November 11, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Dedicated managed hosting provider The Planet (www.theplanet.com) announced on Tuesday it has added the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to its Planet Northstar Managed Hosting line of business, enabling customers with Linux, Microsoft or blended environments to now use The Planet’s managed hosting services.
Launched in July, Planet Northstar Managed Hosting (www.planetnorthstar.com) division provides small- and medium-sized customers with enterprise-class IT managed hosting services.
As a Red Hat Premier Hosting Partners, the Planet Northstar engineering staff will now have direct access to the company’s product roadmaps and new platform features, including both Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard and Premium editions, Red Hat Network management technologies and Red Hat Layered Products.
Currently, managed hosting provider Rackspace is the only other Red Hat Premier Hosting Partner.
Previously, The Planet only offered managed hosting for users of Microsoft Windows environments. However, there has been a greater demand for Linux support in recent years as application developers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a foundational component of the LAMP stack or Java Platform, Enterprise Edition.
“With our rigorous Anticipation Advantage best-practices methodology, Planet Northstar Managed Hosting becomes a proactive extension of your IT team,” says Steve Kahan, vice president of marketing and product management at The Planet. “CIOs require proactive planning, preparation and prevention, which is precisely what Planet Northstar provides. Backed by a team of certified professionals, our enterprise-class network and SAS 70 Type II world-class data centers, customers gain access to infrastructure that would otherwise be unaffordable for most companies.”�
As a Red Hat Premier Hosting Partner, Planet Northstar is able to provide greater insight to platform-specific support incidents and package updates, which the company manages and passes directly to customers.
This includes assigning every customer account with experienced engineers and key resources, including a Red Hat Certified Engineer; a senior database administrator specifically certified on MySQL who review the performance and future scalability of every database platform; Red Hat’s Logical Volume Management snapshots to perform online and reliable database backups; advanced platform features; and OS management.
Using its Anticipation Advantage methodology, Planet Northstar uses a four-step process throughout every customer’s hosted IT lifecycle.
The Northstar team starts with in-depth business and technology planning to gain a thorough understanding of the customer’s business and technology goals. Based on the customer’s goals, the team designs and develops a comprehensive, customized systems architecture plan to meet its present and future needs.
The staff proactively manages and maintains the customer’s IT performance. The company then integrates metrics and reports best practices, establishing benchmarks to report the status of IT systems and to find critical trends.
