Rackspace just completed its second ‘Green’ week. A year ago, Rackspace launched Greenspace, a proactive campaign to address the issues of power consumption and efficiency, carbon emissions, and general environmental responsibility.

Since then, we’ve come out with products like the Green Server configuration (utilizing the most energy efficient hardware, with all of the carbon usage offset through NativeEnergy). We’ve begun offering cloud hosting through Mosso and virtualization. And most notably, our new data center in Slough is run completely on renewable energy.

So what was Green Week?

(read more…)

DNS or Domain Name System is a service most commonly used to translate Domain Names (URL’s, websites, call them what you will) into IP Addresses. Realistically, IP Addresses are the true identifiers of how to locate things/places on the Internet, however DNS makes it much simpler to “surf” by only having to reference Domain Names that are much easier to remember. DNS functions in a hierarchical structure

Rackspace uses an implementation strategy called AnyCast with our Authoritative DNS. This technology allows us to announce the same DNS IP space from 3 different (or as many as desired) datacenters via the BGP protocol we run with our Internet Service Providers. The purpose of this is multi-fold in that it not only allows us to have active/active DR type redundancy, but it also allows us to serve customer requests from the closest DNS infrastructure possible, which typically means the best response time too. Additionally, it allows for the ease of maintenance, upgrades, and expansion our our DNS infrastructure with no customer impact.

This is the same kind of underlying technology that the Root Nameservers of the Internet run off of, and many other companies that specialize in DNS as a service.

Order by phone or online?  Pickup or delivery?  Generally speaking, there isn’t one way of doing things.  We all have preferences and priorities. This is something lots of us have thought about over the years at Rackspace.  How do each of our customers want to be supported?  Does it depend on the situation they’re in? 

From my experience, each customer defines Fanatical Support a little different.  For some it’s about being able to call at 3am and have a team of Linux experts eager to troubleshoot an unusual Apache error.  For others it’s about having the power to go into the MyRackspace customer portal to create a snapshot of their virtual server. This is one of the beautiful things about Fanatical Support; it represents many things to many customers.  And so, having options is very important.

We’ve heard consistently from customers that while they love having a team of Rackers available to support them around the clock, many prefer to just take care of some things themselves. Self-service matters at Rackspace! Self-service is about offering choices that make hosting easier and more efficient.  If a customer has the expertise and would prefer to just knock out a quick change themselves, then they should have the tools available to easily make this change.  This is something we understand and have a fleet of folks working to deliver. (read more…)

I wrote on the RackLabs blog over the weekend about our first Rackspace Developers Conference and I thought I’d post a pointer to it here on the Rackspace blog too. To make a long story short, we held a big conference here in San Antonio last week for all of the Rackers who develop software here at Rackspace. We’re thinking next time we’d like to invite some of our customers. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in attending?

Also, if you’re a developer and interested in joining Rackspace, we’d love to hear from you too. We’re looking for talented developers, especially those skilled in the Python and Java languages.

I’ve been at Rackspace for a while. People ask me from time to time to explain exactly what Fanatical Support is. Typically, I try my best to walk through the basics of our approach, philosophy, etc. The challenge has always been that it’s hard to do so without getting into the technical jargon. For most folks, this causes eyes to glaze over and typically buries the important information under a series of acronyms and such in the listener’s minds. So, recently, I’ve tried to find other examples - even outside of the Rack - to help paint the proper picture.

Rackspace doesn’t have the market cornered on great service in San Antonio. There are businesses, and more commonly, individual people that exhibit the same traits we look for in Rackers. Not only was a recent experience my family had an example of this, but it serves as an excellent, non-technical, illustration of what Fanatical Support really looks like. (read more…)

Last week, Rackspace attended Gartner’s Midsize Enterprise Summit in Orlando, Florida to talk to CIOs about hosting. We were given the opportunity to speak at four “boardroom” sessions during the three-day event. Our goal was to tell attendees about Rackspace and how hosting is a great alternative to do-it-all-yourself IT. I presented our story to about 100 IT decision makers from companies all over North and South America and apparently made an impression.

Honestly, I didn’t even know there were awards to be won at the show, but on the last evening of the conference we attended dinner and an awards ceremony where Gartner presented awards that were voted on by the attendees. We won! We were awarded the Midsize Enterprise Summit’s Mid Market Innovation Award in the service category. (read more…)

John Engates, our CTO, recently posted an article about Rackspace and Data Center Efficiency. Having been a part of a lot of those discussions and initiatives, I wanted to briefly touch on what we’ve done specifically to help reduce our carbon footprint on our servers in our Datacenters.

Processor Technology:

AMD Opteron has played a big part in us being able to reduce power. There are several reasons for this. When Opteron came out, they decided to take a different approach and deviate from what was the standard architecture that Intel always used. They integrated the memory controller on the processor and were able to remove the Northbridge from the motherboard. Because of this, the memory was linked directly to the processor and eliminated the usual bottlenecks that the Intel Platforms experienced. This allowed them to stay on older technology memory instead of jumping to the next while maintaining competitive performance. Because of this, we’ve been able to maintain performance with the Intel Xeons while taking advantage of faster memory throughput, reduced power, and reduced cost. One great example of this is that the AMD Socket F platform uses DDR2 memory and has better performance in some cases against Intel Xeon platforms with Fully Buffered Dimms (which take about twice as much power per module). (read more…)

Today we announced the private beta of the much anticipated CloudFS, an Internet-based storage offering that was developed by Mosso and Racklabs. I’ve included a couple interesting excerpts from the press release below:

This file storage offering, CloudFS, allows developers to securely store a virtually unlimited amount of data on the web connected through Rackspace’s infrastructure. At the conclusion of the beta program, the new storage offering will be available as a stand-alone service or as part of Mosso’s cloud hosting solution at competitive storage, bandwidth and transaction pricing. In addition, Rackspace customers will benefit from free local transfers between CloudFS and their managed hosting servers. The ability to tie a scalable and low-cost storage engine to Rackspace’s customized managed hosting environment is unique in the hosting industry.

Mosso is seeking applicants to participate in a private beta program as well as encouraging developers to build tools and services around CloudFS. Developers and businesses interested in the private beta can visit www.mosso.com/cloudfs to apply starting May 5, 2008.

Pricing for CloudFS is strictly pay-for-what-you-use. Current plans target the pricing for storage to start at $0.15 per gigabyte, upon release, including replicated copies for data protection. This competitive rate allows developers to scale their storage-related projects seamlessly and affordably.

The storage platform will be accessed via a ReSTful web services API and language-specific API’s (.NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python). CloudFS will support language-specific libraries, giving customers confidence that they can quickly and easily store data and run applications in a business-class, standards-based environment.

Check out John Engates’ post on the Racklabs blog for an interesting behind the scenes look at the development of CloudFS.

“How do I get my employees to care about customer service?”

This is a common question that we hear. Senior leaders in all types of organizations recognize the power of Fanatical Support, and want to know how they can bring it to their company.

My advice is always the same: If you want to build a culture of customer-centricity, look to the corner office before looking to the front line.

Far too many managers and executives view customer service the same way as public transportation: it’s a great idea – for everyone else but them. The reality is that until customer experience is on your leadership agenda, any efforts to create a service-center culture will fall flat. Why? In my opinion there are two main reasons. (read more…)

As some of you may know, Google recently announced an application hosting offer called AppEngine. Our very own Lew Moorman discusses this, the whole ‘cloud computing’ angle, and Rackspace’s own cloud computing offering Mosso on the RackLabs blog. It’s a very good read. Check it out here.