The Planet, a major player in IT hosting, plans to spend more than $7 million to enhance the network infrastructure in Houston and Dallas, its core operating cities.
The Planet officials said that 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.
The company officials said that to increase network resilience and capacity, The Planet 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.
Around 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 Douglas J. Erwin, chairman and CEO of The Planet, in a statement.
Erwin said that even with these investments, the company’s growth has outpaced requirements as customers place more demands on the network.
“Ultimately we’ll deliver improvements in orders of magnitude that offer increased capacity, and even more resilience and fault tolerance,” he said.
The upgrades are slated to be completed in phases, beginning in March, with completion expected by year-end 2010.
Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anil’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Erin Harrison
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