Rackspace sponsored a case study presentation yesterday entitled “Determining the Right Infrastructure for SaaS and Web 2.0 Companies,” presented by Emil Sayegh (VP, Product at Rackspace) and Kraig Kuipers (CEO of Pangea Foundation). The case study walked through Pangea Foundation’s move from a colo provider to Rackspace.

I’ve embedded the presentation below for your viewing pleasure. I’m interested in your thoughts!

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I’m here in sunny California, home of the world famous In-n-Out Burger. No, I didn’t travel 1,700 miles for a cheeseburger (even if it is a double-double, animal style). I’m here for SaaSCon, the premier Software as a Service conference that brings together application developers, IT managers and infrastructure gurus. Over the next couple days, I will be providing you with a recap of the previous day’s events.

The big news is that business of all sizes are starting to incorporate more and more SaaS applications into their IT stack. From the IT managers that I spoke with, it appears that the most compelling reason for incorporating SaaS offerings is to free up resources to focus on other activities.

I spoke with a CIO from a consumer goods company who told me about how he was able to build an incredibly successful custom application funded entirely with the budget that was freed up when they turned to a SaaS-based email provider. He took money that was going towards a non-differentiating activity (email), and applied it to something that gave his company a significant competitive advantage. (read more…)

We went to Chicago for PyCon 2008 last week. So, “what’s PyCon?” you might ask. PyCon is a conference for the Python community. And no, it has nothing to do with folks who keep snakes as pets.

Pythonis a programming language that we use heavily here at Rackspace for the development of many of the tools that run our business. Our systems that keep track of customers, servers, networks, and trouble tickets are all written at least partially in Python. Rackspace sent about a dozen developers to PyCon this year and we even sponsored the event. We also brought along some of our Rackspace recruiters and had a booth at the conference focused on recruiting more Python developers to Rackspace.

So who else uses Python? Well the big names, besides Rackspace, with booths at the show were Google, Lucasfilm, and Canonical. And at the conference, we met folks who work for companies you might not expect. I personally met folks from Apple, Hitachi, Sun, Microsoft, and many others.

The talks given at Pycon we’re great. The best part is many of the talks are given by the guys who are responsible for writing Python itself, the core developers. And if it isn’t those guys, it’s other big brains who are working on things like distributed computing, high performance networking, web development frameworks, or scientific application, just to name a few. As with all conferences, a few sessions were duds, but overall I thought the content was great. 

Here are a few of my observations from my first PyCon: (read more…)

Rackspace’s own Frederick Mendler recently particpated in a panel discussion at the Customer Service is the New Marketing summit. The topic of the discussion was scaling customer service. The panel, which was moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe, also included Heather Champ from Flickr, Pratap Penumalli from Google, and Ross Mayfield from Socialtext.

The below video was originally posted by Lane Becker on the Get Satisfaction blog.

“Should I be using LAMP?”

Me: Maybe.

“But .Net is easier for me and I like Visual Studio and SQL Server! I already know it. Plus we already paid for the licenses.”

Me: Then why did you ask?

“Because everything I read about LAMP makes me think I should be developing our app on Linux. All the companies like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and, well…all those cool Web 2.0 startup companies are developing on open source. Maybe I should switch.”

Me: Are you a cool Web 2.0 startup company?

“Well, no, we sell lawn mowers.”

I must have this conversation at least twice a week. Everything’s the same except for the lawn mower part. And oftentimes it’s the reverse; someone wondering whether they should switch over (or back) to Windows.

My answer is simple. You should be using the technology that you’re comfortable with. Once you make a choice you should stick with it. And you shouldn’t switch technology platforms just because all the cool kids are doing it.

Now, having said all that, you still have to make a choice. My advice is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your team and the nature of your application then choose the platform and never look back.

Here are a few considerations to help evaluate your platform decision: (read more…)

Our Greenspace initiative is an umbrella for all of our environmental and efficiency programs at Rackspace and one of the key areas of focus within Greenspace is data center efficiency. In May of last year, I posted an article over on the Rack Labs blogabout Rackspace joining an industry consortium called The Green Grid. The Green Grid was launched in February 2007 and today has over 150 members. The primary mission of GG is to advance energy efficiency in data centers around the world and as Rackspace is a big believer in running efficient data centers, it made a lot of sense for us to participate in this forum. We joined the group as a contributing member in March of last year and we’re proud to be one of the few hosting companies on the membership roster.

A couple of weeks ago, Troy Toman and I attended The Green Grid Technical Forum in San Francisco. This was the largest gathering so far for any Green Grid conference. In attendance were GG members, the press and industry analysts, governmental policy makers, end users, and members of other green energy constituencies. At this event, the GG presented a progress report of what we’ve been working on over the last year.

Here’s the punch line: There are no silver bullets for operating a green data center. In fact there is not even a good definition of what a green data center is yet. There is no one correct answer, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and no simple technology solution to make data centers become magically efficient overnight. It will take focus and hard work to get more efficient but the good news is, as evidenced by the attendance level at the conference, that there are lots of folks working toward the goal. (read more…)

Last week I told you I was headed to LA to the launch of Windows Server 2008. Well, I went and got a t-shirt to prove it. Last Wednesday morning, I attended the keynote where Tom Brokaw opened for Steve Ballmer and Microsoft officially announced the launches of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008.

This was the first of Microsoft’s series of launch events called “Heroes Happen Here” that will be traveling the world and introducing these new products to Microsoft developers and IT pros. The events are designed to introduce the new features and enhancements and to showcase third party products and services that are relevant to those who may soon be implementing these new Microsoft offerings.

As Rackspace was a launch partner for Windows Servers 2008, my job was primarily to talk to reporters covering the launch. Unfortunately, that meant that I didn’t get to spend a lot of time attending the many sessions that Microsoft presented on the products. But from the people I spoke to at the event, the sessions were informative and the event was well done overall. I encourage you to attend one if it comes through your town.

In my previous post I told you that IIS 7 was the biggest feature for Rackspace. While that’s definitely still true, even if you ignore IIS, there are plenty of things to talk about with the core operating system itself. (read more…)

Each year here at Rackspace we all rally around an internal theme.  While a theme may be launched in a given year, our desire is not to forget about it the next year, but rather for it to become ingrained in our DNA.  In 2003 we wanted to make great strides in focusing on our employees and that spawned “Project Racker” (Rackers=Rackspace employees). Today, our business model is designed around our employee engagement and desire to make this the greatest place to work.  Another year we got excited about promoting  “Rock Solid Fanatical Support” in everything we do, and we worked very hard to lay a solid foundation to serve our customers.  Each goal doesn’t go away, but instead becomes a part of how we think and plan.

This year’s theme proves equally engaging: For 2008 and beyond, we want to focus on Building Customers for Life.

“Customers for Life” takes Fanatical Support beyond short-term, ticket-by-ticket service and focuses more on how we can build each customer’s business and loyalty to the Rack for the long haul.  We have created a commitment to our customers that we feel will facilitate this and named it ‘The Fanatical Support Promise.’  With The Fanatical Support Promise, we’ve made significant strides toward the Customers for Life goal by creating a Service Level Agreement customers won’t find anywhere else in the hosting industry (where average thinking is to hold customers to contracts, no matter the customer’s hardship).   This Promise is just one component of our commitment to a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

We feel that The Fanatical Support Promise puts our money where our mouth is—if we don’t live up to our standards, customers can leave before their contract is up.  It’s something we’ve already been doing, but now we’re making it official.  Here’s how it works: (read more…)