TechCrunch is the technology industry’s most influential media organization and when they make moves the implications can be deep. Recently TechCrunch moved to the Rackspace Cloud and TechCrunch’s CTO, Nik Cubrilovic, talked with building43’s host Robert Scoble about what the move’s implications were to traffic, uptime, peace of mind, and also costs. Across the board Nik praised Rackspace Cloud. In the interview Cubrilovic revealed that they moved from a company that was providing free hosting and are now paying to use Rackspace’s services.

Robert Scoble interviews Nik Cubrilovic from Rackspace Hosting on Vimeo.

Today, Rackspace partner AvePoint, announced that they had enabled their award winning DocAve suite of products to be able to use Rackspace Cloud Files as a repository for SharePoint data.  This is exciting as it enables the use of a highly available, redundant storage location for SharePoint data outside of SQL server.  Once you download their software and setup a Cloud Files account – all you have to do is configure Cloud Files as a data repository in the DocAve Manager.  After that, data is seamlessly transferred to the Rackspace cloud but still managed and accessed from SharePoint.

Below you will find two videos that show a farm being restored from the Rackspace cloud and also files being stored in the Rackspace cloud but being access from within SharePoint.

Restore From Cloud

Extension Archiver

If you have any further question, feel free to contact me via email: jeff.deverter@rackspace.com

We are sure happy to welcome GitHub to Rackspace. I have gotten to know the founders of GitHub over the last year, and there is no question this is a team and concept that the world should not ignore. We are excited to support them as they continue to deliver great services to the developer community.

It goes without saying that in reaching out to them one of my intentions was to get them on our cloud.

I was surprised to hear a few months later that they were eager to move to us, but they didn’t want cloud, they wanted primarily dedicated servers. Here is true leader of the new era of computing, a team born in the cloud era, and they wanted dedicated gear? What gives?

Well, here is how they describe it in their blog:

“We’ve grown to a size where it no longer makes sense to have every server virtualized. The benefits of running bare metal are obvious and have been empirically proven. We need to have the option to run bare metal when it is appropriate to the task at hand. We also need to be able to configure boxes with custom setups.”

There are really two cloud debates going on right now. One, is simply about the era of buying computing over the web vs. building it in house. This is what we call the cloud movement and it is real and has serious implications. We truly believe 99% of companies in the world can move faster, save money, and perform their IT better by using a computing partner. The next debate is about the specific tool now being called “Cloud.” These are pooled services, powered by software allowing for real time provisioning and very granular pay for use. We think of these as cloud technologies. All this jargon and cross talk has caused much confusion.

We think the Github decision is a great example to use to try to share our views on it. So:

One, we do think most companies going forward will buy computing not run it themselves. No capex, no inventory, no lock in. Github is not interested in having a DC and all the headaches that go with it. In fact, they have never really even considered that option (what startup today would?). We are discussing this movement daily on our site nomoreservers.com.

Two, while this strategy could be called using “the cloud” there is no doubt in our mind that companies will choose from a variety of services based on the workload they are dealing with. They will not just use Cloud technologies like our Cloud Servers or Amazon’s EC2. They will use traditional technologies as well as even higher level services, like SaaS. Why?

Well, here is how we think about it:

If you see these tools as a continuum of prescribed technology deliver on demand, they set up a series of trades. The trades are pretty simple:

The Github team faced this exact trade. As they grew, they needed the ability to customize every aspect of the stack by using physical machines. This is not to say they don’t believe in the Cloud technologies. Later in their post they say:

“On-demand access to a cloud infrastructure will be important to us as we increase the number and variety of low-frequency but long-running jobs that we process.”

The “Cloud” is a part of the computing strategy for Github. As it should be for any company. There are workloads where it is a perfect fit. Other workloads will need other tools. So, as the cloud era picks up steam, the discussion about all or nothing decisions of using one tool or another should be ignored. The key for any IT department is to figure out where the tools match their needs based on the workload they are deploying. Follow the lead of Github.

Do you want to know what we’ve been up to lately? Then check out NoMoreServers.com. This new site is dedicated to the emergence of Computing-as-a-Service models (like hosting, cloud computing and SaaS) to power corporate computing. To support this mission, we’ve put one of our newest Rackers, former founder of Tier1 Research, Andy Schroepfer, in the captain’s seat to cover the trend as companies move from in-house computing to “cloud” providers.

NoMoreServers.com will feature daily and unique commentary explaining the next era in computing. In addition to filtering and reviewing interesting developments and third-party content about the NoMoreServers computing era, the site will feature daily commentary and a live community portal for visitors to engage on the topic and offers a white paper on the subject for community members.

Rackspace held a System Administration breakfix contest at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago pitting the top Red Hat Certified professionals against each other for the chance to win prizes and win bragging rights. During the two day contest, forty-seven participants worked to solve the four identified “breaks” within the fifteen minutes allotted. The problems, listed below, were chosen as representative of issues Sys Admins in a hosting environment must be able to resolve on a daily basis. The contestants who resolved the most problems in the shortest times respectively won first, second and third place.

With encouragement from @devrandy, Randy Russell, the Director of Certification for Red Hat, there was quite a heated competition among the contestants for the top three spots. The winners respectively won one of three prizes: 1st Place, an Acer Aspire 5155; 2nd Place, $100 ThinkGeek gift certificate; 3rd Place, 8GB USB drive. Our winners were:

1st Place – Alex Davies (also a Red Hat 2009 RHCE of the Year!) – 4 correct solutions in 12 minutes

2nd Place – Hai Wu – 3 correct solutions in 15 minutes

3rd Place – Dave Johnson – 3 correct solutions in 15 minutes

Of the forty-seven contestants, only Alex successfully solved all four problems in the allotted time. Thirty-two correctly solved Problem One. Eleven solved Problem Two. Three solved Problem Three and four contestants solved Problem Four. Congratulations to our winners!

Rackspace Trainer Mike Roberts (@soopurman on Twitter) provides a multi-part screen cast of the four challenge questions and provides insight in troubleshooting and solving each. Below, Mike’s screen cast is broken into segments for each problem in the challenge. These are interspersed with the actual questions from the breakfix challenge for reference. Mike begins with a brief introduction to the breakfix:

Rackspace Breakfix Challenge Instructions

This exercise is meant to approximate the types of problems that Rackers solve for our customers with Fanatical Support every day.  As such, the idea is that you should attempt to detect and correct any possible misconfigurations, but not drastically alter the basic setup, nor replace the actual services being used.

We will give you up to 15 minutes to complete the following problems. When you are finished, ask a Racker to record your name, the problems you fixed, and your completion time.  On Friday we will award prizes for the fastest successful completion of all challenge problems.  Good Luck!

1. The IP address 192.168.0.253 is accessible by others on the network, but this machine cannot succesfully ‘ping’ it.  Figure out why and fix it.

2. This machine is supposed to offer both anonymous vsftpd and anonymous rsync services, but clients are complaining they cannot connect to either one.  For example, the command “rsync rsync://localhost” should display a share called “challenge” but it does not.  Figure out why and fix it.

3. The default page of the web site running on this machine is supposed to simply display the word “success” but it does not. Figure out why and fix it.

4. The password for the user named “rack” is correctly set to “rackspace” but this user still cannot login.  Figure out why and fix it.

Mike concludes the presentation of the solution to the breakfix challenge with a special invitation to System Administrators who may want to pursue this kind of activity on a regular basis:

For more information about Rackspace and available careers  please visit our Career portal: http://RackspaceCareers.com.

Do you want to deploy some form of ‘Rich Media’ online? With so many things to consider, first and foremost on your mind is probably HOW: host it yourself or outsource it? How much will this cost? Do you have the right people to make it successful?

Asking and answering the right questions sets you up to succeed; because a failed or broken media campaign can be far more damaging than no campaign at all.

Three key factors to a successful online campaign of any kind are delivery, availability and performance. Learn more about how to launch your rich media campaign here.

In this ongoing series, we will help you ask and answer these and many other questions.

The Rackspace engineering groups have been busy in our data centers. We’re growing and improving our facilities every day.

As noted in our recent press release, we have partnered with DuPont Fabros to expand our footprint in Northern Virginia. This partnership gives us access to a world-class facility that is backed by some of the smartest engineers and operators in the business. More importantly, it will give our customers more options for multi-site and DR deployments. We plan to have this new facility online this summer.

We’ve also been hard at work on our DFW data center. We recently opened an expansion that adds just over 22,000 sq ft of raised floor and raises the total capacity of the site to more than 75,000 sq ft. The work in Dallas goes well beyond just adding floor space. We’ve been adding capacity to all of our infrastructure as well. We have added 16 Megawatts of generator capacity and have nearly completed an overhaul of the HVAC system that more than doubles capacity and leverages new, more energy efficient chillers.

These new developments, when combined with our London and Hong Kong facilities launched in 2008, ensure that we will continue to provide the flexibility and capacity our growing customer base requires. They also provide a modern, robust platform for deploying our expanding set of cloud offerings. Exciting times!

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

These days, it seems to be all about the cloud.  In the last couple of years, this new variant of hosting has built into quite a storm (pardon the pun) amongst the IT community.  On whiteboards all across the world, amorphous blobs that used to represent what lay outside the application infrastructure ( the Internet, for example) have now been elevated to part of the design.   While the change may seem subtle in regards to brainstorming and spit-balling your way through a design session, the options that cloud hosting brings to developers is quite significant.  The challenge, however, is making sense of all the options and how to leverage the different variants this new trend provides.

Cloud can mean a lot of things.  Sometimes it refers to a storage option.  It can also describe a self-contained application platform.  The term is even used to reference leveraged virtual machines where the customer doesn’t have to worry about any of the underlying physical machines.  With all the rapid innovation in this area of the hosting industry, it’s easy to see where people might start getting confused.  While more and more IT shops have embraced various cloud hosting options as part of their solutions, it’s clear that there is a huge population of enterprises that haven’t taken advantage of these scalable and flexible offerings – primarily because they don’t have a comfortable level of understanding.

This became remarkably clear when Rackspace® Hosting recently commissioned a study by by Vanson Bourne to gauge the level of awareness about cloud hosting among businesses of varying sizes in both the US and the UK.  Earlier this week, we released the findings of that survey.  The statement said that while: (read more…)

If you are interested in the cloud, you’ll want to join us on Wednesday, October 22 @ 12:00 pm CT for the Rackspace Cloud Event.

Rackspace and our cloud hosting division, Mosso, are holding a customer event and live webcast entitled ‘Live and Unplugged: A Conversation with Rackspace about Cloud Hosting and What’s Coming’.

We don’t do events like this often, but we’ve got some great stuff in the works and are excited to share the news with our friends.  The webcast and event will offer listeners the opportunity to hear strategic and product announcements from our managed and cloud hosting businesses about the future of the hosting cloud.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier and Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman, along with our partners and customers, will be on-hand to discuss emerging hosting trends.

Please join us for this exciting event via Webcast or in person from the historic KLRU studios on the Austin City Limits stage

Visit http://www.rackspacecloudevent.com for more information!