Round Tale

(The Hosting News) – The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today discussed its results for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2009. The Chairman and CEO of The Planet  Douglas J. Erwin was officially quoted as saying that the company  “ended the fourth quarter and the year with increased revenue and EBITDA beyond 30%, despite the tough economic conditions”. Mr. Erwin went on to say that  “during the quarter, we reorganized our sales and support organizations to best serve our various customer segments, and we declared 2010 the Year of Customer Experience. In that regard, we recently announced certain new offerings, and lowered our prices for bandwidth and various server lines. We also have kicked off numerous training and customer service programs in an effort to deliver the best customer experience in the industry.
“To deliver across the board, operational excellence is critical. While our customer satisfaction rankings remain at all-time record highs, we will continue to make changes to improve our performance and deliver the products and services our customers require for their businesses.”

“We had another record revenue year and a solid quarter,” said Chief Financial Officer Kevin Klausmeyer. “Deal sizes continue to increase, and the managed hosting business is gaining more traction. Our cash flows remain very strong, which has resulted in a powerful balance sheet, with our net debt at its lowest level in the past three years. In 2010, we plan to make significant investments in our customer-facing systems, our network, our Virtual Dedicated Server offering and our data center infrastructure.”

Fourth Quarter Highlights
Complex Infrastructure Growth: The company’s complex infrastructure solutions, which include virtual and private racks, experienced more than 30% growth year-over-year, making them the fastest-growing products in the portfolio.

Partner Program Addition: Ayuda Networks, a highly regarded leader in IT infrastructure connectivity strategy and services, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., joined the company’s Partner Plus program.

Cloud Speaking Engagements: Rob Walters, director of product management, represented The Planet as a panelist at the Cloud Computing Expo and Conference. Todd Mitchell, general manager for the company’s Dedicated Hosting and Global Services business, delivered an address on cloud computing at the fourth annual cPanel customer conference.

New Storage Area Network: The company announced the availability of the Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a high-performance storage area network (SAN) disk array. Ideal for multi-server environments such as virtual and private racks, the company’s fastest-growing solutions, the MD3000i offers a cost-effective and scalable storage solution.

Nehalem Servers: The Xeon 3450, based on the Dell PowerEdge R210 platform and loaded with Intel’s next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, became the third and most powerful server in the company’s fleet.

Microsoft OS Added to Portfolio: The company added the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 to its product line-up, making it available to all dedicated hosting customers.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark Membership: Supporting its SMB customers, the company joined Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program, which provides small Web development and design firms with free Microsoft licenses for the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server, key tools for building and designing rich Web sites.

Texas IPv6 Conference: At its Houston-based headquarters, The Planet hosted and served as a Gold Sponsor for the Texas IPv6 Task Force, which attracted more than 100 participants. Also participating as Gold Sponsors were NTT America, Global Crossing and ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers).

The Planet Reports Fourth Quarter Results

(The Hosting News) – The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today discussed its results for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2009. The Chairman and CEO of The Planet  Douglas J. Erwin was officially quoted as saying that the company  “ended the fourth quarter and the year with increased revenue and EBITDA beyond 30%, despite the tough economic conditions”. Mr. Erwin went on to say that  “during the quarter, we reorganized our sales and support organizations to best serve our various customer segments, and we declared 2010 the Year of Customer Experience. In that regard, we recently announced certain new offerings, and lowered our prices for bandwidth and various server lines. We also have kicked off numerous training and customer service programs in an effort to deliver the best customer experience in the industry.
“To deliver across the board, operational excellence is critical. While our customer satisfaction rankings remain at all-time record highs, we will continue to make changes to improve our performance and deliver the products and services our customers require for their businesses.”

“We had another record revenue year and a solid quarter,” said Chief Financial Officer Kevin Klausmeyer. “Deal sizes continue to increase, and the managed hosting business is gaining more traction. Our cash flows remain very strong, which has resulted in a powerful balance sheet, with our net debt at its lowest level in the past three years. In 2010, we plan to make significant investments in our customer-facing systems, our network, our Virtual Dedicated Server offering and our data center infrastructure.”

Fourth Quarter Highlights
Complex Infrastructure Growth: The company’s complex infrastructure solutions, which include virtual and private racks, experienced more than 30% growth year-over-year, making them the fastest-growing products in the portfolio.

Partner Program Addition: Ayuda Networks, a highly regarded leader in IT infrastructure connectivity strategy and services, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., joined the company’s Partner Plus program.

Cloud Speaking Engagements: Rob Walters, director of product management, represented The Planet as a panelist at the Cloud Computing Expo and Conference. Todd Mitchell, general manager for the company’s Dedicated Hosting and Global Services business, delivered an address on cloud computing at the fourth annual cPanel customer conference.

New Storage Area Network: The company announced the availability of the Dell PowerVault MD3000i, a high-performance storage area network (SAN) disk array. Ideal for multi-server environments such as virtual and private racks, the company’s fastest-growing solutions, the MD3000i offers a cost-effective and scalable storage solution.

Nehalem Servers: The Xeon 3450, based on the Dell PowerEdge R210 platform and loaded with Intel’s next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, became the third and most powerful server in the company’s fleet.

Microsoft OS Added to Portfolio: The company added the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 to its product line-up, making it available to all dedicated hosting customers.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark Membership: Supporting its SMB customers, the company joined Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program, which provides small Web development and design firms with free Microsoft licenses for the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server, key tools for building and designing rich Web sites.

Texas IPv6 Conference: At its Houston-based headquarters, The Planet hosted and served as a Gold Sponsor for the Texas IPv6 Task Force, which attracted more than 100 participants. Also participating as Gold Sponsors were NTT America, Global Crossing and ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers).

The Planet Reports Fourth Quarter Results

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, has outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.
The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”
The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support.  For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

$7 Million Network Investment announced by The Planet is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, has outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.
The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”
The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support.  For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

$7 Million Network Investment announced by The Planet is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, has outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.
The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”
The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support.  For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

$7 Million Network Investment announced by The Planet is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, has outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.
The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”
The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support.  For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

$7 Million Network Investment announced by The Planet is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON – The Planet, a global leader in IT hosting, has outlined plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities. The company plans capital investments in network capacity upgrades, expanded infrastructure for its Private and Virtual Rack solutions, new routers and switches, and robust test platforms to evaluate custom solutions. To increase network resilience and capacity, the company plans to double the number of 10 Gig-E links connecting its data centers with its Internet Service Providers. Also planned are capacity and functionality upgrades to meet the unprecedented traffic utilization demands of its colocation and managed hosting customers.
The Planet operates seven data centers – two in Houston and five in Dallas – with 179,000 square feet of raised floor, and additional capacity in London for virtual rack customers. Approximately 44 percent of the company’s business originates from outside of North America, and it operates network points of presence on the East and West Coasts to enhance network performance and reduce latency.
“Our network and data centers are core to the value we provide customers, and over the past three years, we’ve made significant investments to improve speed, reduce latency and ultimately provide the best customer experience,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “Even with these investments, our growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on our network. Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance.”
The upgrades will be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support.  For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.

$7 Million Network Investment announced by The Planet is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON, TX – Expanding its mission to provide customers with the best value in the hosting industry, The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced sweeping price reductions across its product portfolio. From domestic and international servers in London, to CDNs, bandwidth, services, and hard drive and RAM upgrades, the company is lowering pricing and taking deliberate steps that enable customers to extract more value from their hosting investments.
Prices on new server orders are reduced from 7 to 30 percent, while RAM and hard drives are reduced by 50 percent.
Today’s price reductions come on the heels of recently announced bundles that come with every new server (http://www.theplanet.com/about/news-events/press-releases/2010/The-Planet-Now-Offers-Free-Control-Panel,-Cloud-St/). The bundle includes Symantec business-class antivirus software, 10GB of Storage Cloud, the company’s robust cloud storage solution, and the choice of either Parallels Plesk Panel or cPanel/WebHost Manager (WHM).
“We’re focusing on value and how we deliver even better, more responsive customer experience from every vector of our business,” said The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Douglas J. Erwin. “We want to make The Planet an easier company to do business with across the board, backed by the quality of our data centers, network and an 86 percent customer satisfaction rating. During the course of the year we’re planning additional programs, seminars and education opportunities that will underscore why we’re the uncontested value leader in the industry.”
To learn more about The Planet’s new pricing, visit the Web site at http://www.theplanet.com or contact Sales at 1-866-325-0045.

About The Planet
The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses. For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.
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The Planet Escalates Hosting Value with Permanent Price Reductions is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

(The Hosting News) - HOUSTON, TX – Expanding its mission to provide customers with the best value in the hosting industry, The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced sweeping price reductions across its product portfolio. From domestic and international servers in London, to CDNs, bandwidth, services, and hard drive and RAM upgrades, the company is lowering pricing and taking deliberate steps that enable customers to extract more value from their hosting investments.
Prices on new server orders are reduced from 7 to 30 percent, while RAM and hard drives are reduced by 50 percent.
Today’s price reductions come on the heels of recently announced bundles that come with every new server (http://www.theplanet.com/about/news-events/press-releases/2010/The-Planet-Now-Offers-Free-Control-Panel,-Cloud-St/). The bundle includes Symantec business-class antivirus software, 10GB of Storage Cloud, the company’s robust cloud storage solution, and the choice of either Parallels Plesk Panel or cPanel/WebHost Manager (WHM).
“We’re focusing on value and how we deliver even better, more responsive customer experience from every vector of our business,” said The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Douglas J. Erwin. “We want to make The Planet an easier company to do business with across the board, backed by the quality of our data centers, network and an 86 percent customer satisfaction rating. During the course of the year we’re planning additional programs, seminars and education opportunities that will underscore why we’re the uncontested value leader in the industry.”
To learn more about The Planet’s new pricing, visit the Web site at http://www.theplanet.com or contact Sales at 1-866-325-0045.

About The Planet
The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 18.5 million Web sites worldwide. Customers have the power to choose from the broadest range of hosting solutions in the industry, from dedicated servers, Managed Dedicated Servers, Northstar Managed Hosting™ and data center colocation, all backed by 24×7×365 support. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class service, backed by state-of-the-art data centers and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses. For additional information, visit http://www.theplanet.com.
###

The Planet Escalates Hosting Value with Permanent Price Reductions is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.

SANTA CLARA, CA — The adoption of virtualization and outsourcing of infrastructure to managed hosting and cloud providers is driving demand for high performance and increased scale in the data center network. Extreme Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXTR) has responded with next-generation data center products to enable the migration to virtualized data centers and new infrastructure solutions that feature market-leading scalability, performance and simplicity.

Hosting companies and enterprises alike are scaling their data centers to realize the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure and cloud-based applications and systems. This new architecture enables resources to be dynamically managed and deployed and therefore delivers great organizational flexibility, agility and scale.

The physical network — providing essential interconnect and backbone within and between Data Centers globally — is the foundation for the new virtualized architecture and topologies. It is therefore essential that the network technology and systems be highly scalable, deliver powerful performance, capacity and capabilities to support large data center implementations. Whether these deployments are based upon Layer 2 or Layer 3 designs, the network must support a rapidly expanding number of virtual machines and a very large numbers of users within a limited power and physical footprint.

“As managed hosting and cloud environments continue to grow rapidly, both Layer 2 and Layer 3 scalability becomes a major issue in the network,” said Jon Oltsik, principal network analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Extreme Networks today introduced new core and edge data center switching solutions that boost the physical network to deliver the scale and flexibility for a broad range of deployments. The BlackDiamond(R) 8900-xl modules and Summit(R) X480 stackable switches offer industry-leading data center solutions that allow for a variety of network architectures and topologies to be deployed by managed hosting companies and enterprises.

“With this announcement, Extreme Networks introduces both Layer 2 and Layer 3 scale across its data center product family of switches, and this is essential to scaling the network to enable these kinds of environments,” continued Jon Oltsik.

“Extreme Networks has answered the call as we expand our business, consolidate our data center and migrate to 10 Gigabit Ethernet core,” said Hugh Wilkins, senior manager of Information Technology for Inmar, a leading national provider of retail logistics services in the United States. “Extreme Networks met our foremost priorities for our data center with its Summit and BlackDiamond solution families, and our network has the intelligence, flexibility and performance to manage multiple terabytes of data across our virtualized server environment.”

Product Highlights:

The BlackDiamond 8900-xl modules include Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet data center solutions that more than double the Layer 2 and Layer 3 table size previously supported and deliver a high speed switching capacity of 128 Gigabits per line card. Additionally, the BlackDiamond 8900-xl modules increase port density and scale, allowing the largest data centers to minimize network tiers while supporting increasing numbers of virtual machines. The BlackDiamond 8900-xl modules are available as upgrades to the BlackDiamond 8800 series switch family, allowing organizations to grow at their own pace while avoiding a forklift upgrade.

Extreme Networks Summit X480 fixed configuration 48 port 10/100/1000 switch provides data center class functionality with industry leading Layer 2/3 scalability, front-to-back airflow and dual internal hot swappable power supplies and fans. Taking advantage of the optional VIM2 slot, which is 40 Gigabit Ethernet ready, the Summit X480 supports a four port 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplink module or a stacking support module which provides 40Gbps or 128Gbps throughput.

The Summit X480 serves as a high performance data center edge solution with robust stacking features to enable highly scalable “virtual chassis” configurations for the data center. Virtual chassis functionality allows the data center to control 1.8 terabit of switching capacity as a single managed device.

The BlackDiamond 8900-xl modules and Summit X480 stackable switches fit within Extreme Networks extensibility framework, featuring the single modular operating system, ExtremeXOS(TM), XML APIs, an open SDK and cross platform scripting capabilities enabling more rapid customization and automation of the network.

Pricing and Availability

The BlackDiamond -xl modules for the BlackDiamond 8800 have a List price starting at U.S. $15,995. The Summit X480 switch has a list price starting at U.S. $11,995 for fiber and U.S. $9,995 for copper (Base-T). Both products will be available for shipment this quarter.

To learn more about Extreme Networks high performance data center solutions, visit:

http://www.extremenetworks.com/solutions/datacenter.aspx

Extreme Networks Announces Scalable Virtualized Infrastructure for Managed Hosting and Enterprise Data Centers is a post from: Hosting News and Reseller Web Hosting information.