Are you ready for the Rackspace Revolution?  That’s the theme of several activities we will sponsor at the 2010 SxSW Interactive Festival.  Here’s a brief look at scheduled events.

Noteworthy Panel

The company has organized a noteworthy panel called Can You Run a Server-less Business? to be moderated by GigaOm’s Editor Stacey Higginbotham.  Panelists include Lew Moorman, Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer and President of the Rackspace Cloud; Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com; Mark Interrante, VP, Media Products, Yahoo!, Inc; and Ethan Kaplan, Senior Vice President, Emerging Technology, Warner/Elektra/Atlantic Corp.  Scheduled for 11 a.m. – 12 noon on Tuesday, March 16 at Hilton Ballroom C, the event is open to anyone with the appropriate admission badge for the festival.  As well, the panel discussion will be available after the event on podcast and video.

Rackspace Revolution Party

The Rackspace team will take over popular 6^th street location Maggie Mae’s on Monday, March 15 from 8 p.m.  to 2 a.m. for a free event for SxSW registrants featuring live entertainment from The Last Vegas , food, drinks and lots of special prizes and activities. Be there as we reveal our newest hosting solution designed specifically for the music recording industry.

People

Rackspace people will be everywhere and we want to meet you there too.  Check out these additional activities:

• Get connected with Rackspace and other members of the software-as-a-service revolution known as the Small Business Web for drinks, food and fun surprises.
• Check out the No More Servers kiosk in the trade show area at the interactive festival; test your strength, talk to a recruiter and hear about our products and services.
• Our recruiting team will also be on hand at the Ruby on Rails user group event at Buffalo Billiards.

Check out all the details of the Rackspace Revolution at South by Southwest Interactive Festival .  Reach out to us on Twitter @rackspace.  We’ll be using the hashtag #raxrox.  See you there.

Congratulations to the winner of our 2009 Fanati Award for Outstanding Customer Service: Pet Relocation.com! Not only do they talk the talk; but they walk the walk when it comes to customer service. Pet Relocation is exactly that…relocating your pet (with your permission of course). PetRelocation.com has built a successful business around their tagline of ‘Any Pet, Anywhere, Any Time.’ Moving is such a hassle to begin with; it’s even more stressful when animals are involved. That is why PetRelocation.com focuses on customer service as a way to create a stress-free experience for relocating their customer’s pets.

But I know you don’t want to just read about what PetRelocation.com does and how they exemplify customer service; you want to see it. So check out their video submission below:

One customer wrote, “I transported a seven year old bulldog from San Francisco to Chennai, India. First, they gave me all the information I needed about the logistics and risk involved. They were friendly, patient with my endless questions, and above all honest. Second, they took care of all the paperwork — which is extremely tedious in a place like India – with speed and efficiency. It was almost painless. Third, they did a wonderful job actually transporting my dog, who arrived here in great shape. Finally, I always felt that my dog’s well being was as important to them as it was to me. That doing the right thing, and doing it well was their first priority. Profit was secondary. I will always recommend them highly to anyone I know.” (read more…)

DrupalCon, taking place April 19 to 21, 2010, is in its final weekend of voting for speaker sessions.  Rackspace has submitted the following panel topics:

How Enterprises Use Drupal to Build Brands, Grow Business and Reach Consumers in an Evolving Digital Marketplace

A Match Made in the Cloud – How to Best Take Advantage of Cloud Technologies with Drupal Sites

You’ll need to create an account to vote, but it’s not hard. Just go here.  You can vote more than once but not on one particular panel.  You can also vote for other panels. Voting closes March 1st and panels will be posted March 15th. To learn more about Drupal, the open source content management system, click here.

Congrats to Lanham Napier, Rackspace’s CEO and our very own “gutsy Texan”, for making the Forbes’ list of America’s 15 Most Powerful CEOs 40 And Under. According to Forbes.com, those included on the list had to be the CEO of one of the 15 biggest publicly traded companies in the U.S. (as of Feb. 8, by market capitalization) and be under 40 years old.

The list sources include Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s Business), FT Interactive Data and Thomson Reuters Fundamentals via FactSet Research Systems. To read the entire article, follow this link or you can check out Lanham here.

Rackspace has been recognized as A Best Company to Work for in Texas, coming in at #30 in the Large Companies category. The honor comes from the Texas Association of Business (TAB), the Texas State Council of the Society for Human Resources Management (TSC-SHRM) and Best Companies group. The 2010 list names companies with best practices among Texas employers and was created to recognize the best employers in the state – the ones who make it a priority to create better workplaces for their employees.

Each day, Rackspace reaffirms its commitment to building a culture of service, one in which Rackers come to work and volunteer their best each day. Recognitions such as this confirm our mission to become the world’s greatest service company.

Racker Kathy Kersten was at the awards ceremony, held in Austin TX and had this to say, “It is exciting to see Rackspace listed as one of the Best Companies to Work for in Texas.  We made the list because Rackers believe that this is an awesome place to work, and that is a really cool feeling.” Kersten goes on to say, “Rackers know that our culture and company is special and it is fun to know that other Texans will recognize this distinction as well!  Go Rackers!”  

To read the full story on Rackspace and all companies recognized, check out the February edition of Texas Monthly.

Since the January 12 earthquake devastated Haiti, there has been a critical shortage of supplies, manpower and assistance to help the Haitian people through their crisis.

Beginning today, the hosting community is coming together as an industry to do our part to help in the relief effort  by launching a new Web site.  Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of a common industry, we know we can help far more as a group than we could individually.

We know that no organization is better suited to the integrity of large relief efforts than the American Red Cross.  So every dollar donated through our site goes directly to them, an organization that can make the biggest difference in disaster relief.

This is a joint effort between Peer1 Hosting, GoGrid, The Planet, ServInt, Site5,VPS.Net and Rackspace, but we hope many others in web hosting and cloud computing will join us by making a donation. With the generosity of our combined groups of customers, employees and others, we know we can make a difference. If you’re one of our industry partners and want to join us, contact us at: info@hostingforhaiti.com about joining the cause.

Then, we hope you’ll spread the word by sharing the link and information on the project.  Follow the progress of the effort on Twitter by following @hostingforhaiti.  Or use the hash tag #hostingforhaiti.  It’s all for a good cause and will provide immediate assistance to tens of thousands of Haitians in need.

Stay tuned to see what good things we can do when the hosting industry partners together!

Yesterday, a story broke around the world about a recent cyber attack that appears to have originated in China, involving Google and many other companies.  Rackspace was a very small part of this situation and did everything possible to assist in resolving it.  No customer data at Rackspace was compromised or altered as a result of this action. We were mentioned as one of the target companies.

Here’s what we told the media who asked us about it:

Rackspace hosts tens of thousands of websites for customers and we take every precaution to make them safe and secure.   As a hosting and cloud computing company, we run the servers and operating systems for our customer’s websites, but customers run their own applications on those servers.  In this case, a server at Rackspace was compromised, disabled, and we actively assisted in the investigation of the cyber attack, fully cooperating with all affected parties.   Cyber attacks are a common occurrence in today’s online world, and we work every day to combat them and make our servers safe for our customers.

It’s difficult to share any more beyond the statement as we are committed to the privacy and security of the tens of thousands of customers we serve daily.  As a tech company, we know we need to remain diligent to prevent future incidents.  As always, our customers come first.  Here is an FAQ to assist our customers in understanding the event.

The New Year often brings new projects. Rackspace customer, Gallant FX, has a huge 10 weeks ahead of them as they sponsor Boston Technologies’ “Man VS Machine” competition, which launches at the end of this month.

This ten week competition will simultaneously run thousands of automated trading systems (Machine) and manual trades (Man) to see who earns the most cash in the Foreign Exchange Market (Forex). Thousands of traders, developers, and trading bots will be running on Rackspace infrastructure to make this competition happen. Six winners will be selected, with prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. Winners are determined by account balances from their fictitious trading accounts at the end of the competition.

The last day to sign up for the contest is January 10th, 2010. Visit http://www.manversusmachine.net/mvm/rulesm for more information! Once the competition goes live, viewers can track the top 10 contestants from the Web site.

Gallant FX, the sponsor of the competition, is a Foreign Exchange liquidity provider offering a wide range of trading technologies and services in a unique Forex trading environment. A recent case study highlights how Rackspace helped Gallant find a reliable home for their application. This video shows how Rackspace “came in swinging” for GallantFX.

Who is the favorite in this competition? Will it be Man or Machine? Only time will tell.

There’s been some local buzz in recent weeks on Rackspace that we are happy to share. Two pieces, in particular, include a recent news story on our San Antonio headquarters and the major Racker move-in as well as a piece from the San Antonio Express-News which mentions our role in cloud as well as our dedication to Fanatical Support.

Incident Overview:

On December 18, 2009 between 3:37 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. CST, Rackspace experienced network connectivity problems.  The issues resulted from a problem with a router used for peering and backbone connectivity located outside the data center at a peering facility, which handles approximately 20% of Rackspace’s Dallas traffic.  The problems stemmed from a configuration and testing procedure made at our new Chicago data center, creating a routing loop between the Chicago and Dallas data centers.  This activity was in final preparation for network integration between the Chicago and Dallas data centers.  The network integration of the facilities was scheduled to take place during the monthly maintenance window outside normal business hours, and today’s incident occurred during final preparations.

Incident Timeline:

3:37 p.m. CST Rackspace detected customer impacting connectivity issues; backbone engineering begins troubleshooting procedures.

4:02 p.m. CST Backbone engineers confirmed source of issue as Rackspace router housed at a peering location outside our datacenter facility.

4:12 p.m. CST-Upon rerouting traffic from this device, all systems were back online.

Current Status:

Rackspace is operating under normal conditions, and we do not anticipate any further connectivity interruptions.

This issue interrupted our customers’ businesses, and for this we apologize.  If you have additional questions. please reach out to us.

Editor’s Update on Dec. 19, 2009 at 12:00 p.m. :  An FAQ on this incident.