October 6, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IT hosting provider The Planet (www.theplanet.com) has added significant improvements to its enterprise-class network, consolidating its Houston and Dallas networks into a single, global network, providing increased reliability and scalability, and a more consistent experience for the company's 22,000 customers.
According to The Planet's announcement Monday, the integration provides a common network policy across the company's six data centers in the two cities. Almost two-and-a-half years after hosting giants Dallas-based The Planet and Houston-based EV1Servers were bought by investment firm GI Partners (www.gipartners.com), the two companies have announced the results of a two-year long integration initiative.
"In survey-after-survey, customers tell us they choose The Planet based on the quality and reliability of our network and data centers. Both comprise the central nervous system operations for our customers, who rely on us to operate their mission-critical IT infrastructures around the clock," The Planet vice president of technology Will Charnock said in a statement. "During the past two years, we've performed significant upgrades to deliver even better quality network capabilities."
To prepare for next-generation technologies, The Planet's network is now Internet Protocol version 6-ready and is running Multiprotocol Label Switching for greater traffic engineering and management. IPv6 has a much larger address space than IPv4, the current standard that is facing the threat of address exhaustion. It provides more flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and virtually eliminates the need for network address translation. MLPS provides networks with a more efficient way to manage applications and move information between locations by prioritizing network traffic.
"As we prepare for future technologies that will be important to our customers," Charnock said. "These upgrades represent strategic investments that provide them with access to the highest-quality network in our industry."
The company has upgraded its interconnection with all its major carriers to 10Gbps connections. In the Houston data centers, 10Gbps port upgrades were added to AboveNet, NTT, Level3 and AT&T, expanding total capacity and performance. The Planet has also installed redundant 10Gbps links between its Dallas network and Houston's H1 and H2 data centers.
The company said it has upgraded every core network router to Foundry XMRs, and all customer-facing routers to Cisco 4500 Series routers. It has also increased its Internet capacity in Houston to 65Gbps.
