Austin Loves Puppies

Austin Rackers are celebrating Green Day in a new office this year, but they’re going outside to do it. They significantly reduce their energy consumption by sending the majority of Rackers to work outside where Mother Nature provides the lighting and the air conditioning (after all, Texas is lovely in the spring). Austin Rackers also have a special place in their hearts for animals, so they celebrate Green Day by bringing their dogs to work.

The Green Fayre in London

London Rackers have dubbed their celebration ”Green Fayre” and will have several special guests onsite, including some goats, to teach Rackers about sustainable practices. Well, the goats may not actually be teaching per se, but Rackers will be able to see how soap and other products are made from goat’s milk. London Rackers will also learn about the Eden Project and enjoy some recycled beats with a guest deejay – how’s that for going green?

Green Day at the Castle

San Antonio’s event will be free and open to the public. Attendees will learn about environmental conservation, get information on local utility rebates, recycle used electronics, understand proper recycling practices and try out some hybrid and electric vehicles. It’s a great way to spend a few hours outdoors learning how to reduce your carbon footprint and make choices that are better for the earth.

 To learn more and see photos from our offices, check out Rackspace Green Day on Facebook.

The result? In less than 24 hours, we surpassed 10,000 views. And the news gets better: our customers began asking how they could donate as well. Our customers are amazing!

Rackspace hangs its hat on Fanatical Support 365 days a year, but this is one way that our customers can see – and contribute – to another side of Fanatical Support: the kind we give to the communities in which we live, work and play. We’re proud to be able to give back, and proud to know that our customers share the same values. Thank you for joining us in our holiday gift, and for being such wonderful customers.

When the ethos of your organization hangs on Fanatical Support, you start to look at the world differently. There are, of course, the expected “side effects” one would expect, like effusively promoting companies that create great experiences for their customers, and making references in our own language (“Can anyone recommend a Fanatical mechanic that specializes in XYZ?”). But Fanatical Support is not about taking something subpar and making it acceptable. Fanatical Support is about making things great for others; it’s about doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do. And Fanatical Support is the reason we value National Philanthropy Day.

We have innumerable facets of philanthropy at Rackspace – some touch on our core value of Friends & Family, such as when a Racker is in crisis and we rally behind them to raise money, donate items or even rotate meals so the family is covered; some center on Rackers who are passionate about causes that may not fit our corporate focus of giving, but are important nonetheless, so we support them in their individual pursuit of doing the right thing. It’s important that we hold sacred the ability of our Rackers to do the right thing – whether it’s corporately sponsored or not.

Our Community Affairs group is responsible for initiatives centered on the notion of providing Fanatical Support for the communities in which we live, work and play. We create opportunities for Rackers to give their time, talent and treasure in meaningful ways. When Rackspace moved into an abandoned shopping mall and repurposed it into our global headquarters, we embarked on one of America’s largest recycling projects – 1.2 million square feet of derelict space converted to a LEED-certified economic generator in what was a declining part of San Antonio. We partnered with the community and asked how we could be a good neighbor. We launched the Rackspace Foundation, a 501(c)3 whose sole purpose is to create a vibrant learning community – a place of hope – beginning with the seven schools in our neighborhood. We continued to strengthen Rack Gives Back, the organization that drives the lion’s share of our community investment through volunteerism and corporate charitable giving. We are responsible for creating another side of Fanatical Support.

November is a busy month, not just because of the coming holidays but because of how invested Rackers – from frontline Rackers to our senior leadership team – are in this “other” side of Fanatical Support. We are wrapping up our annual Thanksgiving Food Drive in which Rackers donated (at last count) 1,240 food boxes, quadrupling the amount we’re able to give to our neighborhood’s families compared to last year. This Saturday we’ll have masses of families who received vouchers from the San Antonio Food Bank drive through our parking lot to pick up their Thanksgiving food boxes and turkeys. This week we held our quarterly blood drive for the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center which yielded 79 pints of blood, or 237 lives saved. And for this day only – National Philanthropy Day – our Chairman, Graham Weston, has announced a 2:1 match for all donations made to the Rackspace Foundation. Last year Rackers raised $85,280 in just 24 hours so that we could place a team of 10 City Year corps members at Roosevelt High School, our next door neighbor; this year the challenge is $150,000. In 24 hours. Yes, you read that correctly, and yes, that number is wildly audacious. But what’s really amazing is that Rackers always step up to the challenge. It’s what we do when there’s a need, and in this community where, on average, there’s as many as 78 percent of our students on free and reduced lunch fare, and a roughly 24 percent mobility rate*, there’s most certainly a need. We owe it to our neighborhood to invest, to partner and to leave things better than we found them. This is the way Rackers – collectively and as individuals – will leave a legacy of Fanatical Support.

To our customers, partners and friends, I encourage you to jump on the Fanatical Support train, not just for National Philanthropy Day, but every day, in the communities in which you live, work and play. Adopt your neighborhoods. Invest in them. Take ownership of your communities and know that you don’t have to move mountains to make a difference. Every little bit helps, and every act of giving brings our communities closer to greatness. Fanatical Support isn’t a cultural catchphrase at Rackspace; it’s alive and well in this season of giving, and of giving thanks to those who help us show we’re invested in our communities.

To learn more about the Rackspace Foundation, or to contribute to the National Philanthropy Day match, please click here.

*rates of economic disadvantage and mobility are as high as 96% and 30%, respectively, in some of our schools.

The art installation is a striking physical interpretation of Rackspace, and captures the fact that there are two sides to Rackspace:  1) Rackers are a diverse, creative group who 2) work in a very serious company on the leading edge of hosting and cloud computing. The Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio is located in the old Windsor Park mall which we call The Castle. The installation also uses giant spires to represent an abstract crystalline castle, each of which has two faces on each side. Disparate images are projected on the two sides to show the dichotomy of the Rack, and create visual tension within the piece and two visual experiences, depending on the location of the viewer. The sculpture was created by Rackspace Director of Events and Media Michael Dietrich.

The second way we’re adding uniquely-Rackspace value is in the creation of the interactive guide (live.luminariasa.org). Tracy Loring, the Racker who serves on the Luminaria steering committee, recognized this opportunity early on, sent a few emails to some Rackers who could donate their time and talent, and the rest, as they say, is history. Roughly 20 Rackers mobilized to bring this interactive guide to life, creating QR codes that point to information about each artist, schedules and maps – essentially up-leveling the entire experience for both the 300,000-plus people who attend Luminaria and the artists themselves. With this interactive guide, users can more carefully tailor their experience at Luminaria, and they’re now able to access these artists well beyond the one-night event itself. Special thanks to Kevin Bittner and all the Rackers who worked on this project.

Luminaria is a great event for Rackspace to be involved with for several reasons. We’re helping drive the progress and direction of San Antonio as it continues to reinvent itself. San Antonio is working hard to create the next evolution of its ‘city experience’ and Luminaria is part of that effort. I’m so incredibly proud that Rackers have volunteered their time and talent to contribute to this event – especially when our time and talent is the most valuable thing we have. There was no obligation, no requirement to get involved – these Rackers just saw an opportunity to help and jumped in. And the ones who weren’t directly involved with the art installation or the interactive guide? They show up, they represent. They wear their Rackspace shirts to show that they’re proud too. Rackers are a tribe that I’m honored to be part of. Luminaria will come and go this year, but Rackers are what make this experience truly special.

Can’t make it to Luminaria: Arts Come to Light? Stream it live on NowCastSA.

Rackspace was proud to be the presenting sponsor of this illuminating evening, which was happening just as we were also kicking off all the fun at SXSW in Austin. Rackers were kept busy (in a fun way!) at both events, including an electrifying flash mob (see below) that had the crowd dancing along as Rackers helped open the festivities at Luminaria. How about you? Any Luminaria adventures to share? Were you part of the crowd of more than 250,000 in HemisFair Park that night? If so, we’d love to hear about your experience. Thanks for helping shine a light on the arts in San Antonio. Creativity and innovation: yay!

Join Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces CTO, and Guy Korland, GigaSpaces VP of R&D, to learn about how GigaSpaces’ XAP application server, running on Rackspace Cloud Servers, creates unmatched cost efficiencies for application providers.

In this webinar, you will discover how to reduce TCO and boost ROI with:

• Built-in multi-tenancy for lower costs per user
• Linear, dynamic scalability for hardware cost savings
• Performance efficiencies that help reduce cloud resource requirements
• Accelerated time-to-value, with an out-of-the-box solution that leverages existing developer skills (no code change, quick deployment)
• Monitoring and management capabilities that streamline operations and reduce maintenance

Details of the webinar:

Date: Thursday, August 26th
Time: 11am CST

Click here to register.

Live Demo – The Rackspace Cloud
Wed, Aug 25, 2010, 1:00 PM CST

We will walk you through the benefits of Cloud Hosting, discuss our cloud offerings—Cloud Servers™, Cloud Files™, and Cloud Sites™—and show you how to get started. Near the end of the hour, we’ll wrap up our time with some interactive Q&A.

Click here to register.

See you there!

Part 3 – Easy to Find, Share and Use: SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management

Topics include:

• Analysis of why more than 50% of ECM projects fail and how SharePoint 2010 can help you avoid those mistakes
• How to enhance Record Management capabilities including Document IDs, Document Sets and Enterprise Content Types
• The unifying power of Enterprise Search

Thursday July 22, 2010 at 9am PT/11am CST/12pm EST.

Click here to register for Part 3.

Part 4 – Connect and Customize: Capturing Knowledge and Pinpointing Expertise with SharePoint 2010

Topics include:

• How to demonstrate capabilities and expertise within SharePoint
• How to easily publish knowledge in today’s Enterprise SharePoint environment
• New social networking features that enable knowledge capture

Thursday July 29, 2010 at 9am PT/11am CST/12pm EST.

Click here to register for Part 4.

We look forward to seeing you at these educational webinars that conclude the SharePoint 2010 series.

Click here to view SharePoint 2010 webinar Part 1, “Creating Business Solutions with Enhanced Tools and Improved Collaboration.”

Apache Cassandra is a fully distributed, highly scalable, sparse-table database.  It combines Dynamo’s fully distributed design and BigTable’s schema-free ColumnFamily-based data model. Client-tunable eventual consistency allows users to achieve a high degree of consistency while not sacrificing cluster availability or data redundancy.

Many users arrive at Cassandra after reaching the limits of what they can affordably accomplish with a traditional relational database (RDBMS). However, Cassandra is not a drop-in replacement for MySQL or Oracle.  It has some features that relational systems lack and is missing some features found relational systems. If you understand your application well and are willing to think about problems differently, Cassandra might be a tool worth exploring.

Distributed and Scalable Cassandra’s decentralized approach means every node in a Cassandra cluster is the same. Adding nodes to an existing cluster is relatively easy. Just make sure your storage settings are correct and then startup the new node. Cassandra takes care of deciding which ranges of data the node is responsible for and replicating the data to it. If you require more control, you are free to perform every step of this process yourself manually.

Schema-free Sparse Table If you are used to SQL tables, Cassandra’s data model is probably the biggest mental hurdle to overcome. One of the easiest ways to conceptualize the Cassandra data model is to imagine many rows, each row containing a list. You are free to add and remove items from these lists, or to ask Cassandra for the values from sections of these lists (we call them slices).

One of the ramifications of being “sparse” is that Cassandra has no notion of NULL—a key-value pair is simply present in a row or it is not. You are free, however, to store a column name with no value associated with it to indicate NULL (the absence of data) to your application.

Shedding Features Cassandra does away with several RDBMS features in the name of performance and scalability. Notably, you will have to do without robust transactions, ad-hoc queries, joins or flexible indexes.  These aren’t limitations though. Just ask some of the visible companies using Cassandra to build their applications. These include Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Reddit to name a few.

Why You Would Use It If your application has a very large dataset, high write throughput and requires distributing redundant copies of your data across servers, racks or datacenters, you should consider using Cassandra. Writes are fast because Cassandra’s write path has been optimized to avoid random disk accesses. Server-side caching enables reads to be fast as well, if you need it and have the RAM to spare. Cassandra has the ability for you to specify where your data is replicated, and how many nodes it should be replicated to. This makes Cassandra very fault-tolerant.

Rackspace Supports Cassandra Development Besides having our own internal uses for Cassandra, we at Rackspace believe it is important for you to have the ability to develop your application for Cassandra and deploy it anywhere, not just with a specific cloud provider. Rackspace is committed to an Open Cloud. We currently employ two programmers to work on Cassandra full-time along with several other part-time contributors.

There are three ways you can get more information on Cassandra:

1.  IRC. #cassandra for general questions, or #cassandra-dev if you are a programmer looking for answers relating to the codebase.

2.  Apache mailing lists. Those interested may subscribe to either a user- or developer-related list, or both.  Find out more by sending mail to user-subscribe@cassandra.apache.org and dev-subscribe@cassandra.apache.org.

3.  My email: gary.dusbabek@rackspace.com

What Does this Mean to You?

Microsoft will continue to provide security updates for Windows Server 2003 but will no longer provide non-security related hot-fixes, no-charge incident support, warranty claims, design changes or feature requests.

Windows Server 2003 will remain in Extended Support until July of 2015, at which time all updates for Windows Server 2003 will be discontinued.

Has Rackspace support of Windows Server 2003 changed?

No.

But, if you have any questions you should check with your Account Manager or access the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ.