HOUSTON (Business Wire EON/PRWEB ) November 11, 2008 -- The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced the addition of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to its Planet Northstar Managed Hosting line of business. Customers with Linux, Microsoft or blended environments can now take advantage of premium managed hosting services. As one of just two Red Hat Premier Hosting Partners, the Planet Northstar engineering team will have direct access to the company’s product roadmaps and new platform features, creating a technically superior hosted environment for its customers.

With our rigorous Anticipation Advantage best-practices methodology, Planet Northstar Managed Hosting becomes a proactive extension of your IT team

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.

Databases provide the foundation for today’s advanced, multi-tier applications. To provide the support required by customers in managing these complex applications, Planet Northstar customers are assigned a dedicated MySQL cluster-certified database administrator as part of their core team.

“With our rigorous Anticipation Advantage best-practices methodology, Planet Northstar Managed Hosting becomes a proactive extension of your IT team,” said The Planet’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Steve Kahan. “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.”

About Planet Northstar’s Red Hat Portfolio

As a Red Hat Premier Hosting Partner, the Planet Northstar team provides greater insight to platform-specific support incidents and package updates, which they manage and pass directly to customers:

Red Hat Certified Engineers: Every customer is assigned a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), who has passed rigorous testing requirements to earn the designation.

MySQL Management: A senior database administrator (DBA) specifically certified on MySQL is assigned to every customer account. Each customer account also has access to exclusive MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBAs who are responsible for reviewing the performance and future scalability of every database platform.

Red Hat LVM Expertise: Planet Northstar uses Red Hat’s Logical Volume Management snapshots to perform online and reliable database backups with virtually no performance impact. Customer databases are expertly managed to ensure maximum processing power.

Advanced Linux Platform Features: Linux engineers help customers leverage advanced platform features, including centralized authentication over LDAP; cluster suite failover; shared storage over high-performance SANs; or Apache Web server load balancing.

OS Management: Every Planet Northstar customer gains access to proactive OS management, including hardening procedures, performance monitoring, security patching, managed backups and scalability reviews to be certain systems grow with their business.

Planet Northstar is backed by The Planet’s core infrastructure, including six SAS 70 Type II world-class data centers, enterprise-class network, data center operations, customer provisioning systems, physical and environmental security, and problem management and resolution through its customer portal. Coupled with its powerful and industry-leading Service Level Agreement, Planet Northstar guarantees 100 percent power and network uptime, along with one-hour hardware replacement and 15-minute response times.

Using its Anticipation Advantage methodology, Planet Northstar utilizes a four-step proactive process throughout every client’s hosted IT lifecycle:

Assess: For every customer, the Planet Northstar team begins with in-depth business and technology planning to gain a thorough understanding of business and technology goals. Together they examine current and future expectations, and how each will impact the customer’s technology requirements. The result is a recommended IT implementation plan that delivers on business requirements, along with alternate configurations should the environment or goals change.

Design: Based on the customer’s business and technology goals, the team designs and develops a comprehensive, customized systems architecture plan from the ground up to satisfy specific needs now and into the future. It provides scalability foresight – not just insight – so customers are prepared for each business cycle. The plan also defines how the Planet Northstar team will work as an extension of the customer’s team.

Maintain: The dedicated team of certified and seasoned IT experts applies years of experience to proactively manage and maintain each customer’s IT performance. For example, protection of IT assets is secured by design. Customized change-control procedures are built into the plan to ensure high-availability and security for customers. These processes enable the Planet Northstar team to anticipate and mitigate risks, and prevent breaches, outages or compliance violations.

Measure: Metrics are a key component of Planet Northstar Managed Hosting. By integrating metrics and reporting best practices, the dedicated account team establishes benchmarks to report the status of IT systems and to identify critical trends. Quarterly interactive meetings are held to review systems health and discover new ways to improve operating procedures and technology performance, at the same time integrating these metrics with the Anticipation Advantage methodology.

To learn more about Planet Northstar, visit the Web site at www.planetnorthstar.com. White papers that provide additional details are available for download: The Anticipation Advantage of Proactive Managed Hosting; and Leveraging Capex-Free Managed Hosting by the Yankee Group, an industry-leading research company.

About The Planet

The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 25,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 13.3 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and advanced services backed by 24x7x365 support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division combines a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver a fully managed hosting solution. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities 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 www.theplanet.com.

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