Rackspace just completed its second ‘Green’ week. A year ago, Rackspace launched Greenspace, a proactive campaign to address the issues of power consumption and efficiency, carbon emissions, and general environmental responsibility.

Since then, we’ve come out with products like the Green Server configuration (utilizing the most energy efficient hardware, with all of the carbon usage offset through NativeEnergy). We’ve begun offering cloud hosting through Mosso and virtualization. And most notably, our new data center in Slough is run completely on renewable energy.

So what was Green Week?

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DNS or Domain Name System is a service most commonly used to translate Domain Names (URL’s, websites, call them what you will) into IP Addresses. Realistically, IP Addresses are the true identifiers of how to locate things/places on the Internet, however DNS makes it much simpler to “surf” by only having to reference Domain Names that are much easier to remember. DNS functions in a hierarchical structure

Rackspace uses an implementation strategy called AnyCast with our Authoritative DNS. This technology allows us to announce the same DNS IP space from 3 different (or as many as desired) datacenters via the BGP protocol we run with our Internet Service Providers. The purpose of this is multi-fold in that it not only allows us to have active/active DR type redundancy, but it also allows us to serve customer requests from the closest DNS infrastructure possible, which typically means the best response time too. Additionally, it allows for the ease of maintenance, upgrades, and expansion our our DNS infrastructure with no customer impact.

This is the same kind of underlying technology that the Root Nameservers of the Internet run off of, and many other companies that specialize in DNS as a service.

Order by phone or online?  Pickup or delivery?  Generally speaking, there isn’t one way of doing things.  We all have preferences and priorities. This is something lots of us have thought about over the years at Rackspace.  How do each of our customers want to be supported?  Does it depend on the situation they’re in? 

From my experience, each customer defines Fanatical Support a little different.  For some it’s about being able to call at 3am and have a team of Linux experts eager to troubleshoot an unusual Apache error.  For others it’s about having the power to go into the MyRackspace customer portal to create a snapshot of their virtual server. This is one of the beautiful things about Fanatical Support; it represents many things to many customers.  And so, having options is very important.

We’ve heard consistently from customers that while they love having a team of Rackers available to support them around the clock, many prefer to just take care of some things themselves. Self-service matters at Rackspace! Self-service is about offering choices that make hosting easier and more efficient.  If a customer has the expertise and would prefer to just knock out a quick change themselves, then they should have the tools available to easily make this change.  This is something we understand and have a fleet of folks working to deliver. (read more…)