The Planet, the world’s largest privately held dedicated hosting company, recently deployed the first PowerEdge R710 servers, based on Intel’s Xeon 5500 series processors. I was able to join a team of my Dell colleagues who were on hand to observe the company’s IT personnel un-boxing the new systems and deploying them in their Houston-based data center. While we were there, the company was also deploying them in their Dallas data center, for a total of more than 80 PowerEdge R710 systems being put onto the grid.
The Planet serves more than 20,000 businesses worldwide, with about 40 percent of those located outside of North America. They have standardized on Dell PowerEdge servers and have about 56,000 of them in six data centers powering more than 17 million websites worldwide.
I had the opportunity to talk to Urvish Vashi, general manager for The Planet’s Dedicated Server Hosting business. In our discussion, he talked about the strong design elements of Dell’s new PowerEdge servers that address power and cooling issues and take advantage of the power of the new Intel processors. The entire team had discussions with The Planet’s Jon Lowe, who manages operations for the company’s two Houston data centers. He talked about some of the design elements that made the deployment of the servers much faster than they anticipated, specifically new rail designs that enable simple installation and easy access.
Urvish provides an overview of The Planet, what their customers expect of them and their growth challenges.