? Whatever your answer is to that question, I would suggest that’s not often enough, so you should take advantage of this opportunity.

The grand opening event for this data center — our eighth — will feature remarks from The Planet Chairman & CEO Douglas J. Erwin and Plano City Manager Thomas H. Muehlenbeck. A light lunch and refreshments will be served, and you, as our guests, will have the opportunity to tour the ultra-secure, “green” facility.

On the technical front, the new data center uses the latest modular cooling technology from Turbine Air Systems (TAS), with high-efficiency, water-cooled chillers that eliminate the possibility of an interior water leak. The facility meets SAS 70 Type II standards and is protected by biometric security access.

If you’re keeping track at home, the addition of this raised-floor real estate brings The Planet’s footprint up to 224,000 square feet … more than five acres of enterprise-class server space.

For more event information and to register to attend, visit http://www.theplanet.com/New-Data-Center-Grand-Opening/.

If you wait too long to register, your “light lunch” might end up being a package of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter, so sign up today!

-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

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

The first time I saw the inside of a data center I had already worked in Web hosting sales for nearly two years. A member of our executive management team had decided that if we were going to sell dedicated servers we should probably have some concept of what they looked like.

I knew the building well; we’d once had a company-wide meeting in the lobby at 7:00 AM on a Saturday, so until our field trip I associated data centers with stale coffee and discontent over early weekend meetings. Although the data center and I had shared a less-than-stellar first encounter, when I finally stepped through the door that separated our then 14,000 or so servers from the rest of the world I never wanted to leave.

For those who have never had the pleasure or opportunity, visiting a large data center is something akin to a religious experience. Everything is so clean and sanitized. There are thousands of machines lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows and racks that tower above you, all connected by miles upon miles of a brilliant cable rainbow. The words you speak die in mid-air, absorbed by the sound of an electrified, whirring wonderland.

But in spite of the majesty of our data center’s sights and sounds, the part that struck me most was the smell. Imagine the new-plastic smell your CPU gives off when you plug a home computer for the first time, multiplied by many thousands, floating through perfectly filtered air. Within the first five minutes I wanted every customer to come and visit. They had to see and hear and, most importantly, smell what I was experiencing.

So when I read this article about the rising popularity of rub and sniff marketing my first thought was that we needed a way to recreate the smell of our data centers and include it in our print ads. We would be pioneers in olfactology for IT businesses!

Before this idea could come to fruition, it was pointed out to me that the smell of the data center really doesn’t do it for everyone. Although I cannot imagine why, some people even find it downright unpleasant, preferring smells like vanilla and sandalwood to plastic and electricity. One of our data center managers has even told me that while the CPUs and the electricity were contributing factors, most of what I smell is the fan belts on the air conditioning units, but that sounds much less romantic.

Still, the data center experience is more widely available to our customers than ever before. We now have a data center tour, starring actual Planet employees and filmed in our very own data centers. Click the button that says, “Take the Tour” on http://www.theplanet.com/ and enjoy our video, scent not included. For that part, you still need to make the trip to Texas and schedule a guided tour … break room coffee included.