Towers vs. Rackmount Servers at The Planet

Towers? Rackmounts? Cats and dogs, sleeping together? The Planet discusses server form factors on its blog.

We’ve all seen the new mega-data centers with rack upon rack packed with 1U “pizza box” servers. But different companies have different mixes of form factors in their data centers. Take The Planet, the Houston-based provider that got its start in dedicated server hosting, but has since expanded into managed hosting and colocation.

“Quite a bit has changed in the way we’ve built data centers over the last four years, writes Jon Loew of The Planet’s data center operations staff. “When we opened our H2 data center, we only deployed racks of tower servers, and in our newest data center phase, D6 Phase 3, we only provision rack-mount servers. You might assume this shift to imply the complete dominance of rack-mount servers over its tower-chassis relative. Let me suggest that you’d be making an incorrect assumption.”

Jon explains the variables that go into deployment decisions at The Planet in a blog post.