**Update – Blake Mycoskie blogged about his visit to Rackspace – Check it out here

Today Rackspace had a fantastic visit from philanthropist and entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie. As the founder of Toms Shoes Blake shared the idea, mission, and successes his startup company has experienced with Rackers and a few community members.

About Toms Shoes:
In 2006, Blake was in Argentina and was introduced to the health and social problems presented to children in underdeveloped countries caused by lack of shoes. In many countries, debilitating diseases and school attendance can be corrected by providing children with shoes. Toms Shoes was founded in 2006 on the premise that with every pair of shoes purchased, Toms will donate a pair of shoes to a child in need. “One for One” is the principal behind Blake’s work. In three years, Toms has given over 150,000 pairs of shoes to children all over the world. Toms plans to give over 300,000 pairs in 2009 alone.

Blake spoke to Rackers about the importance of creating a business with the idea that you are working towards something bigger than yourself. He also enjoyed taking a tour of the Rackspace facilities and meeting several Rackers. Along with a great story, Blake provided Rackspace with a special insight.

Blake’s secret sauce? Giving people the chance to feel good about what they’re doing and success will follow.

See below for pictures of Blake’s visit:

For more pictures, check out our Flickr account here.

Rackspace, The Junior League of San Antonio, HEB, Valero and North East Independent School District are working together to launch a new literacy initiative in San Antonio. The 2009 Summer Literacy Academy is a first of its kind program that is targeting more than 54 kindergarten through 5th grade students at Windcrest Elementary. The objective of this academy is to increase the literacy levels of students and have that increase endure.

To show his support of the academy, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and Councilwoman Ivy Taylor paid a visit to the children last Thursday morning. The mayor emphasized the importance of education and believing in success, and announced that each child participating in the academy will receive $200 in college scholarship money from the City of San Antonio, the City of Windcrest, Rackspace and the other academy partners.

“This is a fantastic project that brings together the resources of many businesses and organizations to benefit the children of the Windcrest community,” said Richard A. Middleton, superintendent of NEISD schools. “It is partnerships like this that can begin to make sustainable positive change for the future of San Antonio.”

See below for a video of the Mayor’s visit:

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!

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!

Erik Carlin wrote a great post on the Mosso blog comparing the cloud storage offerings from Rackspace (Cloud Files) and Amazon (S3). Here’s a quick excerpt:

The cloud is advantageous for many reasons and both Rackspace/Mosso and Amazon offer cloud storage solutions.  We are frequently asked to compare Cloud Files enabled with Limelight’s CDN with S3 and CloudFront.  Many of the questions we are asked revolve around cost and performance (particularly CDN).  These are very quantifiable metrics so I thought I’d share with you the results of some comparative analysis we’ve done.

Read the entire post here: A Quantitative Comparison of Rackspace and Amazon Cloud Storage Solutions

Happy New Year to you all! 2009 brings with it a bunch of changes, but one thing we here at Rackspace don’t like to change is our culture. For those of you familiar with Rackspace, you know what I’m talking about, but for those of you new to us, first off, welcome. We wanted our CEO to say a few words about what makes Rackspace great, but he decided to take a camera around and ask Rackers themselves.

Second, let me share some real life quotes from Rackers about why they love Rackspace.

(read more…)

Last week all Rackers received the following email from Larry “Sugarbear” Reyes, Rackspace Culture Czar:

‘Twas the day before Open Book and all through the floor…
Lanham was exclaiming we need one competition more…
To my desk I sprang to email his mission…
Guess what Rackers, we’re having our first Annual Outrageous Christmas Sweater Competition!…
So come one, come all, to Open Book wearing your sweater…
It can be outrageous, festive, crazy and even better…
All Rackers and External Customers will be the judges…
So BRING IT before you hold any grudges…
This is a competition and it could be wild…
But please keep this Friends and Family and not over styled…
The winner wil receive a special recognition…
Something that will reflect this season of appreciation!!!

And now I present for your voting, the top 4 contestants:
Contestant #1

Contestant #2

Contestant #3

Contestant #4

So who do you think should win? Let us know in the comments section and have a Happy Holiday!!!

I have been in this field for over 30 years and this is the most exciting time to be dealing with security and risk management. The good news is that there are more tools, resources and support for the industry out there now than at any time in the past. The potential downside of that is there are a lot more people using a lot of different methods to try have a less-than-desirable effect on all of us.

Businesses need to look at a number of different methods to deal with things like web attacks, social engineering, identity theft, scams, compliance and plain, old-fashioned theft. Security, Risk Management and Compliance are no longer items to be looked at after big decisions are made. Rather, these three key components should be part of every key decision. Every decision has an inherent level of risk. I do not advocate inserting controls for the sake of controls or compliance just as I do not advocate ignoring risk and hoping that nothing happens. Every good decision should be made by looking at the potential downside of little or no controls and compare that with the potential downside of the cost of controls. The right balance is the right answer (see diagram). (read more…)

Most companies are familiar with one or more types of Business Process Modeling. Many are also used to donating time, money or other resources to charity. While each are common practices, what happens when they collide and the gift is actually helping a non-profit diagram how it works? Well, through our Rack Gives Back program, a small group of Rackers and the San Antonio Food Bank are learning just that.

Things didn’t start out this way. At first, it looked like your typical corporate/non-profit interaction with the Food Bank approaching Rackspace for some help – preferably improving some technology they use or developing new tools. As a company, we were already assisting them with hosting, food drives and volunteers from our various teams. For this initiative, Long-time Racker, Cultural Warrior and User Experience Designer, Brett Elmendorf was first brought in to help find a solution. Instead of just offering up coding or some similar service, he realized that the Food Bank needed to take a step back and diagram the processes for their key areas of operation. Once there was a clear picture of how things work today, they could figure out changes and Rackspace could find ways to help with any systems or tools that would facilitate those improvements. So calls were made, and a small team was assembled.

I won’t bore you with the details of the type of process modeling we are using or spend too much time on the details of what specific tasks have been completed to date, but I will say that the San Antonio Food Bank has never quite looked at their business this way before. Also, those of us who are “veterans” to the process modeling methods in place are finding new challenges and questions you wouldn’t see in a for-profit business. Some of them include: (read more…)

No matter what business you’re in, having the right employees on board in the right seats can mean the difference between being an average company and a great company. We’ve found this to be especially true in a service-delivery business like Rackspace, and finding the right Rackers (Rackspace employees) has been one of our biggest challenges since the early years of the company. 

For the first year of the company, I can think of numerous occasions when we had thought we found the perfect candidate for a role. He’d be extremely technically proficient in his area (whether it is was Linux system administration, tax accounting, or software development) but the person just didn’t seem to work out as a Racker. While the candidate could be a rock star in a lot of companies, he just didn’t seem to fit in our unique environment. It turned out that the entire process was focused purely on making sure that the prospect had the technical skills necessary for the job in question. While that was important, it really only told part of the story.

Without understanding how a candidate collaborates with his peers and subordinates as well as what a candidate is naturally passionate about, it is really impossible to tell if a candidate will fit in your company. And in our case specifically, it was critical for the candidate to be able and WILLING to talk to customers and have a genuine concern about solving their problems…whether it was an external customer or an internal customer. In fact, the candidate really needed to have a value system that was very consistent with the value system of the company. So while our interview process was more than adequate for testing technical knowledge, it was sorely lacking in its ability to uncover the candidate’s value set so we could see if it was consistent with our value set and our culture. 

Once we realized this, of course we set out to change the way we selected Rackers to ensure we learned during the interview process what values really drove a candidate. It turns out, however, that there aren’t 10 simple questions you can ask to discover if some one naturally shares your value system. Think about the dating process. You don’t decide to get married after the first date (at least not usually). You don’t decide after the second date either. In fact it sometimes takes months or years of dating before you decide to get married. The whole dating process is about really getting to know someone. To learn about that person and discover if that person is compatible with you, your family, your friends, and your value system. Interviewing a candidate has many of the same characteristics. The only problem is that you don’t get to have a long courting process…in fact, taking more than two weeks is often too long to successfully win a candidate. (read more…)