Rackspace’s very own Emil Sayegh has a great article posted on CIO.com titled “Navigating the Labyrinth: Choosing a Hosting Infrastructure.” Here is a teaser:

Making the decision to host your IT infrastructure is a complicated task—so complicated, in fact, that we sometimes hear customers refer to the process as “navigating the labyrinth.” But hard as it is, navigating the decision can be easy if you focus on a single question: What is my strategy for success? In other words, if your business is an instant sensation in the market, how will you scale to meet the demand? A success strategy must be built into your IT plans from day one. This includes laying out plans for the architecture, support, supply chain, language, features, operating system and hosting service level you require.

You can view the whole thing here.

If you would like to see more from Rackspace in CIO magazine, please be sure to rate this article!

Here is a special guest post from Robert Taylor, a Rackspace Senior Systems Engineer.

Rackspace Break-fix Competition
LinuxWorld 2008
San Francisco

Rackspace Hosting held a break-fix competition at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco. The competition pitted System Administrators comfortable with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Perl) platform against one another in a 4 question, 20 minute contest. The top three competitors who answered the most questions in the shortest time won one of the following prizes:

1st Place: Apple iPod Touch
2nd Place: Nintendo Wii
3rd Place: Garmin GPS

A break-fix competition presents problems with an otherwise working system that must be resolved. System administrators call upon their knowledge and troubleshooting abilities in a break-fix competition and is a good gauge of the depth of those skills and abilities. The Rackspace break-fix is tailored toward the Hosting industry as that is our forte.

Contestants were given root access to a remotely-hosted virtual machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. The questions for this break-fix were as follows:

1. Using the ‘ping’ utility, successfully ping ‘www.rackspace.com’ at 72.32.191.88.

2. Successfully run the command:
mysql world < /root/insert.sql

(Valid solution will leave the insert.sql file as is).

3. Successfully execute the command:
echo “this file is secret” >/tmp/secret.txt

(Valid solution will not affect functionality of the /tmp directory.)

4. Successfully start the Apache web server, without losing any configured functionality (read more…)

Every time I talk to customer that is joining the Racker family or run’s into an issue with scaling their IT infrastrcuture, I find that they either don’t know how backup and storage needs will effect their business or how to best enable today’s storage product’s to better enable their business needs. It seems that when it comes to architecting the largest most bullet proof solution in the world either the storage portion or the backup solution are thought of last. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why this is the case and in most case understand why it is the last thing to consider. However I would like to recommend a new way to think about architecting your solution when storage or backup is needed.

The new approach I like to take is what I call “Block-up” infrastructure planning. Block-up planning is a very easy process. You first decide how much data space you need (in term of GB), what do you need it for (In terms of a business application, like a database) and how much this data is worth to your company/business? I will give you an example of this and how this is important. (read more…)