The Official Rackspace Blog » Ashleigh Davis

SharePoint Tuesdays: Stop! Collaborate And Listen

Ashleigh Davis — Fri, 04 May 2012 20:23:52 +0000

You are not alone.

Stop feeling like a SharePoint Lone Ranger and take advantage of the knowledge and skills of our SharePoint team. Join the Rackspace SharePoint Services team, a group of Microsoft certified MVPs and SharePoint enthusiasts, every Tuesday beginning May 15 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. CST to find the help you are looking for.

SharePoint Tuesday is a forum for people who want to dig deeper into SharePoint from both a business and technical viewpoint. With SharePoint911 and Rackspace playing on the same team, you have access to a huge concentration of thought-leadership, and we are bringing it to your doorstep … or in this case, to your computer screen.

Unlike your typical webinar, at SharePoint Tuesday you define the topics. Since each MVP will cover a different SharePoint subject, you can tune into the ones that are most pertinent to your business and cover what you care about without wasting time on topics unrelated to your job.

The weekly expert will be able to answer questions from the audience on topics like:

- Administration & Infrastructure
- Governance & Planning
- SharePoint Branding & User Interface Design
- Creating out of the box value
- Designer workflows, InfoPath and Data View Web Parts
- Building Enterprise Solutions
- Database Architecture

Let’s succeed together.

Bringing Fanatical Support to customers in NYC

Ashleigh Davis — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:31:18 +0000

This post was written by Cliff Turner,
Solutions Architect for Rackspace’s Enterprise Services Division

After seven years in San Antonio, Rackspace has sent me on the road to be a bit closer to some of our customers: I’m happy to be part of Rackspace’s new four-member and growing regional New York City team.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing some posts about what our customers are building, and how our team is helping them put it all together—so everything scales smoothly, of course.

My new home office is in Woodside, Queens. My wife and I lived in New York ten years ago, not too far from here. A lot of things have changed, but some things are just the same: street parking is still a hassle, and I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the mysterious rhythms of garbage pickup in this city.

Here in New York, I’m doing the same thing I did in San Antonio: talking with our customers about how Rackspace can make their IT work better and finding solutions to make their crazy dreams utterly possible.

I’m meeting or talking with customers every day of the week, and I answer a lot of questions: How does the cloud work? How can we use it? How do we make it work for us? And our favorite: We’ve decided to move to the cloud—now what? Every day, the Rackspace team helps customers take their business to the next level, and implement the perfect hosting solution for their needs.

More soon…until then, I’ll be busy meeting more of our customers for coffee, lunch—and drawing a lot of diagrams of puffy (and powerful) clouds.

Decade of Storage: From USB to Cloud Storage (infographic)

Ashleigh Davis — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:48:29 +0000

To store a gigabyte’s worth of data just 20 years ago required a 500-pound machine the size of a refrigerator. Today, we carry gigabytes of data around in our pockets in our smart phones, mp3 players, and laptops.

Click image below for larger version.

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Online Storage

2000

Commercial production of the USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drives capable of holding 8MB of memory – that’s 5x more than floppys at the time. Today you can get USB flash drives with up to 256GB (portable drive). The USB flash drive’s solid state design also one-upped floppys by eliminating the moving parts that made the floppys prone to damage.

The “I Love You” virus is unleashed. The virus eventually costs consumers over $10 billion, becoming the most expensive computer virus in history. The resulting data loss from the virus’ damage underscores the value of backing up data.

2001

Apple’s iPodMP3 player with 5GB (about 1000 songs) hits the consumer market selling 125,000 units in less than two months. In 2003, Apple launches iTunes, an online digital music storage service. Today, an iPod Touch can store up to 64GB.

Bram Cohen authors the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol and its first file sharing program, BitTorrent. The protocol is used to power many popular download sites, like Shareaza and LimeWire and continues to drive the need for more consumer-end storage capability.

2002

Development begins on blu-ray disks after years of squabbling about patent ownership of the small blue diodes needed for production. Blu-rays replace DVD red laser technology with shorter wavelength blue rays capable of holding up to 25GB (single layer) & 50GB (dual layer).

The one billionth PC is sold. This milestone comes 27 years after the introduction of Sphere I, considered the world’s first PC, shipped with a mere 4KB of RAM.

2003

The Internet turns 20. The adoption of TCP/IP protocol in 1983 offered greater access and laid the groundwork for expanding the Internet to the World Wide Web it is today.

The floppy disk drive becomes obsolete. Dell follows Apple by not including floppy drives in PCs in favor of CD-rewritable drives.

2004

300,000 US households own a network storage device. By 2010, the number jumps to 10 million.

MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr launch. These sites represented a new breed of social websites specializing in storing massive amounts of user data.

2005

IBM introduces the Millipede chip able to hold one trillion bits of data per square inch. The chip stores data using thousands of levers about 10 micrometers wide instead of the traditional magnetic disks found in hard drives.

“Me at the Zoo” is the first video uploaded to You Tube. Holding about 45TB of data, You Tube stores over 14 billion videos with 34,560 hours of video uploaded daily.

2006

Cloud computing introduces the idea of securely storing unlimited amounts of data without physical, onsite hardware.

Twitter launches with the first tweet: “Just setting up my Twttr” from co-founder of Twitter. Today, Twitter handles over 65 million tweets and about 800,000 search queries per day.

2007

First 1TB hard drives ship. At the time, it was the largest capacity hard drive available.

The iPhone is introduced by Apple at Macworld. The iPhone is credited with popularizing the multi-touch screen phone, the first phone to come with its own operating system, and the only phone with access to the popular Apps Store. The first iPhone included 8GB of flash memory and the recently released iPhone 4 comes with as much as 32GB.

2008

U.S. households consume about 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008. That’s the equivalent of 100,500 words and 34GB gigabytes per person.

The battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray comes to an end. Toshiba announces it will no longer make HD-DVDs due to the crushing market popularity of Blu-ray technology.

2009

Micro holographic storage material able to hold 500GB of data on a DVD-size disc is unveiled.

Sixty years ago, Konrad Zuse builds the first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer called the Z2.

2010

The first 3TB external hard drive, the largest to date, reaches consumer markets. It has enough space to hold 120 high-definition movies.

Just 19 years after it revolutionized data storage, Sony stops making 3.5in floppy disk.

Webinar Recap: Managed Cloud Top 20 FAQ

Ashleigh Davis — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:25:31 +0000

Last week’s webinar, Introduction to Rackspace® Cloud Servers™ with a Managed Service Level, was a topic that garnered much attention. Hosted by Lew Moorman (President‚ Cloud & Chief Strategy Officer), Frederick Mendler (Vice President‚ Sales & Marketing) and Paul Salisbury (Director‚ Managed Service Level‚ Rackspace Cloud), the webinar drew more than 550 attendees.

We received so much interest during the webinar, that we didn’t have enough time to address each individual question. We have reviewed your questions, though, and developed a document with answers to the Top 20 most frequently asked questions.

If the Top 20 doesn’t address your question, please here, reach out to us by phone, chat or email.

For your convenience, we’ve also made the Webinar Audio/Video available on demand and have also uploaded the Presentation slides in a separate file.

Thank you to everyone who participated – we look forward to seeing you in the clouds.

Sign up for Cloud Servers with a managed service level before January 31, 2011, and save up to $300.

Great Customer Support Made Easy with Zendesk, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner

Ashleigh Davis — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:15:01 +0000

This post was written and contributed by Helen Yu, Director of Product Marketing at Zendesk, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.

Zendesk is a leading provider of web-based help desk software with elegant support ticket system and a self-service customer support platform. Built upon the idea that customer support software doesn’t have to be costly and complicated and should be focused on the customer experience, Zendesk lets companies offer high-quality support for both internal and external customers at minimal expense. Zendesk is easy to customize, integrate, and use so companies can quickly start offering better customer service.

Rackspace Cloud Delivers Customer Support Using Zendesk
Blake Yeager, Product Manager at Rackspace, explains the importance of being recognized as a provider of outstanding customer support — “When we launched our cloud hosting offering, we wanted to keep this distinction from other vendors by delivering a higher level of support.”

Rackspace Cloud’s support staff initially handled customer issues via phone, online chat, and email. The original ticketing system provided limited visibility into open cases. Rackspace aimed for a higher level of customer service in its cloud hosting offering.

“Our customers were already very happy with our overall level of service,” says Yeager. “We wanted to take it one step further and give them an interface where they could track their own tickets online, so we began to look for a provider of such solution.”

After researching various ticketing system options, Yeager confirmed that Zendesk would allow Rackspace Cloud customers to create their own support tickets online and track them in real-time, rather than exchanging emails with the support team.

“Zendesk makes a world of difference,” says Damian Green, Product Operations Engineer, Rackspace. “It lets our cloud customers see the current status of their tickets, which increases their overall confidence in us. It also feeds us performance reports on how promptly we’re responding to their support needs.”

By offering its customers an additional means of interaction, Rackspace has solidified its customer service in improving its customer interaction without devoting more resources. Some customers use Zendesk as their primary means of communication with The Rackspace Cloud support team.

Attend Webinar To Learn More & Try Zendesk FREE
Join Tim Sturge, director of infrastructure and operations at Zendesk and Roxana Siu, product marketing manager at Zendesk, for a webinar. You’ll get an introduction to getting started with Zendesk and learn how to leverage Zendesk to engage and grow your customer community.

We are extending a very special offer for Rackspace customers! Try Zendesk for free and get 25% off your first 3 months. For more details, visit www.zendesk.com/rackspace

Popular Computing Acronyms Defined

Ashleigh Davis — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 14:15:53 +0000

CMS, IaaS, PaaS, CDN and API. You may be familiar with some, or all, of these acronyms, but what exactly do they mean? And how do these acronyms impact developers and decision makers within your organization?

A recent post on the Rackspace Email & Apps Blog goes into detail some of the most popular acronyms, and their applications. Among the defined terms is:

CDN = Content Delivery Networks

What Is It? A geographically dispersed network of hosted servers holding copies of media. The geographic range of the servers allows media to be served to users around the world as if they were just around the corner from your data center.

Who Uses It? Web entities with global audiences who need to maintain a consistent experience across the world without building data centers all over the world.

Interested in learning more? Read “What Does That Mean?” for more insight.

Selecting the Best CMS Platform Based on Goals, Expertise and Budget

Ashleigh Davis — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:30:22 +0000

Web programming and design has experienced quite an evolution this decade, with the Content Management System (CMS) growing in popularity. In recent years, developers have come together to build a flourishing community that offers a host of open-source solutions.

The largest CMS platforms within this free, open-source community are Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Each offers room for customization and varied coding structure, so how should a developer go about deciding which one is the best for a given project?

The goals and budget for each particular project should drive the selection of a CMS platform. Additionally, the expertise of the developers involved in the project should be taken into consideration.

Given your resource constraints, what platform is the best for a project with a very limited budget with goals of integrating the latest social plug-ins? Conversely, if your project has assigned a team of proficient developers, which CMS platform might be the best for developing a complex, robust website?

For insight into those questions we have prepared a complete rundown and side-by-side comparison of each CMS platform based on various attributes including ease of use, features and best use cases; visit the Rackspace Knowledge Center to read our CMS Comparison: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

Rackspace on the Road – December 2010

Ashleigh Davis — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:03:52 +0000

The holidays are almost here, but we have a few more events we’d like to share with you before the New Year. If you’re going to be in attendance, be sure to stop by and chat with us.

Joomla Day 2010
December 4-5, 2010

Anything and everything Joomla. Topics will include template development, Joomla for business, extension coding and much more.

Rackspace is a proud sponsor of Joomla Day. We look forward to seeing you there!

Cloud Camp Boston
December 16, 2010

This unconference is an opportunity for early adapters of Cloud computing to exchange ideas and innovations – as well as challenges and potential opportunities.

Rackspace’s own Robert Collazo is among the various speakers. We look forward to collaborating with you.