Our efforts to rewrite the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are showing good results. But we’ve got to keep the pressure on.

By Lanham Napier
CEO, Rackspace

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace —along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good.  Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals.  We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day.  We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

We have traveled to Washington to discuss SOPA and PIPA with leading lawmakers. We have blogged about our concerns and given interviews to interested journalists. We have discussed the issue with business executives and other leaders in our community. We’re pleased that our efforts, and those of the entire Internet community, are having a positive effect.

Key legislators in both houses of Congress have recently said that they will remove the provisions for blocking of websites through the Domain Name System (DNS), which are among the most-disruptive and troubling features of SOPA and PIPA.  The White House has called for a fresh approach to the issue that would hear the concerns and suggestions of all stakeholders, and would balance the fight against online piracy with due process protections and the sound functioning of the Internet.

I had accepted an invitation to testify before Congress this week on the DNS website-blocking provisions, but that hearing has been cancelled, thanks to changes being made in SOPA and PIPA.  I and other Rackers are working with key lawmakers on those changes, providing our ideas, and studying the ideas of others.

Some Senators are working to bring PIPA — as written, with the DNS website-blocking provisions in place — to a floor vote, through a cloture motion on January 24th. I encourage you to call or email your Senators and urge them to vote against the cloture motion, and instead work toward an improved anti-piracy bill.

Here’s a convenient link you can use to reach the Senators for your state: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfmrepr

We’re making progress in blocking bad legislation and working toward something better, but we need to keep the pressure on.  I’m going to keep making my views known, and I hope you’ll do the same.

CRN.com recently named Robert Fuller, Rackspace Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales, as one of the top 10 Next-Gen Channel Leaders of 2011. Fuller was joined by executives at Dell, Avaya, and Salesforce on the list of trailblazers for his work in restructuring the Rackspace channel partner program.

Read more on CRN.com.

At Rackspace, we use the Net Promoter Score to gauge customer loyalty. If you’re a customer, you’ve probably received our survey asking, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a company or friend?” Based on a scale of 0-10, customers can be Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6). Our goal is to make our customers promoters – and with this army of promoters, we can count on their loyalty to continue refer others and help fuel our growth.

How effective is an army of promoters?

We put that question to the test this week by asking all Rackspace Foundation* donors to join us in a 24-hour challenge – help us raise $50,000 for National Philanthropy Day by recruiting new donors for our Foundation. It was a bold goal that relied solely on Rackers to be promoters and to refer others to contribute to a great cause. The challenge was simple – each donor was asked to recruit at least one new person to donate to the Foundation through payroll deductions or through a one-time donation. Rackspace Chairman, Graham Weston, generously offered to match the annualized rate of all new donors and to match the existing donor.

In this 24-hour period, Rackspace Foundation Promoters raised a total of $42,640.00. With Graham’s match, that number comes to a total of $85,280! We didn’t just hit our goal; we blew it out of the water! It was truly inspiring to see how Rackers rallied together to hit our target, but more importantly, it was amazing to see the power of promoters. By relying on those who believe in the cause, we were able to raise more money than we’ve ever raised in a single day, plus put the Rackspace Foundation on the path to sustainability.

We were thrilled to see the incredible results of this experiment – the power of promoters is real, and in our case, it had the power to affect the lives of students, teachers, administrators, and families in our community. It’s a great feeling to work alongside other Rackers with such big hearts and passion to give back. On a scale of 0-10, I’m a 10 for the Rackspace Foundation.

Watch this short video to see The Rackspace Foundation in action.

*About The Rackspace Foundation: 
In 2008, Rackspace moved to the abandoned Windsor Park Mall and called it our new home. As a good neighbor, Rackspace and NEISD came together to create a “Roosevelt Compact” – pledging to build educational achievement at Roosevelt High School and six of its feeder schools – 2 middles schools and one elementary school (we call them the Magnficent 7). This Compact is supported by the Rackspace Foundation (a 501 (c)(3) organization). By funding various nonprofit programs at the schools, Rackspace hopes to uplift the schools and with time, uplift our neighborhood. The non-profits include Youth Orchestras of San Antonio, CityYear, Communities in Schools, Gemini Ink (creative writing), Say Si (art), Family Chess Night at the Roosevelt library, Windcrest Literacy Academy, Good Samaritan community Centers (afterschool programs).

Authored by Shannon Bray, SharePoint Technical Architect, SharePoint Evangelist, and Microsoft Certified Trainer.

This post was originally posted on my blog and Rackspace has given me the opportunity to share my story here. 


Last month, I made the trip out to Anaheim, CA to attend my first SharePoint conference, the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011. I also had the pleasure of being selected to deliver two sessions.

Most of my demos are typically done on my 16GB laptop, but after the demo gods frowned on me at a previous SharePoint conference; I needed to change the way I demoed my sessions. I ended up taking my sessions to the cloud, trusting both of my sessions to Rackspace. 

My first session, “SPC367: Managing LOB Data with BCS & SharePoint Search”, was right after the keynote and had over 700 attendees. The session required three servers:

• SPC-AD – 4GB, hosted Active Directory
• SPC-SQL – 8GB, hosted SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint Designer
• SPC-Services – 8GB, hosted SharePoint 2010

During this session, I created an External Content Type using SharePoint Designer 2010 and provisioned BCS, Enterprise Search, and Secure Store. The goal of the demos was to take data from an SQL Database (AdventureWorks) and surface it in Search results. While the demo had some rough spots, it was ultimately successful and my evaluations were great!

My second session, “SPC385: Service Application Federation with SharePoint 2010”, required a little more horsepower:

• SPC-AD – 4GB, hosted Active Directory
• SPC-SQL – 8GB, hosted SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint Designer
• SPC-Services – 8GB, hosted SharePoint 2010 (Publishing Farm)
• SPC-SP – 8GB, hosted SharePoint 2010 (Consumer Farm)

During this session, I created two SharePoint farms from scratch. There were no service accounts or SharePoint databases. I used PowerShell to create the farms, the accounts, and all of the services that can be federated. I needed peak performance or I was going to suffer a catastrophic demo.

Rackspace delivered. The demo went perfectly and my session made the conference top 20. Rackspace offers a stable service, and I just bet my future speaking engagements on it. Thank you Rackspace!

During peak season, Air & Water, Inc, one of the Internet’s largest independent appliance retailers, can generate thousands of dollars per hour. Site downtime means the loss of revenue. After running a web server on-premises and dealing with connectivity issues taking them offline for hours at a time and needing more hardware to meet increasing demand, Adam Hart, IT Manager, Air & Water, Inc, chose Rackspace. They haven’t had a moment of unscheduled downtime since.

Why Rackspace? “We wanted to go with an established company. With Rackspace, we knew we had a hosting provider that will be around for the long term.” Adam Hart, IT Manager, Air & Water, Inc.

Read the full Air & Water, Inc. case study.
Browse more case studies in the Rackspace Knowledge Center.

One of the many things that makes Rackspace a great place to work is the fun, random things that happen in our office, like having the Sexy Sax Man visit. Take a look:

You might be wondering, why? Well, when we asked fellow Racker Jason Stiles of 10 years, he said;

“I just wanted to make my friends laugh a little more than they usually do on a Monday.”

The Sexy Sax Man has visited many offices including Zappos.

Authored by Toby Owen, Senior Manager, Hybrid Cloud Solutions

A year ago, to the day actually, we announced general availability of RackConnect™, the Rackspace® Hosting solution to integrate dedicated and cloud hosting into a single solution.  It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year since the launch, and we’ve been hard at work since then.  We’ve seen adoption grow from a few customers to a significant portion of our customer base.  We’ve seen RackConnect open up architectures and solutions that we hadn’t even dreamed of a year ago.  And most importantly, we’ve listened to you about what works and what needs improvement.

Today, I have the distinct privilege of announcing the launch of a new and improved RackConnect, “RackConnect 2.0” if you will.  It’s packed with improvements and features that you told us were important.  While there are still lots more improvements in the works, here are some of the highlights we are pleased to offer you, as part of the new-and-improved RackConnect solution.

1.    More Automation – We’ve fully automated the provisioning of your Cloud Servers™. Once Cloud Servers are built, they are already fully connected to the rest of your hosting environment.  We’ve also created a portal interface to allow you to manage your entire RackConnect configuration in one place.

2.    More Security Features – You can now set a network security policy for your entire hosting environment, and it’s automatically applied and managed across your dedicated firewall, load balancer, and Cloud Servers.  This includes managing a software firewall on each of your cloud servers.

3.    More Availability – We’re excited to announce RackConnect on a wider variety of networking platforms, including an entry level firewall; which should make RackConnect a great option for a cloud customer wanting a dedicated firewall.

Network security policy management should be an exciting feature, since it allows you to create a policy for communication to, from, and within your environment ONE TIME, and have that policy applied AUTOMATICALLY as you scale up and down in the cloud.  This creates a managed security perimeter for your entire hybrid infrastructure at Rackspace.

Also, it’s good to point out that RackConnect can provide secure connections from your own IT infrastructure to the Rackspace Cloud.  By terminating a VPN tunnel or leased line at Rackspace, you have a secure way to move workloads to and from Rackspace, or to manage your environment remotely.  When used in conjunction with RackConnect, you can now link your datacenter or IT infrastructure directly to the Rackspace Cloud!

We’ve also created some additional content on our website to detail the ways in which Rackspace customers are using RackConnect to help solve their IT needs.  This content includes more product features, details on some of the top use cases, and some customer testimonials, including one from Vevo. Watch the Vevo video or download and read their case study now.

One more thing to note, in the spirit of full transparency (a core value of Rackspace) – for current RackConnect customers, we won’t be able to upgrade you to the new feature set of RackConnect for a few more weeks.  Upgrading customers should be a simple and flawless experience.  In order to provide this experience to our customers, we need a bit more time to finish some additional tools to aid in the upgrade process.  We know it’s important to you that your hosting environment stays up and stable and we think the upgrade will be worth the wait! Thanks for your patience.  We’ll update you when we’re ready to offer you the chance to upgrade (upgrading to the new RackConnect features will be opt-in, by the way).

We look forward to discussing these new RackConnect features with you further.  If you’d like more information, please contact a member of our Sales team; or if you’re already a Rackspace customer, please contact your Account team.

The Redmond Magazine 2011 Readers Choice Poll results are in, and Rackspace comes out on top. This is the first year that the poll included a category for Exchange hosting providers, and Redmond Magazine’s readers overwhelmingly gave their support to the Rackspace Hosted Exchange product with nearly 40% of the vote against five other providers.

The Hosted Exchange product delivers the complex email application and hardware as a cloud-based service managed via an intuitive control panel. IT teams appreciate the service for making their jobs easier and business owners prefer Exchange as a service because it’s less expensive than an on-site deployment. Currently, nearly a quarter of a million Exchange mailboxes are hosted at Rackspace.

View complete poll results.
Learn more about Rackspace Hosted Exchange.

If you have one of those handy fuel reward program tags on your key chain, then you’re already familiar with Excentus, the leading provider of loyalty marketing programs and services based on cents-off per gallon fuel discounts. The infrastructure behind such a program requires a highly available, secure system that lets users earn points and redeem discounts at the pump in seconds for over a million transactions a day.

Mike Melson, Senior Vice President of Technical Operations at Excentus, brought these challenges to Rackspace. 
The Rackspace sales and technical teams worked closely with the Excentus IT team to address technical and logistical concerns, eventually deploying two environments to support performance, staging, and backup needs.

Why Rackspace? “From a credibility perspective, we can approach a CEO or VP of marketing and tell them, with confidence, that we can deliver on our promises. Our customers feel safe knowing that their applications are running on a Tier 1 hosting provider,” says Melson.

Read the full Excentus case study. 

Browse more case studies in the Knowledge Center.

According to a ComScore report after the 2010 holiday shopping season, more than 85% of Americans online visited a retail site in December of last year. I suspect the other 15% are my grandmother’s bingo buddies and the toddler demographic who’ve yet to experience the joys of shopping online. Web traffic for ecommerce sites surges during the holiday buying rush – and the holiday season has officially started. With added traffic and retail competition, this is a crucial time of year to have a well-built site that provides an unencumbered shopping experience to keep visitors coming back after the holidays.

With that goal in mind, a panel of experts from Rackspace Hosting and Magento lead you through, “Building Customer Trust through a Rock Solid E-commerce Platform”, a 30-minute webinar exploring the foundational elements of building out your ecommerce platform to accommodate future growth, maximize performance, and address security and compliance concerns. Each panelist offers unique, from-the-trenches perspective and recommendations on approaching platform building for ecommerce success.

The webinar gives an overview with strategies on the essential pieces of an ecommerce system:
Hardware layer – How to select the physical servers and devices you’ll need to provide a strong foundation for your web operations.
Operating systems – Figuring out how to choose your operating system and the ramifications up the stack.
Ecommerce software – Guidance on evaluating and implementing supported, scalable, and secure software platforms to power your business.

Watch the webinar now.
View more ecommerce resources in our Knowledge Center.