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

UPDATE: The Extra Life marathon was a huge success. Extra Life is still pulling in the donations, but so far they have surpassed their total from last year and have eclipsed the $140,000 mark. And The Rackspace Gaming Team had a great time doing their part. Here is the info to the money they raised so far.

Gaming for 24 straight hours can be pretty tough. Rack Gives Back helped out by donating food and snacks to keep the players energized. Still, the last few hours were pretty tough and not everyone made it, but that’s okay. The live stream was a great addition to the Rackspace Team and had up to 70 viewers online. Even a local high school student found the stream, chatted with the team and actually hopped in the public server played some CounterStrike:Source with the team.

The Rackspace Team played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Quakelive.com, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike:Source, Prototype, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Madden, Assassin’s Creed, World of Warcraft and finished out the live stream with a wicked game of Solitaire.

So thanks to everyone who donated or contributed to this good cause!

This weekend, 15 Rackers will participate in Extra Life, a 24-hour gaming marathon to fund pediatric cancer research and treatment. Extra Life partners with the Texas Children’s Hospital and all donations are given to the Texas Children’s Cancer Center.

Extra Life was founded by Houston-native Jeromy ‘Doc’ Adams and last year (just the first year) they raised more than $120,000 from every continent except Antarctica.

So Rackers formed the ‘Rackspace Gaming Team’ this year to do their part. Their team goal is to raise $2,842. Donations start at $1 an hour. Starting at 8 a.m. CST Saturday, Oct. 17 and ending 24 hours later, these Rackers will be up all day and night playing various games on X-Box, Playstation and the PC to include Madden, Call of Duty and Age of Empires. Best of all, Rackers have set up a site to stream their marathon live so anyone can tune in and check on their progress.

So if you’d like to help by donating, just go here and make sure to check out the Rackspace Gaming Team stream this weekend.

**Update – Blake Mycoskie blogged about his visit to Rackspace – Check it out here

Today Rackspace had a fantastic visit from philanthropist and entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie. As the founder of Toms Shoes Blake shared the idea, mission, and successes his startup company has experienced with Rackers and a few community members.

About Toms Shoes:
In 2006, Blake was in Argentina and was introduced to the health and social problems presented to children in underdeveloped countries caused by lack of shoes. In many countries, debilitating diseases and school attendance can be corrected by providing children with shoes. Toms Shoes was founded in 2006 on the premise that with every pair of shoes purchased, Toms will donate a pair of shoes to a child in need. “One for One” is the principal behind Blake’s work. In three years, Toms has given over 150,000 pairs of shoes to children all over the world. Toms plans to give over 300,000 pairs in 2009 alone.

Blake spoke to Rackers about the importance of creating a business with the idea that you are working towards something bigger than yourself. He also enjoyed taking a tour of the Rackspace facilities and meeting several Rackers. Along with a great story, Blake provided Rackspace with a special insight.

Blake’s secret sauce? Giving people the chance to feel good about what they’re doing and success will follow.

See below for pictures of Blake’s visit:

For more pictures, check out our Flickr account here.

At Rackspace, Fanatical Support extends from a Racker going above and beyond for a customer. It also applies to Rackers and how we act toward each other. How we, as a family of Rackers, take care of each other and how our leaders listen to what we want out of our work place.

On Sunday, October 11, the San Antonio Express News named Rackspace to its Top Work Places Program. This is exciting news for us! It’s an affirmation that our philosophy is still working and we are making strides. According to Top Workplaces, this survey measures factors that deal with direction of the company, the ability of the organization to execute, opportunities for career growth, caliber of managers, workplace conditions, and benefits.

Rackspace came in 7 on the large list and was ranked third overall for having excellent managers who praise good work, care and listen to Rackers.

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.

On Tuesday night, Rackspace joined the North East ISD to host National Night Out. The Windcrest and Rackspace community enjoyed live musical and dancing performances complements of theFund, facility tours, pumpkin painting and much more. For the entire list of activities, which spanned across Rackspace and neighboring Roosevelt and Krueger schools, check out this press release from NEISD.

Rackspace and NEISD have developed a partnership to improve the community through motivated students, engaged parents, socially responsible partners and an involved community. This event presented an opportunity for the community to gather as one in a fun environment and create a stronger neighborhood. Rackspace’s event theme was “Arts and Culture,” while Roosevelt’s theme of the evening was “Literacy and Higher Education.”

Guadalupe Dancers in front of Rackspace

To see more photos of National Night Out, check out our flickr.

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.

At Rackspace, we love listening to our customers to see how we can serve them better. From September 27 to 29, we did just that by holding a Customer Advisory Council hosting 18 companies. During the advisory council, we discussed customer needs for today and tomorrow, the Rackspace Enterprise Cloud, Fanatical Support and how it can better serve them, high demand applications and the Rackspace sales engagement process. By pulling some of the best minds in the industry together, these council members will help in directly impacting the future of Rackspace. As a result of participating in interactive sessions, these members will help set priorities for Rackspace to better serve their business needs.

As part of our ongoing Greenspace initiative, Rackspace recently completed its third annual Green Survey, which polled customers about their environmental strategies. We sliced and diced the results, compared answers to previous surveys, and you can now access the full report here.

We were especially curious to see if being green was a key factor in business initiatives and purchase decisions, especially in this rough economic climate as compared to the last two years. While a majority of survey respondents positioned cost as a more important factor than being green, it is interesting to note that many IT cost-cutting efforts have inherently produced green benefits. For example, thirty-one percent of respondents had undertaken datacenter consolidation, which could be seen as both a cost savings and environmentally friendly initiative.

As I see it, it makes sense that cost-cutting initiatives, such as server consolidation, yield efficiencies and a significant reduction in power consumption. In general, hosting servers in larger datacenters reduces power consumption and environmental impact through scale efficiencies, but there are opportunities to reap even greater benefits if you add in virtualization and cloud computing. Using these technologies is growing in popularity for companies who want to consolidate computing while reaping environmentally and budget friendly benefits.

The survey shows there is a big opportunity for education around the green benefits of cloud computing. A new question was added to this year’s survey asking Rackspace customers whether they viewed cloud computing as a greener alternative to traditional computing infrastructure. Twenty-one percent agreed that cloud computing was a much greener alternative, while thirty-five percent were not yet convinced on its green benefits.

Overall, while cost may outweigh green benefits in the decision making process, the survey shows that a majority of companies are still concerned with green initiatives and are sustaining or improving their environmentally friendly policies. More interesting findings from the survey include:

• Half of the companies polled last year which had begun taking steps towards being green have made significant steps toward being green this year.

• Only twenty-one percent have put their green initiatives on hold.

• Seventy-one percent of respondents said they use traditional methods of environmental sensitivity such as recycling.

Let us know about your own experiences. How has your company balanced shrinking budgets with being environmentally responsible?