“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.” – B. C. Forbes

April brings the advent of spring, the planting and tending of gardens, and refreshing rains that help nature spring forth. Here at The Planet, April is no different – the sales and marketing teams will be busy planting seeds to help fuel our growth with a busy trade show schedule.

Here’s a look at all the activities planned this month:

PubCon South — April 13-15 — Dallas, TX
We’ll kick off in Dallas at PubCon South. Here, we’ll showcase our hosting and cloud solutions, and learn about the latest trends in social media marketing. The conference is being held just up the street from our Dallas office, so this is almost a “home game” for us. If you’re in Dallas, stop by and see us!

Cloud Expo East — April 19-21 — New York, NY
At the Cloud Expo, we have two speaking spots: Duke Skarda will deliver a general address to the delegates on how to evaluate cloud solutions and determine what makes sense for their respective companies. Carl Meadows will also conduct a technical workshop on choosing the right cloud platform for your business. You can find us in the expo hall at booth 118.

ad:tech — April 20-22 — San Francisco, CA
At ad:tech, we’re sponsoring a panel discussion on the challenges faced by today’s ad agencies while navigating media-rich campaigns that integrate video, social networks and new media. We’ll also show off our unique corporate style in booth 6240. In addition to our hosting capabilities, we’ll showcase The Planet Partner Plus program, our channel program for referral partners, resellers and affiliates.

Interop — April 25-30 — Las Vegas, NV
After a quick two-day breather, we’ll hit the road again to the Entertainment Capital of the World. Thank goodness you never know what time it is in Vegas … because I know we’ll still be jet-lagged. You can find the weary travelers from The Planet in the Interop expo hall at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. During the show, we’ll feature our server challenge, back by popular demand from SXSW. Stop by to see us in booth 1851.

Don’t worry … we’ll still be out and about in May. I’ll save the details about those shows for a rainy day at the end of April.

We’re excited about all things spring, including meeting new customers, seeing old friends and making new ones. There’s a lot planned and much coming your way, so be sure to keep in touch. We’ll see you on the road!

-Sherry

P.S. If you plan to be at any these events, let us know! Hit us up in the comments section below, via Twitter or on our facebook page.

I may be taking a long shot here, but I believe I am now completely accustomed to my surroundings and my colleagues. I’ve met some fantastic people, and I’ve excavated the never-ending Houston underground tunnels in their entirety. While the latter involved arduously dragging myself on a strange and intriguing expedition past endless halls of restaurants, stores and power-walking businesspeople that made me feel severely underdressed, when I navigated back to the Bayou Place glass door, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. Was that pride matched by a feeling of being out of shape? Maybe — but hey, that’s what the company’s fitness challenge is for, right?

That’s right, a fitness challenge. Participants are broken into teams that take this thing seriously. After six biweekly weigh-ins, the team and individuals with the greatest percentage weight loss and body fat loss are declared winners and receive a nice little award. The prize is nice, but the real draw for me was the chance to be motivated by my teammates to lead a healthier lifestyle. I think there’s a saying about a healthy employee being a happy employee, so when a large portion of the staff enthusiastically participates, you see even more smiles around the office. It’s not like the clip from Office Space where everyone’s forced to participate in the droll, TPS-report zealot boss’s birthday – an extracurricular they loathe. If you expect there to be a few Miltons around our office who miss out on the cake when it’s being passed around, you’ll be sorely mistaken.

This environment is completely different. Employees are voluntarily and enthusiastically participating in team events – just because. You can feel a vibe that this is not about the potential award and bragging rights. People are enjoying themselves, getting healthier, developing long-lasting personal relationships and building our team’s bonds simultaneously. You need a certain breed of employee and a certain level of trust to make that happen.

The moral of the story here – yes, there is a moral – is that when you engage a group of people in pursuit of a common goal and allow them to get legitimately excited, you’re going to build an incredible team. It’s that simple. Enthusiasm is contagious and produces happy employees who in turn produce incredible results. I’m witnessing it right now, and I love it.

-Ryan

P.S. On the tangential topic of cake inspired by Milton, there should be a set of rules governing cake distribution. Should there be unfair cake distribution, there shall be severe repercussions, many involving demerits. As Dwight Schrute explains, “[Get] three demerits, and you’ll receive a citation. Five citations and you’re going to get yourself a violation. Four of those and you’ll get a verbal warning. Keep that up, and you’re looking at a written warning. Two of those, that’ll land you in a world of hurt in the form of a disciplinary review placed on the desk of my immediate superior.” I hope this suggestion does not lead to any disadulations.

As a teenager, no one really wants to talk to their mother on the phone, and that was how I felt early Saturday morning on January 29, 1994, when my mother called me at a friend’s house. As I begrudgingly picked up the phone, my adolescent attitude gave way to a much more powerful emotion when I heard her say, “Sherry, Daddy died.”

I wish no one ever had to hear those words.

At the young age of 44, my father died of sudden cardiac arrest. I have now lived as much of my life without my father as I lived with him.

In November 2008, I stepped off the sidelines in the fight against heart disease and went to work for the American Heart Association. While the time I spent there often stirred up memories and emotions I once wanted to suppress, I knew that my efforts to help raise money for research, education and awareness might save another little girl’s daddy.

I miss my father. Everything is so different without him. I look back at pictures from my sister’s wedding, and while I remember how fantastic the day was, I also see the empty space he should have filled. I know that I am the woman I am today because of the short time I had him in my life, and that understanding impacts almost all of my decisions.

When I decided to change careers, coming to work at an organization that supports the community was important to me, so the fact that The Planet supports the community – and the AHA in particular – won me over. More than 16 years after I got that phone call, I am happy to be working with an amazing team that is also armed to fight cardiovascular disease.

Every year, I participate in the American Heart Association’s Start! Heart Walk, and because today is National Start Walking Day, I’m joining my coworkers in a brisk walk at lunch to get into gear.

I am challenging myself to walk 10,000 steps a day until November 7. If every one of The Planet’s 500 employees do the same, we’ll walk 1,085,000,000 steps – almost 22 laps around the globe.

I hope you’ll consider supporting our efforts to get moving, to raise money for the AHA, and most of all, that you’ll share your own story of how your life has been affected by heart disease.

Will you lace up your walking shoes?

-Sherry

When I moved to Houston nearly five years ago, one of my long-term goals was to land a job downtown. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been enamored with big-city downtowns — something about a city’s core is electrifying. It might be the commerce that’s going on all around – the undeniable relevance of what’s happening inside the Fortune 500 company headquarters. Maybe it’s the movement — messengers zipping by on their bikes, the light rail smoothly slipping through intersections, cabbies weaving in and out of traffic, and businessmen and women hustling to meetings, gripping phones, laptop bags and a Venti Starbucks. Or, perhaps it’s just my personal awe of ginormous buildings made of glass and steel (especially 75-story ones).

Whatever the reason for my infatuation, I’m an especially big fan of Houston’s downtown. I’m lucky that The Planet’s headquarters are located here, and I’m within walking distance of some of the coolest destinations in town: the Angelika, which regularly screens indie, foreign, and critically-acclaimed flicks; the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, with a regular schedule of Broadway shows; a bevy of dining options (Post Oak Grill and Azuma are personal favorites); and Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros.

Our latest Storage Cloud customer, Central Houston, is one of the reasons Houston is so great. The 26-year-old nonprofit has championed the sustainable revitalization of Houston’s center city, spearheading downtown improvement projects and encouraging businesses to land here. The organization has been a driving force behind some of my favorite downtown developments: Discovery Green – a 12-acre urban park that hosts free outdoor concerts, ice skating in winter and “yoga on the green”; the Buffalo Bayou Walk – a perfect trail for those long marathon-training runs or a scenic walk at lunchtime; the Houston Pavilions – home of a 2-story Forever 21 (my idea of heaven); and House of Blues Houston – the venue where I’ve seen acts from Arctic Monkeys to OAR to Who’s Bad, a – you guessed it – Michael Jackson cover band.

Amidst all of these other incredible projects, Central Houston manages a historical repository of downtown — including old photos, maps and various business documents — so they required fail-safe storage to protect their critical data. They selected our Storage Cloud based on a number of factors, chief of which are the product’s scalability and ease of management. And, of course, they’re neighbors of ours in this big, bustling downtown. And in Texas, that counts for a lot.

You can read more about their selection of The Planet Storage Cloud here: http://www.theplanet.com/about/news-events/press-releases/2010/Central-Houston-Selects-The-Planet-Storage-Cloud/

-Katie

Here at The Planet, work has been proceeding in order to bring reliability, scalability and burstability to the crudely conceived idea of a hosting and communication platform that would not only supply inverse binary data for use in an internet protocol transfer request, but would also be capable of automatically and redundantly synchronizing cardinal base-qualifiers to streamline the load times of a business’s Web site. Such a configuration is commonly known as the hostatulator.

The original infrastructural configuration had an internal architecture of prefabricated aluminum cabinetry, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the pentametric fans in devices in close geographic proximity would exhaust rectified cooling agents multidirectionally … The primary consumption involved uncompressed lotus-o-delta rays reconfiguring the standard operation of the panendermic semi-boloid coded computing sector, but inefficiencies were noticed when the thermodynamic coupler connected to the nonreversible sonic transfiber caused the differential components to misdiagnose the ‘up’ end of the RAM modules. By sequentially incorporating a combination of hostatulators and retro-serverations, amazing results have been observed [see schematic below for preliminary calculations].

Basically, by reengineering the way the seventy-four cloud accelerators navigated the channels of the Cisco grouting router drives, a simple operating system reload brought about unbelievable improvement in per-core output and rotor slipstream variance … The consolidated, hardware-independent dependencies were all but eliminated.

While our slight modifications involved the forced diathetical retrograde of the data center’s coefficient of efficiency and its temperature phase disposition, the annular network bandwidth deviation was kept below four exabytes during peak usage. This traffic was measured with the aid of a Dell metapolar refractive hypervisor, and with the latest beta firmware release, the transcendental hopper dadoscope’s KVM output completely modified the terminal response and alleviated any need for conversion by the quadratic requantifier. By restoring the fundamental database with an emergency serial loop, the hierarchy immediately became an oligarchy, and the workload was redistributed much more efficiently.

Undoubtedly, the hostatulator has now reached a very high level of technical development, and they are immediately available for custom solution provisioning at the low price of $43,234.44 per server per month.

Thank you.

-Kevin

P.S. We’re looking to spread the word about this unbelievable technological innovation. The first person to record a video of with the above content will get an awesome T-shirt! Post the video on YouTube and link to it in a comment here. That is all.

Every day, we spend countless hours visiting Web sites. What you may not realize is that the pages you see — updates to them, new pages on related topics, etc. — are determined by how often you use them. This follows the commonly known law of supply and demand: If someone wants it, someone else will be there to supply it. When you’re creating content, the question becomes, “What do visitors want?” Knowing what to supply is a matter for sophisticated programs to turn into simple graphs and pretty charts for us. That information makes up what we call Web stats.

Why Are Web Stats Important?

Countless Web sites, blogs and books are dedicated to Web stats, so instead of spending hours on a comprehensive review of the topic, the answer to the question of importance can best be summed up via the following sentence:

“If you spend time or money promoting your Web site, and if your business decisions are influenced by your Web site’s performance, you need to arm yourself with the most accurate and useful data available.”

There are a multitude of choices in the world of Web stats, also referred to as the “Web analytics industry.” You may have heard names like Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, Urchin, Google Analytics, AWStats, Webalizer and IndexTools … Those are only the tip of the iceberg. They are some of the more popular stats packages in the market today, and each has its own distinct feature set and price point.

Note: Every single stats package on the market is a log file analyzer. SaaS/ASP/hosted stats programs like Omniture and Google Analytics create a log file of special tracking gifs, whereas standalone software programs like Urchin store the tracking gif directly in the Web server log file.

What Is Urchin?

In April of 2005, Google acquired San Diego-based Urchin Software Corp. At the time, Urchin had two main products:

1. Urchin Software – downloaded and installed on customers’ servers
2. Urchin On Demand – a SaaS version of Urchin

Google added some features to Urchin On Demand shortly after the acquisition, and the product was relaunched as Google Analytics a few months later. In the meantime, the Urchin Software project was shelved for approximately two years while development resources were obtained. Finally in April 2008, Google launched a new version – Urchin 6.

Urchin 6 is a software package. You download and install it on one of your servers, and the software generates reports by reading your Web server log files. Urchin can be scheduled to provide new reports whenever you choose – daily, hourly, weekly or at a custom interval – and you view reports with any Web browser.

Hardware & Software Requirements

Urchin 6 is designed to play nicely with other applications. Because Urchin is a database-driven application, you can improve performance by throwing hardware at it. Here are some rough guidelines for Urchin’s hardware and software needs:

• RAM: From 100 MB (with geolocation disabled) to 2 GB (geolocation enabled)
• CPU: The most common bottleneck, Urchin is not multi-processor aware and will only use one processor when processing data. This is one of the reasons why Urchin plays nicely with other applications. Starting with v6.601, both 64-bit and 32-bit processors are supported.
• Disk: Urchin needs 5 percent of the raw Web log file size for storage, and the app files are approximately 200 MB (800 MB if you’re using the geolocation feature)
• Operating System: Urchin runs on Windows, Linux and BSD
• Database: The application config settings are stored in mySQL or PostgreSQL, one of which must be present prior to installing Urchin.

Urchin can run directly on your Web server when it’s only tracking a few sites. If you have several Web sites or are running frequent reports on high-traffic sites, you may want to consider putting Urchin on another server. Obviously, you don’t want to impact your site’s performance in the name of getting Web stats for that site.

Urchin 6 Features

Urchin 6 has a TON of features, the most impressive of which are listed below:

• Data Privacy: Urchin runs on your server and doesn’t send report data back to Google. The only people who can see your stats are those who are explicitly granted access.
• Full Visitor Clickpaths: See the full clickpath for each visit to your site, as well as historical clickpaths for return visitors.
• Marketing Campaigns: Track search engine keywords, banner ads, emails, text links, press releases, offline campaigns, and more.
• AdWords & YSM Integration: Automatically download cost data from your Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts.
• ROI Reports: Import cost data from anywhere and Urchin will calculate an ROI for that marketing initiative.
• Conversion Goals & Funnels: Ensure you’re attracting the right type of traffic to your Web site by examining aggregate behavior for specific activities like e-commerce transactions, lead form completions and file downloads.
• Historical Data Import: If you have five years of historical Web server log files, Urchin can read them and generate reports.
• Geolocation: View the country, state/province and city of each Web site visitor.
• IT Reports: See page errors, robot and spider crawl patterns, “non-standard” user agents and every file delivered by your Web site.
• Data API: The Urchin 6.6 release includes a powerful API that allows you to access the underlying profile datamap from the command line.
• Heavily Customizable: Advanced users can automate setup and customize reports, edit the user interface and process operations.

How to Buy and Where to Learn More

Urchin 6 is available in a 1000-profile package on all of The Planet’s dedicated hosting servers for only $10 per month. You can select the Web Analytics option in our shopping cart or contact a sales representative via ticket, live chat or phone to get it added to your account.

Some Urchin-related Web sites you might want to check out:

• http://www.urchin.com – Google’s site for Urchin
• http://www.urchintools.com – Urchin portal site, includes help articles and free tools
• http://www.urchinexperts.com – Another Urchin portal site with support information

A free 30-minute Urchin 6 webinar is run a few times a month by an authorized Urchin partner called ActualMetrics. Dates and times of upcoming Urchin 6 webinars can be found here:

http://www.actualmetrics.com/products/urchin-6-software/demo/

Take a little time to get to know your visitors. Urchin 6 can be a great way to start that process.

-Mark

A few short months ago, we took transparency to the next level by opening the doors for customers to request a picture of their actual server on a rack in our data centers. Without question, our first “Show Me My Server” experiment was a huge success. We were sure the program would be reborn, and we took a few notes about how we could improve it.

Enter #ShowMeMyServer 2.0.

We heard from a few of our international customers that the narrow time frame fell in the middle of their night. This go-round won’t be limited to a single hour … we’ll accept entries for a full 24 hours, giving every time zone an equal shot at participation. In our first run, we also made a disclaimer about the quality of the photographs, as some were snapped by Blackberries and iPhones … this time, we’ll be using a DSLR camera with hopes of getting some higher quality images back to you. That last update should be reason enough for everyone who participated the first time to enter again.

With the extended participation window, we’re making it a little tougher to qualify, so we’ve got four simple tasks for you to complete within one day – by 3:30 p.m. CDT on March 24. ALL FOUR tasks must be completed before we give your server a well-deserved close-up.

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. Become a fan of The Planet on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theplanet
4. Send an email to twitter @ theplanet.com with the following:
   1) Your name:
   2) Twitter username:
   3) Account number (C—– or E—–):
   4) The IP address of the soon-to-be-photographed hardware:
   5) The name you want displayed in your picture:

The information above – along with the address you send your email from – will be used to verify your account. The IP address you include will not be publicized or included in your server’s photo, its only purpose is to pinpoint your server. If you do not include a display name in your email, we will include your Twitter username by default.

As we did in our first #showmemyserver, we’re limiting each customer to picture of a single server. 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. Just provide your rack number in place of the server’s IP address in your email.

Once we close the submissions window, we’ll start snapping the photos. The turnaround will depend on the volume of requests. We’re aiming to get pictures back to you — replying to the e-mail you sent twitter@theplanet — by the end of next week. 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.

When you finish your tasks and start waiting for your picture, head to our new Flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/showmemyserver/ and show us your computer or workstation … it’ll be interesting to see if the servers look as similar as some pets look to their owners.

What are you waiting for? Get going!

-Kevin

Update: As of 3:31 p.m. CDT on March 24, comments are closed. Participants, get ready for your server’s close-up!

If you haven’t already heard the big news, today marks the launch of The Planet’s Orbit portal iPhone Web application. By working with customer focus groups and culling survey responses about our portal experience, we have put together an ambitious road map to revamp and improve the way our customers interact with us and our system. A surprisingly large portion of our customer base claim the iPhone as their device of choice, so we set off to work on a tool that could manage Orbit accounts on the Mobile Safari platform.

In our initial release, our focus was to provide customers’ most-used functions and features:

• Basic hardware management
• ­Ping status
• ­Power on/off
• ­Reboot requests
• ­OS reload
• ­Bandwidth utilization information
• ­Escalation procedures
• Ticket management
• Invoice summaries

Enough telling … How about some showing? If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch visit https://iPhone.orbit.theplanet.com, and check it out! If you don’t have access to an iPhone at the moment, we’ve posted a few screenshots on Flickr:

Given the constraints of a mobile app and the fact that the screen real estate is limited to 480×320, the application will be most useful to customers who have less than 25 servers with us. Every Orbit user with an iPhone will find this tool to be a valuable resource.

The iPhone app is merely the first of many new customer-facing systems improvements we have slated to launch this year. Later this spring, we will release a new RESTful API upon which you can build you own feature-rich interfaces. You can also keep an eye out for a new community site — accessible from Orbit — that will take you behind the scenes to grade, rank and comment on our new development ideas. Longer-term projects for 2010 include revamping a number of portal functions, adding more API methods, and updating the user interface based on your feedback.

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, check out the app and let us know what you think. We want as much feedback as you can muster, so don’t bite your tongue if you see areas we can improve. Using this app as a test case, we will continue development on other popular mobile platforms like Android and Blackberry, and we’ll update you with that progress.

-Kyle

Six cores at up to 2.8GHz. 32 nanometer manufacturing. 12MB of cache. 1,333MHz memory bus. Enabled with turbo- and hyper-threading. If I would have seen those specs five years ago, I’d probably put it in the Loch Ness Monster file … It would have been something that I wanted but didn’t expect to ever see. As of today, we have Nessie’s technological equivalent in our data centers and available for customers to order.

Housed in a Dell PowerEdge R710 server and equipped with the new Westmere microarchitecture processor, our new Xeon 5650 server is the most powerful server in our fleet. If the powerhouse performance wasn’t enough for you, the X5600 series processors also deliver two new security features – Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT). These new technologies enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments.

You require performance, security and server density, and the new Intel processor delivers across the board. This high-performance server offers hardware acceleration for virtualization and cloud instances, and improved security. It also improves the economics of multi-tenant environments like cloud, virtualization and Web hosting.

Does all this tech talk have you salivating for one? Here’s your chance. The new server is available today exclusively on The Planet’s Virtual Rack platform, which allows customers to effortlessly scale computing capacity within their hosting environment without long-term commitments. Additionally, if you decide to make a leap to the new platform, you’ll get The Planet’s new server bundle, including Symantec Endpoint Protection, 10GB of Storage Cloud and Parallels Small Business Panel.

-Todd

Hello World!

Please allow me to introduce myself in this inaugural blog entry. My name is Duke Skarda, and I have the privilege — and challenge — of running the IT and Development organization here at The Planet. Prior to joining The Planet last summer, I spent 15 years working in the telecom industry as a software developer and architect, enterprise architect and as an executive leading development organizations. I love the challenge of leading technical teams to develop and apply technology solutions to tough problems. The telecom and hosting industries have proven to be great hunting grounds for me in that respect.

I plan to use this blog to talk about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what we will be working on next. We have great plans for our systems and our business, and I want to let you in on them. My goal in this is two-fold: to keep you informed and to get input from you. I’ve taken a few months to settle in and get my arms around our opportunities for improvement and the resources at my disposal. I now have a good understanding of where we are and where we’re going. It’s going to be a great ride with lots of new ideas. We plan to share those ideas and get your feedback along the way, and I’ll keep you informed as we work our way through them.

When I took this role, the number one goal I was given was to improve our internal systems. We’re working to enhance our back-office systems with the application of new inventory management, billing and product catalog solutions. These platforms provide a foundation for our business, and are very important in our day-to-day operations, so as they are updated, our customers will notice subtle and continuous improvements in our service. We have a lot of resources focused on these improvements right now, and we’re making some great progress, so I look forward to sharing our successes with you.

However… what I’ve come to discover is that there is an even more powerful punch: Automation. “We want to automate everything!” That was the second goal our CEO gave me. We have a great automation engine we’re working to improve, and we’re embarking on several initiatives to add new functionality and better cycle times. Our customers will see these improvements directly in improved server delivery times and as new functionality on our portal.

So that’s the journey here at The Planet for the near future. I have a lot of people on the team helping me out. A few of them will also be writing blogs, so let me do some quick introductions. First, Stephen Johnson and Kyle Smith will each be talking about various aspects of our self-service portal, Orbit 2.0. Both Stephen and Kyle joined the company in the fall of last year and have been working hard to build a new plan and some cool new interfaces for our portal. Second, Marc Jones joined us at the end of last year and is currently driving the development of some great new products that are focused on cloud services. So look for some inside-baseball blogs from those guys.

In my next entry, I want to provide a little history and some context. The Planet development team has been working for the last few years to bring a lot of disparate parts together as one unified system. I will talk about that and I will also focus in on the most recent release of our self-service site, Orbit 2.0. There’s an interesting story behind that …

With that … engage …

-Duke

Forty-seven South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Trade Show attendees took The Planet Server Challenge, but only one could walk away with the ASUS Eee PC netbook and the title of “The Fastest Hands at SXSW.” When we designed the competition, we had three goals in mind:

1. Give participants a the chance to show off their technical expertise
2. Appeal to as broad an audience as possible
3. Take less than two minutes to complete

We anticipated strong performances, and we were as surprised as everyone else to see Tagged Director of Engineering Mark Jen masterfully rebuild the server in a blistering 30.7 seconds. His first attempt was slowed by a stray cable, yet it was still fast enough to take the lead from Idea’s Quang Tran. We flicked on our camera to document Mark’s second attempt in hopes we’d catch a faster time on film. Thankfully, he did not disappoint:

If you made it by our booth to try your hand in the competition, we thank you. Whether your time was thirty seconds or two minutes and thirty seconds, we enjoyed meeting you and sharing a little of what we do. To the team of folks that put together the Iron Geek Triathlon, thanks for inviting us to be a part of the fun!

To Mark: Keep those fingers nimble … now the Internet is going to see your tricks of the trade, and next time, it might not be as easy to walk away victorious.

-Kevin

P.S. For more Server Challenge goodness, check out the coverage on Data Center Knowledge and Keith Shaw’s hands-on test at Network World.

I have worked at The Planet now for an action-packed seven days, the last four here in Austin at South by Southwest (SXSW). I am The Planet’s new Events Manager, and while I know very little about IT, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with trade shows after spending more than 15 years running from show to show with Dr Pepper (my drink of choice, of course). With SXSW as my first peek at how The Planet does trade shows, I can’t help but be really excited about what the future holds.

First and foremost, it is an absolute treat to have a team – from systems engineering and sales to marketing and IT – that shows so much passion for The Planet and our products. Never mind that everybody was on time and did their part — that was just a bonus. Everyone is engaged and having fun … from Jeff Reinis hocking T-shirts mid-aisle to Kevin Hazard and Phil Jackson challenging every geek at the show to a server-building race.

Kyle Monson competing in the Server Challenge

My highlight of the show was definitely when Russell Bishop from the UK took the server challenge. As he worked against the clock to put together the server, George – another show attendee – sang the theme song from “Greatest American Hero.” Needless to say, we all joined in. Things like that just don’t happen every day.

Russell and George (The Singer)

I’ve learned so much in the past few days. The whole team from The Planet quickly recognized my “deer in the headlights” look when anyone asked a complex question, and they quickly jumped in to make us look good. After they finished talking to the attendee, they kindly explained everything to me.

I’ve learned a lot about the power of social media … from something as small as tweeting about a lost iPhone to something as massive as our server challenge being Slashdotted.

Becky Rasch reunited with her lost iPhone

As I write this, it’s the last day of the show here at SXSW, and I find myself a little sad that every day won’t be like the past four … then again, with the same gang back at the office, I’m pretty sure we’ll still have a blast.

-Sherry

At high noon on March 15, 2010, four worthy competitors toed the line in anticipation of what would be the most grueling (and perhaps only) multi-event tech geek challenge at South by Southwest Interactive. The competition was intense, and while each participant proved deserving of the SXSW Iron Geek Champion title, only one could walk away a winner.

The Planet’s Server Challenge was selected as an official event in the tech triathlon, so Keith Shaw, Kyle Monson, Chris Boudy and Harry McCracken had to rebuild our Pentium4 server faster than their formidable opponents to walk away with the most points for the round. Hands flew, blood was shed and tears were cried, and after the dust settled, the results were posted:

1. Kyle Monson: 1:02.4
2. Chris Boudy: 1:13.4
3. Keith Shaw: 1:16.3
4. Harry McCracken: 1:58.2

Kyle walked away victorious from The Planet Server Challenge, but when the final scores were tallied from all the events, Chris Boudy was crowned the SXSW Iron Geek Champion. After prying him away from the droves of fans chasing his newly acquired stardom, we took a minute to chat with Chris about his experience in the Iron Geek triathlon and about his impression of SXSW Interactive.

Congratulations, Chris!

- Kevin

South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive begins this weekend, and while this is our inaugural appearance at this particular show, we’re not unprepared. In addition to the standard conference fare of expo booth and giveaways, we’ve got some interesting challenges for attendees and a calendar full of events in partnership with companies like Microsoft, Tumblr, Kickstarter and SoundCloud. Without further ado, this is how you can track us down in Austin:

Our Booth

On the SXSW Interactive Trade Show floor, you’ll find us spanning booths 303 and 305 in Exhibit Hall 4 of the Austin Convention Center. You’ll know you’re getting close when you see the pair of unlikely superheroes we are featuring on our “Redefining Hosting” graphics.

Meet The Planet Staff: Once you squirm your way through the droves of people flooding into the booth, you’ll be greeted by friendly faces who will love to chat with you about your business, hosting, the weather or the names of your childhood pets. In exchange for the privilege of meeting you, we can offer a tokens of our appreciation: your choice of one of our clever giveaway T-shirts!

Sign up for WebsiteSpark: With the help of a little company out of Redmond, Washington, we’re able to offer a special opportunity for attendees to sign up for Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program on the show floor. If you’re unfamiliar with the program, it provides you with access to free licensing for the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server … Needless to say, it’s a great resource for businesses with tight budgets.

By applying for the WebsiteSpark program in our booth, you’ll walk away with a 2GB USB drive and a special Microsoft WebsiteSpark + The Planet T-shirt while supplies last. If that’s not enough of an incentive, we’re also offering a year of free hosting at The Planet to one lucky applicant chosen at random.

Compete in the Server Challenge: If our 10′ x 20′ space wasn’t already busy enough, we’ve got one more featured activity in our booth: The Planet Server Challenge – a little competition is designed specifically for techies. Participants have a deconstructed Pentium4 server sitting on a table in front of them, and the objective is to put it back together as quickly as possible. Bragging rights about having the fastest hands at SXSW might be incentive enough, but we’re sweetening the deal by awarding the competitor with the best time an ASUS Eee PC netbook.

We’ll post the current “Time to Beat” on a board in the booth so you can keep that netbook in your sights. The competition details will be available in the booth.

Our Social Events

If the time you spend hanging out with us in our booth isn’t enough for you, you’re in luck. We are participating in a few phenomenal social events, so you can party hardy with us as well.

Saturday, March 13: RSVP and meet us at Emo’s Austin at 6:30 p.m. to get your SXSW experience started on the right foot. We’ve teamed up with Tumblr, Kickstarter and SoundCloud to put on a little soiree for a thousand of our closest friends.

With performances by Eclectic Method, DJ Mel and DJ Suspence, you’ll be entertained, and with an open bar for those who RSVP, you’ll be hydrated.

Sunday, March 14: Speaking of hydration, The Planet is participating in the SXSW Block Party on Sunday between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. While you’re schmoozing around, stop by our booth and help us imbibe the beverages we’re bringing in for the occasion.

Monday, March 15: Are you tired yet? We need you to power through one more day and one more party. The Planet is a gold sponsor of the Houston@SXSW event at Hudson on Fifth on Monday from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. If you RSVP to the event, you get yourself on the list to enjoy presentations and exhibits featuring Houston-based companies along with a few film and music showcases.

Stay Updated

You’re now “in the know.” Are you ready for your pop quiz? Luckily, this isn’t going to be the only communication we do about SXSW. To get up-to-the-minute updates and reminders about what we’re doing, be sure to follow us on Twitter: @theplanet. If the stream gets a little noisy, we’ll move some of the updates to @theplanetevents.

See you in Austin!

-Kevin

The trade show floor is open at SXSW Interactive, so The Planet Server Challenge is officially underway. We went through the basics of the competition yesterday, so today we’re diving into the details.

The Goal: Reassemble our Pentium4 server faster than your SXSW peers and win an ASUS Eee PC Netbook.

The Rules:

1. You may arrange the components as you’d like* before starting.

*Fan, Heat Sink and RAM must be on the table outside of the chassis.

2. You may not be touching any components when time starts.
3. All components must be installed for your time to be recorded.
4. Components can be installed in any order.
5. Components outside the server may only be touched one at a time.
6. You may attempt the build twice.
7. Time will be recorded by a representative from The Planet.
8. The leader board in the booth will reflect the current “time to beat.”

A Successful/Complete Installation:

• Install heat sink, latch both latches
• Plug heat sink into motherboard
• Install fan
• Plug fan into motherboard
• Install two RAM modules (in any of the 4 slots)
• Plug in Hard Drive power cable
• Plug in Hard Drive ribbon cable
• Plug in CD-ROM power cable
• Plug in CD-ROM ribbon cable
• Slide case lid into place

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m pretty sure videos are worth a few million. With that in mind, we recorded a quick explanation and demonstration of the challenge:

Do you think you have what it takes to get the best time? Swing by our booth and prove it! We will update the top times in the comments section of this blog so you can keep an eye on the current record in absentia.

UPDATE: We just spoke with one of the representatives from the Universal Records Database, and he suggested that we submit the fastest time to their database, and they will certify the winner as a universal record holder! Forget having the fastest hands at SXSW … You’ll have the fastest hands in the universe.

-Kevin

P.S. Don’t forget to RSVP for tonight’s Tumblr/SoundCloud/Kickstarter party!

The 2010 Channel Partners Conference & Expo is underway, and as we finished preparing our booth for the opening of the expo hall, Kevin asked me if I could give a quick overview of The Planet’s channel program for the blog. Given the electric atmosphere on the show floor, I couldn’t resist!

We offer several ways for businesses to partner with us, so if you’ve wondered how The Planet and the channel can benefit you, take a minute to watch this crash course:

Like I said in the video, if you have any questions or want any more details about our channel partnership opportunities, leave a comment!

-Lewis

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Trade shows are opportunities to meet new people and old people.”

It’s not very poetic, but neither is the Thoreau I’m quoting … he’s actually the unkempt 50-something neighbor I run into every now and then when I check my mail. I forgot his name after the first time he introduced himself (it was either Henry or David), and his tattered appearance and hermit-like quality reminds me of someone just returning from an extended stay on Walden Pond. So, I arrived at the code name Thoreau, kind of like a McDreamy … minus the dashing good looks and medical degree. And ability to contribute in a large way to society (scripted for TV or not).

But I digress. The words of (neighbor) Thoreau are not wrong, and we’ve got a got a stacked event schedule for the month of March. Be sure to check us out if you’re in the area, so we can seize the opportunity to meet all the new people (and old people) we can.

Here’s a brief snapshot of where we’ll be in the coming month:

Connect10 – March 1-2 – Orlando, FL

The Planet is one of the co-sponsors for Connect10 – the Sant customer conference. Sant Corp. provides software to major corporations for sales proposal and RFP response creation, and they’re also one of our managed hosting customers. Their two-day customer conference in Orlando is chock-full of excellent sessions on how companies can best leverage the Sant software suite.

When you’re roaming the halls at the conference, be sure to stop by our table and pick up a tchotchke or two.

Channel Partners Conference – March 1-3 – Las Vegas, NV

Last fall, we launched The Planet Partner Plus – our channel program encompassing referral partners, resellers, and affiliates. Since then, we’ve been looking to evangelize the program to members of the partner community, and where better to do that than at THE conference for channel partners? (And, it doesn’t hurt that it’s in Vegas.)

We’ll be setting up shop at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in booth 1326 on the Expo Hall floor, and we’ll be giving away a couple video cameras, so it would behoove you to come say hi!

Visit the Channel Partners Conference site for more information.

South By Southwest – March 13-15 – Austin, TX

Last but certainly not least, The Planet will be making its first-ever appearance at South By Southwest Interactive, and we couldn’t be more excited. Held just a few hours away from our Houston headquarters in Austin, Texas, the show has earned a national reputation for consistently popularizing emerging technology, from social media platforms to the latest and greatest websites.

We’re looking forward to meeting customers, prospects and new friends of all kinds – from software and web developers to e-commerce entrepreneurs. We’ve got a few surprises planned, so make sure to keep an eye out for us.

-Katie

If you follow the techies on Twitter or read IT publications online, you’ve probably seen more than a few mentions of cloud computing. Even tech behemoth IBM runs TV ads on cloud computing, underscoring the confusion around what this new technology really is.

With the wealth of cloud products on the market, The Planet’s philosophy is that all of our products — cloud and otherwise — have to serve you, our customer. Our products have to be beneficial to your business. They should lower costs, make technology easier, speed up your environment or protect your data.

We introduced Storage Cloud last year as a way for customers to store data outside of their hosted server. You might be wondering, “How is Storage Cloud any more practical or beneficial than hosted storage in the server? Both are served over the Internet, aren’t they?”

There are three main differences between Storage Cloud and hosted storage:

1. Storage Cloud is metered, similar to your electricity bill. You pay only for what you use when you need to use it. If your storage needs vary considerably from month to month, it may be a good idea to store your files in the cloud rather than invest in an additional disk that may or may not be used — but will be paid for — in the next month.
2. Storage Cloud is scalable. Your storage needs aren’t limited by the capacity of any single disk, and your cost remains constant. Costs can even decrease as you consistently use higher volumes.
3. Storage Cloud is redundant and available as a service. Redundancy is available in hosted solutions with multiple disks and RAID, but in many cases, it’s not included by default.
4. Hosted storage mediums — internal disks, direct attached storage (DAS) or storage area networks (SAN) — are dedicated only to your hosted servers. Storage Cloud is more flexible. If you have a mix of on-premise servers and off-site clients (your laptop, for example), you could back up everything in one place.

When it comes to whether or not Storage Cloud is a more economical option, the answer isn’t cut and dry. Here’s an example of when it would make sense (from solely a cost perspective) to go with Storage Cloud over an additional disk for backups:

You purchase a new server from The Planet and run regular backups. You want to keep the most recent 20GB of backups, and you’re evaluating Storage Cloud against an additional disk in your machine. You’ve got 10GB of free cloud storage (included with all new server orders), bandwidth is free between your server and the cloud, and the second 10GB is 25 cents per GB (or $2.50) per month.

Those backups are being stored at less than the cost of adding any hard drives to your server, and you get the other inherent benefits of the cloud platform. As your volume of data increases, dedicated storage might become a cheaper alternative, so your decision to use Storage Cloud should be made based on the other benefits in the list above.

Storage Cloud isn’t going to be all things for all people. It’s a specific subset of our larger storage portfolio with its own benefits and use cases. For instance, if you’re storing a multi-gigabyte database, you should still consider internal storage or DAS first … Storage Cloud is an option, but it’s not always the best option for your needs. If you’ve got questions about the best storage vehicle for a given application, let us know and we’ll do our best to help!

If you’d like to learn more about The Planet Storage Cloud, visit http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage.

-Rob

Meet Rachel Rogers.

She is our Sales Automation Manager. She keeps our sales department movin’ and groovin’, ensuring that leads are routed correctly, organizing work-flows, and basically giving the sales team all the tools they need to sell, sell, sell.

Rachel is very important to The Planet. She’s also very teeny.

Enter foul weather.

While our friends in the Dallas office experienced a little bit of Snowmaggedon 2010 last week, we here in the Houston office had a couple rainy, nasty, cold days. On Thursday, no one wanted to go out for lunch, so while we munched away on our sammiches and insta-pasta, we decided to have some fun. A while back, in the midst of a late-night work session, we discovered that Rachel could fit in super-small spaces. We set out to find some.

Rachel in a cubicle closet!
(With Graphic Designer Haidy Francis for scale)

Rachel in a file cabinet!

Rachel in the dry-erase easel!

Peek-a-boo Rachel!

Can Kevin fit? Noooo … But Rachel can!

The girl is seriously tiny.

Alright, back to work. Look for us on a rainy day for another edition of “Hiding Employees in Small Spaces!”

-Ali

Permissions in a UNIX environment cause a lot of customer issues. While everyone understands the value of secure systems and limited access, any time an “access denied” message pops up, the most common knee-jerk reaction is to enable full access to one’s files (chmod 777, as I’ll explain later). This is a BAD IDEA. Open permissions are a hacker’s dream come true. An open permission setting might have been a temporary measure, but more often than not, the permissions are left in place, and the files remain vulnerable.

To better understand how to use permissions, let’s take a step back and get a quick refresher on key components.

You’ll need to remember the three permission types:
r w x: r = read; w = write; x = execute

And the three types of access they can be applied to:
u g o: u = user; g = group; o = other

Permissions are usually displayed in one of two ways – either with letters (rwxrwxrwx) or numbers (777). When the permissions are declared with letters, you should look at it as three sets of three characters. The first set applies to the user, the second applies to the group, and the third applies to other (everyone else). If a file is readable only by the user and cannot be written to or executed by anyone, its permission level would be r--------. If it could be read by anyone but could only be writeable by the user and the group, its permission level would be rw-rw-r--.

The numeric form of chmod uses bits to represent permission levels. Read access is marked by 4 bits, write is 2, and execute is 1. When you want a file to have read and write access, you just add the permission bits: 4 + 2 = 6. When you want a file to have read, write and execute access, you’ll have 4 + 2 + 1, or 7. You’d then apply that numerical permission to a file in the same order as above: user, group, other. If we used the example from the last sentence in the previous paragraph, a file that could be read by anyone, but could only be writeable by the user and the group, would have a numeric permission level of 664 (user: 6, group: 6, other: 4).

Now the “chmod 777” I referenced above should make a little more sense: All users are given all permissions (4 + 2 + 1 = 7).

Applying Permissions

Understanding these components, applying permissions is pretty straightforward with the use of the chmod command. If you want a user (u) to write and execute a file (wx) but not read it (r), you’d use something like this:

In the above terminal image, I added the -v parameter to make it “verbose,” so it displays the related output or results of the command. The permissions set by the command are shown by the number 0300 and the series (-wx------). Nobody but the user can write or execute this file, and as of now, the user can’t even read the file. If you were curious about the leading 0 in “0300,” it simply means that you’re viewing an octal output, so for our purposes, it can be ignored entirely.

In that command, we’re removing the read permission from the user (hence the minus sign between u and r), and we’re giving the user write and execute permissions with the plus sign between u and wx. Want to alter the group or other permissions as well? It works exactly the same way: g+,g-,o+,o- … Getting the idea? chmod permissions can be set with the letter-based commands (u+r,u-w) or with their numeric equivalents (eg. 400 or 644), whichever floats your boat.

A Quick Numeric chmod Reference

chmod 777 | Gives specified file read, write and execute permissions (rwx) to ALL users
chmod 666 | Allows for read and write privileges (rw) to ALL users
chmod 555 | Gives read and execute permissions (rx) to ALL users
chmod 444 | Gives read permissions (r) to ALL users
chmod 333 | Gives write and execute permissions (wx) to ALL users
chmod 222 | Gives write privileges (w) to ALL users
chmod 111 | Gives execute privileges (x) to ALL users
chmod 000 | Last but not least, gives permissions to NO ONE (Careful!)

Get a List of File Permissions

To see what your current file permissions are in a given directory, execute the ls –l command. This returns a list of the current directory including the permissions, the group it’s in, the size and the last date the file was modified. The output of ls –l looks like this:

On the left side of that image, you’ll see the permissions in the rwx format. When the permission begins with the “d” character, it means that object is a directory. When the permission starts with a dash (-), it is a file.

Practice Deciphering Permissions

Let’s look at a few examples and work backward to apply what we’ve learned:

• Example 1: -rw-------
• Example 2: drwxr-x---
• Example 3: -rwxr-xr-x

In Example 1, the file is not a directory, the user that owns this particular object has read and write permissions, and when the group and other fields are filled with dashes, we know that their permissions are set to 0, so they have no access. In this case, only the user who owns this object can do anything with it. We’ll cover “ownership” in a future blog, but if you’re antsy to learn right now, you can turn to the all-knowing Google.

In Example 2, the permissions are set on a directory. The user has read, write and execute permissions, the group has read and execute permissions, and anything/anyone besides user or group is restricted from access.

For Example 3, put yourself to the test. What access is represented by “-rwxr-xr-x”? The answer is included at the bottom of this post.

Wrapping It Up

How was that for a crash course in Unix environment permissions? Of course there’s more to it, but this will at least make you think about what kind of access you’re granting to your files. Armed with this knowledge, you can create the most secure server environment.

Here are a few useful links you may want to peruse at your own convenience to learn more:

Linuxforums.org
Zzee.com
Comptechdoc.org
Permissions Calculator

Did I miss anything? Did I make a blatantly ridiculous mistake? Did I use “their” when I should have used “they’re”??!!… Let me know about it. Shoot me an email (rrobson @ theplanet.com) or leave a comment if you’ve got anything to add, suggest, subtract, quantize, theorize, ponderize, etc. Think your useful links are better than my useful links? Throw those at me too, and we’ll toss ‘em up here. I hope this helps make at least one or two confused sysadmin’s first foray into the Unix dimension just a little bit easier.

- Ryan