The Planet Blog

You’ve probably been on pins and needles since you read our last blog post … anxiously anticipating the inside information of how we built a better-than-ideal-efficiency data center.

If you’re familiar with data center design, you’ve probably heard the terms “cold aisle” and “hot aisle.” A cold aisle is an aisle between racks of servers that sends cool air up through the floor (in the case of raised flooring data centers) and into the fronts of the servers. The air cools the server components and is exhausted through the back of the server as warm air, creating a hot aisle behind the server. Data centers are typically set up with racks of servers arranged front-to-front and back-to-back so that for every 2 rows of servers, only one cold aisle is needed. (If you’d like to see this setup in action, check out our popular Data Centric post.)

D6 Phase 3 uses those principles in a different way: hot and cold air are completely isolated.

Let’s take a look at how the phase is built to see what that looks like and why it is much more efficient.

In a raised-floor data center, your air conditioner blows air down under the floor into an air-tight compartment, and you insert vented floor tiles in the areas you want to cool. The large black unit in the image below is one of this phase’s air conditioners.

The metal posts you see on the ground are the braces used to create the grids upon which flooring tiles are installed.

The photo below is the bottom of a flooring tile. You’ll notice that there are no screws or bolts on the tile … it is simply laid on top of a grid of braces to make an air-tight seal. Each of the tiles is partially made out of concrete and is relatively heavy, so when a tile is installed, it’s not going anywhere unless you really want it to.

Below, you can see what the flooring grid looks like without floor tiles installed.

As we continue building the flooring, the data center appears to be taking shape … pretty standard process up to this point. But now, take a look at the air conditioning units below. Notice anything strange (aside from the fact that the covers aren’t installed)?

The return air plenum extends all the way to the ceiling of the room … now we’re getting somewhere.

I only retained a few things from my elementary school physics lessons, but one of them was that warm air rises and cold air sinks. This natural phenomenon is used in data center cooling: the air conditioners send the cold air down under the floor to cool the servers, when the servers send out warm air, the warm air rises to the top of the room, and the air conditioners pull the warm air from the top of the room to process and send back down as cold air. As Jeff mentioned in his interview, the higher the air conditioner pulls the air from, the warmer that air will be, and you don’t want to cool already cold air, so you should try and pull the hottest air in the data center.

Phase 3 goes a step further: it creates an airtight space above the ceiling tiles where all the warm air is exhausted and pulled in by the air conditioners.

So once we’ve got the floor tiles and the ceiling tiles installed, our fresh data center phase (without any server racks) looks like this:

This begs a big question: if the cold air is being sent through the floor to the servers and the warm air is being pulled from the ceiling, how do the servers pull the cold air and push the warm air without the heat being disseminated into the other areas of the data center?

Enter our new custom-made rack-mount cabinets.

The cabinet above is pulled out in one of our other data centers to demonstrate the design of the Phase 3 cabinets. The servers will pull cold air from the floor in front of the server but instead of exhausting the warm air out into an open aisle, the warm air will rise through a vent sealed to the ceiling (the sides, front and back of the cabinet are closed when the covers are installed).

So a completely installed server row looks like this:

One noticeable difference between this data center and the other data centers we’ve shown you in Houston and Dallas are the servers themselves: all rack-mount, no towers.

The rack-mount servers allow for a better power density throughout the data center, so we’ve got to make sure we can provide the power to all of our new servers in the event of a utility power outage.

We’ve got N+1 power redundancy, so for every phase, we have a dedicated backup generator, and for every data center we’ve got an extra backup generator in case any of the other generators fail. New phase = new generator. It’s pretty interesting to see the generator without its skin, right?

Now that power is accounted for, we can install our PDUs for each aisle and prepare to get servers up and running in the new phase.

A little networking and wiring, and D6 Phase 3 is ready for business! In the first picture below, you can see the orange tubes which are primary network drops into the phase … and yes, even those are sealed in the ceiling.

Head over to our The Planet’s Flickr page for a few more pictures of the new data center phase.

-Kevin

I think I’ve officially become a geek. I just got a few of the pictures from the build-out of our newest data center phase, and I’m almost ashamed to admit how excited I was to write this post as an opportunity to showcase them.

The Planet has six data centers between Houston and Dallas, and some have been built out in “phases” or semi-independent sections. This phased construction process allows us to invest our time and money more efficiently because we can create space as we need it, rather than building out an entire data center shell and having to heat/cool/power the excess space that may not actually house servers for months. Following a very welcome ramp up in demand for our dedicated servers and managed hosting, we recognized an impending need for more data center space, so our facilities team fired up their engines and began planning Phase 3 of our D6 data center … and that’s when the fun started.

Jeff Lowenberg, our vice president of facilities, spoke with WHIRtv about the progress we’ve made in improving our data center efficiency over the past year, and the new data center phase is a testament to the work Jeff and his team have done in researching and designing new data center space. With a few of these innovative ideas, we worked directly with our vendors to create custom DC solutions, and the results are beyond ideal … literally: the new phase’s coefficient of efficiency (the total power necessary to operate a data center divided by the power necessary to operate the servers alone) will be approximately 1.5, which is below (better than) the “ideal” ranking of 1.6. With a lower coefficient of efficiency, a greater percentage of our power is running servers rather than heating/cooling/lighting the data center space while maintaining a perfect operating environment for the servers.

Tune in tomorrow for a tour of the new phase’s construction where we’ll “show and tell” HOW this is possible.

-Kevin

P.S. You may have seen that we announced a new data center earlier this week – D7 – to be built out in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas. We’re preleasing it and expect to have it ready in May, so you can expect to see a bit more info about that space on the blog as that facility takes shape.

Given the ever-evolving social media landscape, it can be difficult for a company to evaluate if, how, when and where it should participate.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been throwing around a few ideas about how we can communicate with our customers more often and get feedback.

Enter twitter: A community-driven platform built to communicate what different members are doing in real-time. It starts a new conversation.

Follow us on our official twitter page - theplanetdotcom - where we will regularly answer the status-centric question, “What are you doing?”

If you are not a part of the twitter community yet, now’s your chance to sign up and join the conversation. We also want to learn about you!

I apologize if this announcement post seems a little disjointed. I wanted to make sure each one of these entries was exactly 140 characters.

-Kevin

The year is winding down and the holidays are around the corner. As a nice reward for a year of hard work, the big bosses decided we’d have fantastic holiday parties in both Houston and Dallas welcoming our families, friends and business associates to The Planet. Thus The Planet Holiday Festival was born.

Tuesday was the Houston party at headquarters downtown. We had tons of activities for the entire family. You could hear Santa’s “ho ho ho” and children’s squeals all over the building.

Outside we had snow! Yes, it did snow in Houston – but that was the day after the party. On party day, we imported it. We had a fun snow pile for snowball fights and a great big snow hill to slide down. I can honestly say the big kids had just as much fun as the little ones.

Santa was a big hit. He got everyone’s gift requests, posed for pictures and brought smiles to everyone’s faces. We were all very thankful that he could take time out of his busy schedule to visit our little soirée.

CEOs have holiday wishes, too!

Just like little girls do.

There was food everywhere! Kid-friendly snacks like pizza and chicken nuggets were available in the break room with more “adult-friendly” fare fair in the Bayou Room and out on the patio.

Other activities include face-painting, balloon animals and gingerbread men cookie decorating, along with a professional photographer who was on hand to take family photos.

Like father …

Like son.

Big kids!

Here is a shot from the professional photographer of a few of us in the Marketing department. Go figure … of course we’d be the ones to do a group shot and ham it up!

By the end of the night, I saw lots of little ones crying because they were tired and didn’t want to leave while very happy parents waited for their cars. It was a wonderful party that really showcased what the employees of this company really mean to senior management. This is a fantastic place to work, and this is just one of the examples of it!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

-Ali

For more party photos visit The Planet Flickr page.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m pretty sure the picture below is worth about a million.

I can’t come up with any to describe it.

I have no idea how I would react if I received a Happy Holidays postcard like that. I don’t want to find out either.

-The Guy Wearing the Rudolph Shirt and Sweater-Vest Combination

P.S. You can click on the image above for a larger version. You can decide whether or not that’s a good idea.

The Planet’s Professional Services engineers are a rare breed. Send us any non-standard problem, and we’ll jump on it to find a solution. That kind of jumping is typically the only jumping you see from one of us, but last Thursday challenged that status quo: a few of us spent our day jumping … out of a perfectly good airplane … hurtling toward a small field just South of Houston.

Being the last line of support at The Planet can get a bit stressful with all the interesting problems that come our way. Sometimes it becomes necessary to cut loose and take some risks. Our group is fairly tight-knit, so we end up supporting each other through these brief periods of insanity and have a blast in the process!

On Thursday, the three of us in Houston – accompanied by our colleague Geraldine Fernando who works at our help desk – ended up taking a half day off of work to go sky diving. We were all new to the process, and needless to say, we were a bit nervous.

Skydive Spaceland would be our proving ground.

To be honest, the location didn’t assuage any of our fears … the letters on the front of the building were merely outlines of their initial glory (pictured above), and we couldn’t help but wonder if this was the result of some unfortunate sky diving accident or just a boring hurricane.

As we started to prepare for our jumps, the sign-your-life-away forms were a bit of a reality check. Each paragraph literally stressed that there is a possibility you can die from jumping out of a plane, followed by several paragraphs confirming that you actually read the paragraph prior and understand the risks. Five pages, and twenty “initial here” fields later, we were amply freaked out and excited to start training!

Our training program consisted of watching an instructional video on what to do once you were actually plummeting to your doom … err, skydiving is what they called it. As an aside: If you can get your hands on this training tape, we’d advise you to take note of the instructor’s beard: it’s epic. Seriously, he could have been wearing a tie, and we would have never known.

(Left to right: Shawn Lime, Christopher Gallo, Geraldine Fernando, James Jhurani)

After training, we met with our instructors, all of whom were surprisingly laid back. They had the luxury of knowing the feeling of a successful skydive. We were not that lucky. They helped us suit up, answered all of our nervous questions and walked through the “this is how it will really happen” version of our training.

The only thing we had left to do was actually do it. Given the most recent skydiving safety statistics, we were confident that most of us would make it back to the office on Friday, but our legs were pretty heavy as we climbed into the plane.

After takeoff, we went over some-last minute questions and reminders. We latched onto our designated instructors, and they assured us that each of the harnesses could support 2500 lbs … which strangely didn’t help with our fear about the parachute opening.

Then we hit fourteen thousand feet, and we had to scoot the longest 10 feet of our lives.

No turning back now … the only way to the ground was out the side of the plane.

Pictures don’t do justice to the rush: free falling to terminal velocity and trying to process the fact that the only thing between you and the ground is a few thousand feet of air. You don’t know whether to scream or smile or close your eyes or breathe … then you realize breathing is not optional.

At Skydive Spaceland, you are encouraged to pull your own ripcord after checking your own altimeter, so you get the full thrill of pulling the cord and waiting for the ‘chute to catch. In reality — based on the statistics — tandem skydives are very safe, and each one of us experienced a textbook jump … the last few thousand feet drifting under canopy to our landing zone.

The final phase of the tandem jump requires you raise your legs straight out in front of you and slowly pull down on the flairs as you approach the landing zone. Depending on the speed of your landing, the instructor may tell you to sit or stand as you reach the ground. Geraldine insisted that we include the fact that she was the only one in our group to land on her feet, while the rest of us slid in on our backsides.

It was blast, and we couldn’t have been more reassured by the professionalism of our instructors at Skydive Spaceland. We’ve all caught the skydiving bug, and after we got back to the office we heard that one of our coworkers is a skydiving regular, so we challenge her to give her perspective on a jump … Patricia?

- Shawn, Christopher, Geraldine and James

Hi there. It’s me again. I’m still in the trenches, trying to find a decent Reuben sandwich in the tunnels.

Daylight saving time ended last month in Texas, and as I changed my clocks, I dutifully replaced the battery in my smoke alarm, just like the public service announcements advised. As I balanced on a chair on top of my coffee table, I pondered: Why is the smoke alarm running on a battery and not, say, plugged into the wall?

Well, in a fire, power can get interrupted, so it’s best to have the smoke alarm running on an independent source of power that you can test and replace when necessary. In a way, this applies to your server, too.

Since my previous post, I’ve counted up a total of 18 incidents where a customer did not get notification of an update to a ticket or a critical message regarding a change to our services. Every one of those missed communications could be traced to an e-mail address residing on the affected server. Each one of those customers suffered downtime because they either didn’t receive an alert in a reasonable amount of time or they didn’t respond to a technician who was ready and waiting to assist them.

And those incidents were just the ones that I fielded … there’s no telling how many folks out there have their “server smoke detectors” hard-wired into the wall.

It’s critical that you keep your contact information up-to-date in Orbit and that you provide us with an external e-mail address. Same thing goes with the monitoring system: Use a contact address that will work if the server goes down.

The best solution I’ve found is to use a third-party provider like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and forward those contacts/alerts to your primary mailbox (which can be on your server). By setting your contact address to a third-party provider first, you can ensure that you will always be able to access any important notifications. If you use a mail program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can have the program check your third-party mailbox in parallel with your primary mailbox, eliminating the need to set up an auto-forward rule.

My advice: Do both.

Yes, I know that means you’ll get two messages for every one delivered to that emergency line, but in the end, isn’t it better to be over-notified of a potential emergency than to not hear about it at all?

-Laurence