July 3, 2009

Dallas data center update as of 6:59 am CDT

We have successfully completed the July 3, 2009 scheduled maintenance on both the A bank generators and the utility breaker.  During this maintenance window, we performed the production load test of generator bank A and confirmed that we have eliminated the excitation failures that caused recent customer disruptions.  We have returned the DFW data center to normal operating conditions.  We will follow up with additional information as necessary.  Thank you for your continued patience throughout this process.

July 2, 2009

Dallas data center update as of 2:35 pm CDT

We are continuing to research and troubleshoot the root cause of the power interruption in our DFW facility.

As part of our work to improve the reliability and performance of these areas of the data center, we have scheduled a maintenance to generator bank A on Friday, July 3, from 12:01 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. (CDT). Customers who are supported by this generator bank have been notified of this maintenance.

Also, as a cautionary measure, we have asked Oncor, our power supplier, to perform preventative maintenance on their utility breaker during the same maintenance window. Oncor believes this breaker maintenance to be low risk and will be accomplished in less than 30 minutes. However, it requires that we place all customers in phase 1 and 2 of the data center onto generator power.  This means that in addition to placing customers on generator bank A onto generator power as planned, we will also place customers supported by generator bank B onto generator power for a brief period during the July 3rd, 12:01 AM to 6:00 AM CDT maintenance window, after the generator bank A maintenance occurs.

We believe no customers will be impacted but want to provide this update to our customers. If you are a customer and have questions, please contact your support team by visiting http://my.rackspace.com or by calling 888-480-7640 or 0800 587 2306, +44(0)20 8734 2700 (UK).

July 1, 2009

Dallas data center update as of 2:45 pm CDT

We are continuing the diagnosis activities to determine the root cause of the interruption. We conducted tests last night on the generators in question and believe we are making progress in understanding what caused the interruption. We have our suppliers and external consultants onsite working with us on this process. We will continue to provide status updates as we learn more.

If you are a customer, please continue to use our customer portal (https://my.rackspace.com/) and this blog http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ for information. 

June 30, 2009

Rackspace community,

Yesterday afternoon at 3:15CDT our data center in Dallas experienced an interruption in power to portions of the facility.  The interruption caused customer servers to lose power and go down.  We sincerely apologize for this disruption and know that it impacted our customers’ businesses as well as the experience of many who use the web.  Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance.  We owe you an action plan to prevent this type of thing in the future, and we’ll get that to you as soon as it is ready.

Specific to this situation, here’s what we are doing right now:

• The data center is currently running on utility power.
• We are continuing to research the root cause analysis for yesterday’s generator failures.  We have flown in our senior-level engineers from our global operations, and they are working with our external suppliers to determine the cause and how we can prevent this from happening again.  We have the best outside experts from companies like Cummins, GE and Eaton.
• We have re-serviced and re-checked our UPS units.
• Tonight at 9:00CDT we will continue our testing of the generator bank in question as we narrow down the variables to determine and remediate root cause.
• Our Support teams will continue to work with all affected customers to ensure they’re up and running.
• We will continue to provide status updates on our customer portal (https://my.rackspace.com/) and on http://www.rackspace.com/blog/.  A copy of the incident report that we sent to affected customers can be found at the following link. Though we typically treat our incident reports as proprietary information between us and our customers, we are publicly posting the report for this incident due to high level of public interest that this incident has received.

I want to ensure you that we are doing everything we can to bring this to resolution as quickly as possible.  We appreciate your support and understanding.  Our promise is Fanatical Support, we believe in it, and we will work with each of our customers to honor that promise.

Lanham Napier
CEO, Rackspace Hosting

June 29, 2009

Dallas data center update as of 11:26 pm CDT

This afternoon our Dallas data center experienced power interruptions that caused downtime for a portion of our customers. These power interruptions were the result of a range of power infrastructure issues. Right now, the Dallas data center is stable and running on utility power. Our UPS units have been re-serviced and re-checked as of this evening, and we are in the process of doing the same with our generators.

We don’t have a lot of details on exactly what happened yet. When we have an outage, our first focus is on fixing it and getting customers online as soon as possible. Now that we have the near-term situation stabilized in Dallas, we have some work to do to improve our reliability. We will follow up with more information as we work through our root-cause analysis.

Although this outage only affected a portion of our customers in one of our nine global data centers, we consider any outage to be unacceptable. We sincerely apologize to our customers and those who were affected by this downtime. We didn’t serve you as well as we should have today. We are dedicated to Fanatical Support and providing world-class hosting to our customers. Rest assured that the entire Racker family is dedicated to determining exactly what our failures were, and how we can correct them. Thank you for your support on the phone, blogs, Twitter and other forums.

Data center update as of 8:58 pm CDT

Section A of the Dallas data center is now back on utility power, and maintenance work on the UPS for that section is complete. No customers were impacted in this transition. We’ll provide further updates as information is available.

Data center update as of 7:28 pm CDT

A prior update indicated that utility power was serving the entire data center. However, that update was incorrect in describing the status of one section of the data center (Section A), which is currently still running on generator power while we finish some work with the UPS for that section. After that work is complete, we will transition Section A back to utility power. Customers in Section A are stable while running on generator power, and we are taking every precaution in transitioning this section of the data center back to utility power. We will provide further updates as they become available.

Data center update as of 5:55 pm CDT

The Dallas data center is now fully back on utility power. We’ll continue to provide updates as information is available.

Data center update as of 5:30 pm CDT

Power has been restored to affected devices.  However, some of the devices need to be manually brought back online, and this process is underway.  The data center is currently running on a combination of generator and utility power.  We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you or your customers, and more information will be presented as soon as it is available.

Last Friday, over 500 people attended the Rack’s 3rd Annual Green Day. This year’s Green Day was open to the public, so attendees included community members as well as Rackers. With over 40 “green” organizations, a farmers market and the opportunity to test drive an electric Porsche, hybrid Lexus, and hybrid Toyotas, Green Day was an opportunity for the community to learn about the environmentally friendly options San Antonio has to offer.

List of great vendors included:

Imagine Lavender Farms
The Nature Conservancy
San Antonio Water System
CPS Energy Windtricity
Bantai Civet Coffee
San Antonio Botanical Gardens

Click here to read the San Antonio Express-News article on Green Day.

See below to view our Green Day video!

Fred Reichheld, Baine fellow and author of The Ultimate Question, is an expert on measuring customer loyalty. He’s also a member of the Rackspace Board of Directors. We were fortunate to catch Fred as he left our annual board meeting – here, he talks about how customer loyalty impacts profitability and how companies can measure loyalty using the Net Promoter Score.

Those of  you who know Rackspace, know that we strive to be the best service company in the world. One way of improving on that was our implementation of the Net Promoter Score, created by Mr. Reichheld. You can read more about that in his book, The Ultimate Question.

Last week we briefed some key partners and customers on our view of the emerging world of on- demand computing, including some plans around our offers. 

We want to share with you some highlights. 

We firmly believe the era of on-demand computing is upon us.  Over the next decade, we predict the de facto model of consuming computing will not be from an in-house server farm but over the web via on-demand computing providers.  Why?  Well, given the new tools and services associated with cloud hosting  and more mature models like dedicated hosting and SaaS (software as a service), the options to get all your computing over the web have become vastly more affordable and flexible than in-house alternatives.  We encourage you to examine the benefits of a “no servers” approach to your business, instead opting to get computing services as you need them. 

Over the coming months, you will see a lot from Rackspace to help make this transition super compelling.

We gave a sneak preview of a few focus areas: 
1. We are moving all our services under the Rackspace brand.  We will continue to have 3 distinct service areas:  Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting and Email and Apps.  We have focused, dedicated teams working to build out the best of breed offerings in each of these areas, but we believe that most companies will want to use services across all 3 computing services.  Different workloads require different tools and we want to bring you the best for all your core computing needs.  While full integration does not exist across all 3 offers, we will be moving in that direction over time.  But, you can be assured you are dealing with Rackspace and our trademark Fanatical Support® standard will be a part of each offer.

2. The first area of integration surrounds what we call Hybrid Hosting.  Imagine having core systems in a managed environment with dedicated equipment and firewalls for security, but behind the firewall access to unlimited cloud resources on-demand for your web and application tiers.  Or private connections to the cloud to offload data for warehousing and computational work.   Well, it is coming.  Stay tuned.

3. We are also very focused on advancing our Cloud Servers product quickly.  We have had great traction on an offer that includes persistent storage, DNS services, auto resizes and other easy to use tools.  But, we are a missing a few things.  One is API’s: As you may know, we’ve recently released the API spec for public comment – after all, the people using the spec should define it. We’ve received great feedback on it already (thanks!). It will be released to the public in July and you can expect a lot of cool partner tools quickly. Two, what about Windows?  Half the market simply cannot use Cloud Servers.  Well, Windows for Cloud Servers is officially coming.  Our plans include offering fully supported Windows.  We want to offer high performance Windows that supports the latest OS and database builds and also meets Microsoft’s supportability standards.  Achieving this high bar comes with some complications which is causing our longer timelines.  But, the work is underway.

4. Finally, we have big plans for our Apps and Email division.  We are currently supporting over 1.2 million business class email seats.  We continue to build out the best Exchange-IMAP hybrid email system that brings huge saving to our customers.  But, we are also moving on to the next core IT problem.  We want to help businesses solve their basic storage issues.  So in the coming months you will see a few new offers from us.  One, an advanced, but low cost mail archiving offer.  So whether you are sick of managing large PSTs or need a compliance tool, giving your employees unlimited archiving will soon be an affordable option.  Next, we plan to offer a variety of tools to help with basic collaboration and backup.  Every business needs a basic fileshare.  A centrally managed, infinitely scalable fileshare is on the way.  And, want to offer your employees an automated PC backup and web access tool?  Stick around. 

We are very excited about these and many other projects in the works.  We hope this collection of on-demand services will help you say no to your next server purchase.  We plan to remove the burdens of technology lock in, slow lead times, expensive build-outs, and unsupported technologies.  We are just getting started.  Keep the feedback coming!

Today in Boston, companies from across the globe are gathering to take a closer look at e-retailer products and services for the 2009 Internet Retailer Conference and Expo.  In fact, several Rackers as well as some friends from our partner Magento, a leading Open Source eCommerce platform, have made the trip to Beantown to showcase what we can do.

Rackspace joined forces with Magento last year to bring secure and scalable hosting to Magento’s enterprise customers.  Magento’s CEO Roy Rubin knows what his customers are looking for:
“Magento backed by Rackspace Fanatical Support is a great option for any online business. The most important aspects of an ecommerce company’s hosting environment are security, scalability, support and uptime. Rackspace is the leading option in the market with proven success hosting the world’s largest brands, and can meet the high demands of the Magento Enterprise customers with a professional, world-class environment. Magento customers can trust that their business is secure, online and ready for business growth.”

Internet retailers are serious about their hosting providers – their livelihood often depends on it - so it’s no surprise that scalability, security and uptime are major drivers when choosing a solution.  This is why the Magento and Rackspace partnership has proven successful for many of our customers over the last year.

We recently spoke with Allen N., Vice President at Westside Wholesale, a joint customer of Magento and Rackspace, who had this to say:
“Our eCommerce concerns center around availability, security, compliance and scalability. Magento’s feature-rich and scalable eCommerce platform combined with the 24×7x365 Fanatical Support® and Zero-Downtime Network™ from Rackspace® Hosting allow us to eliminate those worries when it comes to the platform and infrastructure behind our site.”

If you’re at the Internet Retailer Conference, stop by Booth #248 to visit with Magento and see what great things are cooking with our partnership!  Visit www.rackspace.com/magento to learn more.

We constantly ask our customers what else we can do to help them.  There is one theme that comes up more than any other: Help me grow my business!  While this strays from our core of offering on-demand computing services, today we are pleased to announce something that should help.  

Robert Scoble, Rocky Barbanica, Rob Lagesse and team today launched Building43.  Check it out here.
The goal behind this new community is very simple.  As the Internet grows, it gets more useful, but massively more complex.  How is a business supposed to make sense of all the new tools launching every day?  TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, CNet and many others are all focused on making you aware of these tools, but who is helping you figure out how to actually USE them?  Who can help you, as a businessperson, integrate these tools and drive real results?  Well, that is what Building43 is all about.  The stories up today are just a taste of what is to come.  Mark Zuckerberg talking about how he thinks businesses should use Facebook.  Graham Weston and Tony Hsieh talking about how great service matters even more in the web era and how they use technology to enhance it.   If you find this useful, please join this great new community.

When we announced the hiring of Robert and Rocky this Spring, we were not sure where exactly we would end up.  But, we excited to offer some fanatical insights on using the web to grow your business.  Please engage in the community.  Share your ideas.  Tell the world what has worked for you.  Meet others with your same problems.  Together let’s grow the next generation of the web.

We at Rackspace are always excited to see our partners’ successes, and we get even more excited when we see that success recognized. Our partners put considerable time and effort into creating impactful sites and campaigns, and we are proud to play a part by providing cloud and managed hosting to help ensure the website stays up and running so all can enjoy!

Last month, the 2009 CLIO Award winners were announced and Rackspace partners took home a fantastic 16 awards in the Integrated Campaigns and Interactive Categories including 12 of the 30 CLIO Interactive awards, with the Grand CLIO going to partner Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign for Burger King, and three of the 12 awards in the Integrated Campaign category!

Rackspace would like to congratulate AKQA; Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Goodby, Silverstein & Partners; and Modernista! who were honored at the 50th Anniversary CLIO awards for the following campaigns:

Interactive Category:

• Grand CLIO for Fresh Approach: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, “Whopper Sacrifice” for Burger King
• Gold CLIO for Brand Building: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Now Widget” for Sprint
• Gold CLIO for Innovative Use of Technology: AKQA London, “eco:Drive” for Fiat
• Gold CLIO for Online Application: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, “Whopper Sacrifice” for Burger King
• Gold CLIO for Viral: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Wario Land Shake It!” for Nintendo
• Silver CLIO for Microsite: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Plug into the Smart Grid” for GE
• Bronze CLIO for Animation: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Get Work Done Now” for Sprint
• Bronze CLIO for Consumer-Targeted Site: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Hotel 626” for Doritos
• Bronze CLIO for Mobile/Wireless: AKQA London, “NIKE PHOTOiD” for NIKEiD
• Bronze CLIO for Relationship Marketing: AKQA San Francisco, “Gears of War 2” for Xbox – Gears of War 2
• Bronze CLIO for Rich Media Advertising: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, “Wario Land Shake It!” for Nintendo
• Bronze CLIO for Self-Promotion: Modernista!, “Modernista.com”

Integrated Category:

• Gold CLIO: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, “Routan Boom” for Volkswagen of America
• Silver CLIO: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, “I’m a PC” for Microsoft
• Bronze CLIO: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, “You Got 30 Minutes”

We here at Rackspace would like to send a big “CONGRATULATIONS” to our friends at Zappos. Today, Zappos celebrates their 10 year anniversary. Zappos is similar to Rackspace in that they are incredibly dedicated to maintaining their unique culture—one which focuses on their employees—all which benefits their customers through great service.

Watch our video below!

Earlier this week, some interesting characters, and their entourage, visited the Rackspace Castle location in San Antonio. The WOAI.com program Perspectives, was on location at the former Windsor Park Mall to do a little investigative reporting. This was no ordinary news crew, however. In fact, to say that this crew was “unreal” would be an understatement.

Perspectives is hosted by puppets. Yes, you’ve read correctly, puppets. In this episode, anchor Laughn De La Croix becomes convinced that the old mall is haunted and his co-host, Rodney Grimes, knowingly allows the entire fiasco to unfold.

The show’s talent, crew and creators Bob Gambert, Jerrod Kingery and Pete Mills are the masterminds behind the show and use ‘historic’ (and aging) 3/4-inch-tape archive video from the San Antonio news station as the basis for each episode. Check out the full episode of Perspectives to find out what our friends uncovered.

Over the past two years, Rackspace Hosting® has witnessed some exciting times. We went public at a time when no one thought any company could do it. We launched The Rackspace Cloud, and our Cloud Strategy. We also acquired three companies, including Mailtrust , Slicehost and Jungle Disk all focused on providing solutions complimentary to the Rackspace vision.

All amazing activities in a very short amount time, no matter how you look at it. Many of you may be asking why? Or wonder what Rackspace is up to and where the company is headed?

Well, I can’t answer all of those questions today, but I hope to provide you a glimpse into where we are headed. There are some changes you may have seen on Rackspace.com and additional changes regarding our product branding.

I am excited to announce as of today, all of our Managed, Cloud and Email hosted offerings will now live under the Rackspace brand. So moving forward Rackspace’s core brands will include Rackspace Managed Hosting, The Rackspace Cloud (Mosso) and Rackspace Email (formerly known as Mailtrust), all of which are of course backed by Fanatical Support.  

We have also integrated the navigation of our Web properties to make it easier for our customers to find the specific information relevant to their business needs. As you look over our web site, we hope you will find it easier to navigate and that information is presented in a more cohesive look and feel. We would love to hear your feedback.

While the brands are moving under one umbrella, we continue to believe in the power of small entrepreneurial teams focused on building world class offers, while also leveraging the resources and brain trust of the larger Rackspace community.  While total integration is not complete, we will be working to enhance that over time.

You will be hearing more from Rackspace in the coming weeks as we provide more details about our future. Keep an eye out for more on Rackspace.

Please feel free to provide us with your feedback and ask any questions you may have. We will take your feedback seriously and answer your questions promptly.