(The Hosting News) – The Planet today formally announced it’s 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.

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