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…)

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.

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