TTD Enterprises, located in Chicago, has been employing and supporting Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP for companies across the country since 1994. CEO, Ed Cowen, recently sat down to praise Rackspace for the support they have given him in the E-mail and Apps area.
“Rackspace E-mail and Apps has changed my business because I no longer have to worry about where my information is,” said Cowen, “It’s my assistant and it takes care of me.”

Click here to listen to what else Ed had to say about why he chooses Rackspace!

On Saturday August 17, over 85 Rackers, plus spouses and children, joined forces to beautify and update Ed White Middle School, Rackspace’s third adopted school in the Roosevelt Cluster.

Rackers landscaped, decorated the assistant principals’ offices, painted, and even built a stage for the theater department. On top of the overall refresher the school received, Rackspace donated school supplies for the entire year to over 500 students.

Principal, Phillip Carney, and Superintendent, Richard Middleton, were thrilled with the effort Rackers put forth and were excited to talk with Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier and Chairman Graham Weston about Rackspace’s future involvement with North East Independent School District.

Rack Gives Back would like to give a huge thanks to all of the volunteers who participated at Adopt-A-School and to the local What-A-Burger and HEB for donating food and drinks for the event!

See below for a video of the project:

GigaSpaces, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner, will be leading a free webinar on Thursday, August 26th, 1pm CDT.

Join Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO, and Guy Korland, GigaSpaces VP of R&D, to learn about how GigaSpaces’ XAP application server, running on Rackspace Cloud Servers, creates unmatched cost efficiencies for application providers.

In this webinar, you will discover how to reduce TCO and boost ROI with:

• Built-in multi-tenancy for lower costs per user
• Linear, dynamic scalability for hardware cost savings
• Performance efficiencies that help reduce cloud resource requirements
• Accelerated time-to-value, with an out-of-the-box solution that leverages existing developer skills (no code change, quick deployment)
• Monitoring and management capabilities that streamline operations and reduce maintenance

Details of the webinar:

Date: Thursday, August 26th
Time: 11am CST

Click here to register.

In recent article in Bank Systems & Technology, ING Americas, the US division of banking mogul ING, announced they began using Rackspace cloud services to cut processing times and costs by as much as 50 percent .

Alan Boehme, SVP, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, at ING Americas, was focused primarily on quality  and efficiency. “We looked at: Can we run the jobs faster and give our analysts and others more time to make business decisions, and can we do that at a cost that’s equal to or less than it is today?” Boeheme states.

Moving existing core applications over to Rackspace’s cloud solutions has allowed ING to move to a “service-level-agreement-driven IT model”.  Boeheme is most concerned with providing customers with a portfolio of diverse deployment options. “Instead of saying, ‘We’re putting this in our data center, and it will cost this much to run it,’ we’ll be able to go to the business and say, ‘Here are three different deployment options for your application with varying levels of benefit, cost, performance, quality and flexibility — which one do you want?” he relates.

To read the entire article on Bank Systems & Technology click here.

Please join us for our upcoming Rackspace® Cloud webinar:

Live Demo – The Rackspace Cloud
Wed, Aug 25, 2010, 1:00 PM CST

We will walk you through the benefits of Cloud Hosting, discuss our cloud offerings—Cloud Servers™, Cloud Files™, and Cloud Sites™—and show you how to get started. Near the end of the hour, we’ll wrap up our time with some interactive Q&A.

Click here to register.

See you there!

Recently, one of our customers from South of the border came to visit Rackspace to meet with their team and discuss their account. While they were here, we asked them to sit down and tell us why they chose to host with Rackspace…in Spanish, of course. Check out the video below (with subtitles for those who don’t speak Spanish)

Grupo Multimedios is the largest media conglomerate in Northeastern Mexico. In Monterrey they operate 15 radio stations, a cable TV system, a newspaper, outdoor billboard advertising and cinemas. Multimedios also produces cable TV programs drawing from the talent in its radio station group. Multimedios operates TV and radio stations in other markets mostly in Northern Mexico. Additionally they run all of the associated web content and internet sites for the multimedia group.

Milenio started in Monterrey as Diario de Monterrey, and expanded to other cities in the first decade of the 21st century.  It is now the second largest national news resource in Mexico owned by Grupo Multimedios.  It’s newspaper is published in 11 cities across Mexico. In each local edition they include local content and national news developed by the media group, not only from their newspaper reporters, but also from the radio and television stations owned by Multimedios.   They recently premiered a national 24/7 news station.

Rackspace is offering two additional complimentary webinars that highlight the new SharePoint 2010 functionalities that help make workflow and collaboration so much more customizable and easy than SharePoint 2007. Both webinars feature SharePoint architect Jeff DeVerter.

Part 3 – Easy to Find, Share and Use: SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management

Topics include:

• Analysis of why more than 50% of ECM projects fail and how SharePoint 2010 can help you avoid those mistakes
• How to enhance Record Management capabilities including Document IDs, Document Sets and Enterprise Content Types
• The unifying power of Enterprise Search

Thursday July 22, 2010 at 9am PT/11am CST/12pm EST.

Click here to register for Part 3.

Part 4 – Connect and Customize: Capturing Knowledge and Pinpointing Expertise with SharePoint 2010

Topics include:

• How to demonstrate capabilities and expertise within SharePoint
• How to easily publish knowledge in today’s Enterprise SharePoint environment
• New social networking features that enable knowledge capture

Thursday July 29, 2010 at 9am PT/11am CST/12pm EST.

Click here to register for Part 4.

We look forward to seeing you at these educational webinars that conclude the SharePoint 2010 series.

Click here to view SharePoint 2010 webinar Part 1, “Creating Business Solutions with Enhanced Tools and Improved Collaboration.”

Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere.  A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers.  In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it.  Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.

Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.

I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.

“The cloud” at its most fundamental level is all about a massive supply increase in computing power.  The PC era was all about putting a computer on every desk.  The cloud era goes a step further, putting the power of supercomputing at the literal fingertips of every individual at anytime.   Whether it’s enabling a youth soccer coach to schedule practice across the online calendars of 18 families, or helping a scientist fold proteins to design new cancer drugs, or encouraging a frontline employee to instantly and cheaply test a new marketing campaign, the exponential growth in computing power and applications is changing every corner of our economy and society.  And, this era is truly just beginning.  We have seen only a tiny fraction of the potential gains that arise from cheap, ubiquitous computing power.

As this landscape has evolved, some have dismissed cloud computing as just a return to the mainframe era. This view is fundamentally wrong.  Mainframes were available to only the smartest employees at the richest companies.  The cloud is accessible to all, and usable by anyone, at low cost.  Its ubiquity is the source of its power.

However, there is one area where mainframe concepts are intruding into the cloud – the vertically integrated technology stack.  As hardware and software merge into services, the danger of locked down proprietary software stacks are emerging in the cloud space. The cloud world changes everything, and that is not good to many entrenched interests of the old guard.  Core technologies from operating systems to hypervisors to databases are being used to tie cloud customers into an integrated view of the world.

If the web has taught us anything, it is that open systems, portability, and choice drive innovation.  The open Linux system brought us a mountain of software and tools to help accomplish almost any task.  And, each component, whether a database or a widget could be moved in and out freely based on the job getting done.

We at Rackspace have long talked about an “open” cloud.  And as a service provider built on our Fanatical Support difference, we have never had an interest in creating technical walls around our service.  But, given that no standards tools have emerged to build massively scalable clouds, we too have had to build custom software that creates some level of wall around our cloud offerings.  For months we have debated how to drive greater standards and increase the velocity of cloud technologies in general.  We finally converged on the obvious answer:  open source our cloud technology.

Today, we announced a new open source project that includes those core technologies: OpenStack.  And, we are not alone.  As we looked at all the projects that already existed to drive standards we saw that other efforts were underway that complemented what we have done.  We saw a ton of promise in the Nebula computing project built by NASA and are making it a core part of the project.   Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

The community, which we plan to actively support and drive, is live today at openstack.org with code available for download.

Last week we assembled a strong group of cloud community leaders and developers to meet and review the architecture, engage on technology direction and contribute code.  The effort attracted more than 100 participants from 25 companies including hosting companies, telecom providers, hardware manufacturers, cloud ecosystem companies and beyond.  This enthusiasm and collaboration around OpenStack has laid the foundation for a vibrant and innovative approach to building the core software to power the future cloud world.

What do we expect OpenStack to mean for the cloud community?  Some pretty major things.  One, anyone will be able to run this cloud and do it anywhere. Enterprises and governments will be able to build private clouds.  Service providers will have the same technology used by Rackspace and NASA to build new offers.  Choice and portability are inevitable in this world.  Two, the entire tech ecosystem can build around this foundation. With wide adoption, there will be a market for new services all around this core engine.  From storage systems to monitoring tools to management systems, there is no end to what can be attached to the core project.  Three, the cloud will advance faster than ever.  Between just NASA and Rackspace, an army of developers are committed to the continued advancement of OpenStack.  With our emerging supporters in the project, we expect to dramatically expand that army.  Finally, a core set of standards will be freely available and totally open. New technologies can be attached.  Better solutions will be driven into the product.  And, the use of this powerful technology will not tie you to the use of any other technologies.

For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains.  Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.

We could not be more excited about the launch of this project and the enthusiasm around it.  As a company that has invested a great deal in the development of cloud technologies, we did not take the decision to open source lightly.  We think this decision will serve our interests and those of our customers.  While we at Rackspace hire top developers and engineers to make sure our technology is second to none, seeking a technology advantage has never been our approach.    We have our own vision about how to deploy this technology and serve customers – by giving them seamless access to scalable computing with the trusting partnership that comes through Fanatical Support.  But, there will be many approaches and winning formulas.  We think by welcoming those approaches and driving standards and more rapid innovation we will all win.

We hope you join us in this cause.  We know there are many parties who may want to join us in the effort; please reach out to us on this blog or through the OpenStack page on Rackspace.com.

If you would like to know more, please click here to read the OpenStack press release, click here to see the OpenStack page on Rackspace.com, or click here to visit OpenStack.org.

We look forward to updating you as we make progress.

by Gary Dusbabek

Apache Cassandra is a fully distributed, highly scalable, sparse-table database.  It combines Dynamo’s fully distributed design and BigTable’s schema-free ColumnFamily-based data model. Client-tunable eventual consistency allows users to achieve a high degree of consistency while not sacrificing cluster availability or data redundancy.

Many users arrive at Cassandra after reaching the limits of what they can affordably accomplish with a traditional relational database (RDBMS). However, Cassandra is not a drop-in replacement for MySQL or Oracle.  It has some features that relational systems lack and is missing some features found relational systems. If you understand your application well and are willing to think about problems differently, Cassandra might be a tool worth exploring.

Distributed and Scalable Cassandra’s decentralized approach means every node in a Cassandra cluster is the same. Adding nodes to an existing cluster is relatively easy. Just make sure your storage settings are correct and then startup the new node. Cassandra takes care of deciding which ranges of data the node is responsible for and replicating the data to it. If you require more control, you are free to perform every step of this process yourself manually.

Schema-free Sparse Table If you are used to SQL tables, Cassandra’s data model is probably the biggest mental hurdle to overcome. One of the easiest ways to conceptualize the Cassandra data model is to imagine many rows, each row containing a list. You are free to add and remove items from these lists, or to ask Cassandra for the values from sections of these lists (we call them slices).

One of the ramifications of being “sparse” is that Cassandra has no notion of NULL—a key-value pair is simply present in a row or it is not. You are free, however, to store a column name with no value associated with it to indicate NULL (the absence of data) to your application.

Shedding Features Cassandra does away with several RDBMS features in the name of performance and scalability. Notably, you will have to do without robust transactions, ad-hoc queries, joins or flexible indexes.  These aren’t limitations though. Just ask some of the visible companies using Cassandra to build their applications. These include Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit to name a few.

Why You Would Use It If your application has a very large dataset, high write throughput and requires distributing redundant copies of your data across servers, racks or datacenters, you should consider using Cassandra. Writes are fast because Cassandra’s write path has been optimized to avoid random disk accesses. Server-side caching enables reads to be fast as well, if you need it and have the RAM to spare. Cassandra has the ability for you to specify where your data is replicated, and how many nodes it should be replicated to. This makes Cassandra very fault-tolerant.

Rackspace Supports Cassandra Development Besides having our own internal uses for Cassandra, we at Rackspace believe it is important for you to have the ability to develop your application for Cassandra and deploy it anywhere, not just with a specific cloud provider. Rackspace is committed to an Open Cloud. We currently employ two programmers to work on Cassandra full-time along with several other part-time contributors.

There are three ways you can get more information on Cassandra:

1.  IRC. #cassandra for general questions, or #cassandra-dev if you are a programmer looking for answers relating to the codebase.

2.  Apache mailing lists. Those interested may subscribe to either a user- or developer-related list, or both.  Find out more by sending mail to user-subscribe@cassandra.apache.org and dev-subscribe@cassandra.apache.org.

3.  My email: gary.dusbabek@rackspace.com

Starting July 13, 2010 Microsoft will end “Mainstream Support” for Windows Server 2003 and enter into “Extended Support.”

What Does this Mean to You?

Microsoft will continue to provide security updates for Windows Server 2003 but will no longer provide non-security related hot-fixes, no-charge incident support, warranty claims, design changes or feature requests.

Windows Server 2003 will remain in Extended Support until July of 2015, at which time all updates for Windows Server 2003 will be discontinued.

Has Rackspace support of Windows Server 2003 changed?

No.

But, if you have any questions you should check with your Account Manager or access the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ.