The cloud is advantageous for many reasons and both Rackspace/Mosso and Amazon offer cloud storage solutions.  We are frequently asked to compare Cloud Files enabled with Limelight’s CDN with S3 and CloudFront.  Many of the questions we are asked revolve around cost and performance (particularly CDN).  These are very quantifiable metrics so I thought I’d share with you the results of some comparative analysis we’ve done.

Read the entire post here: A Quantitative Comparison of Rackspace and Amazon Cloud Storage Solutions

Second, let me share some real life quotes from Rackers about why they love Rackspace.

“I’ve been searching for a company with positive energy that makes me want to come to work everyday. I found that with Rackspace.”
Michael — Infrastructure

“Rackspace has the total package — great people, challenging work and a fun environment. I’ve been here 5+ years — I should know!”
Razil — Marketing

“I love the energy here and the freedom that Rackspace gives me to be myself”
Lucy — Help Desk

In a world where technicians are treated as robots, it’s amazing to find a place where you are welcomed like family.”
Kevin — Linux SysAdmin

“I have the opportunity to rotate projects frequently, get exposed to new technologies and work with top IT talent everyday.”
Eric — Solutions Engineer

“Rackspace = people with a passion for what they do and how they do it — all for the customer!”
Robert — Sales

“I love Rackspace because of the people. I enjoy working with everyone I interact with!”
Jessica — Executive Staff

Last year, we were honored by being named on FORTUNE’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For America. We take great pride is this accomplishment. We attribute this ranking to the culture we have created here at Rackspace that makes it a great place to work.

This year FORTUNE has honored us by naming Rackspace to their list of great companies once again as #43. You can read more here

If you’d like to join Rackspace and become part of our amazing culture, make sure to visit the Rackspace Careers website.

‘Twas the day before Open Book and all through the floor…
Lanham was exclaiming we need one competition more…
To my desk I sprang to email his mission…
Guess what Rackers, we’re having our first Annual Outrageous Christmas Sweater Competition!…
So come one, come all, to Open Book wearing your sweater…
It can be outrageous, festive, crazy and even better…
All Rackers and External Customers will be the judges…
So BRING IT before you hold any grudges…
This is a competition and it could be wild…
But please keep this Friends and Family and not over styled…
The winner wil receive a special recognition…
Something that will reflect this season of appreciation!!!

And now I present for your voting, the top 4 contestants:
Contestant #1

Contestant #2

Contestant #3

Contestant #4

So who do you think should win? Let us know in the comments section and have a Happy Holiday!!!

A Fanatical Competition

As a customer service consultant and journalist, I have the opportunity to work with and report on a variety of companies of all shapes, sizes, and specialties.

I first started covering Rackspace in July 2006 and have enjoying following company since then. I have had the opportunity to meet and interview several Rackers and when I was asked to participate in the process of deciding which of Rackspace’s 31,000 customers would win THE FANATI contest award in September, I gladly accepted.

THE FANATI contest has a simple mission: to recognize Rackspace customers who value customer service as much as Rackspace does.

With that goal and my understanding of what Fanatical Support meant to me in mind, I reviewed a small stack of finalist applications and graded each finalist on a scale of one to ten in five areas. To me, Fanatical Support isn’t about responding to emails in a timely manner or being polite (that’s expected in today’s market). Instead, Fanatical Support is about going the extra mile. The companies that have set themselves apart as exceptional service providers are the companies that consistently go the extra mile for each and every one of their customers.

While I didn’t know the names of the companies or specifically what they did when I was judging the applications, I did have some important information: they industry the companies were in, the numbers of customers they had, and the number of employees they had.

The company that ended up winning THE FANATI, The Pangea Foundation, is a relatively small company (12 employees and 1,500 customers), but also a company big enough to understand that Fanatical Support involves everyone being fanatical about service and not just the founders.

I was impressed with how The Pangea Foundation thought about their service mantra, dubbed Client-Intimate Service, in terms of both the abstract and the practical. They knew what Client-Intimate Service and less specifically, a broader “fanatical” approach to service, entailed on both the cultural level and the operational level. This is something that is difficult for many companies to grasp, but because The Pangea Foundation had this understanding, they were able to implement their ideas effectively.

What impressed me most about The Pangea Foundation, though, is their understanding of where they need to go in the future. Their application had a great sentence that is worth repeating: “Extraordinary impact doesn’t happen without effort.”

I’ve mentioned this idea to other people since I read The Pangea Foundation’s application and I think the simple quote sums up an important aspect of Fanatical Support: work hard for your customers and they will show you their appreciation by referring their friends and colleagues.

Douglas Hanna is the founder and a Principal at Service Untitled Group. He blogs about customer service at www.serviceuntitled.com.

John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, and Dave Wright, CEO of Jungle Disk talk about Jungle Disk joining Rackspace

Matt Tanase and Jason Seats, co-founders of SliceHost talk about joining Rackspace

This is not the first time that we’ve been featured on FastCompany.tv. Here are three of our previous appearances:

A Real Business Leader
Rackspace Tears into New Headquarters
Radio Rackspace

Slicehost is a leader in Xen-based virtual machine hosting with more than 15,000 “slices” online today. Jungle Disk offers reliable cloud storage solutions that allow users to easily share an unlimited amount of cloud storage between multiple users through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup.

With these two companies joining the Rackspace family, Rackspace now offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud offerings to go alongside with our Managed and Platform hosting services.

Rackspace’s cloud strategy is supported by three core offerings, all part of Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud hosting division).  The three core offerings are:

Rackspace and our cloud hosting division, Mosso, are holding a customer event and live webcast entitled ‘Live and Unplugged: A Conversation with Rackspace about Cloud Hosting and What’s Coming’.

We don’t do events like this often, but we’ve got some great stuff in the works and are excited to share the news with our friends.  The webcast and event will offer listeners the opportunity to hear strategic and product announcements from our managed and cloud hosting businesses about the future of the hosting cloud.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier and Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman, along with our partners and customers, will be on-hand to discuss emerging hosting trends.

Please join us for this exciting event via Webcast or in person from the historic KLRU studios on the Austin City Limits stage

Visit http://www.rackspacecloudevent.com for more information!

This year’s conference promises to be the best yet.  Our keynote speaker will be Paul Bell, President of Dell Americas, who will be discussing the future direction of the IT industry. We also have a ton of interesting, informative sessions lined up – with both a technical and a business track. Here are just a few of the sessions that are on the agenda:

• Hurricanes, Typhoons and Tornados – Disaster Recovery Options
• Live Launch of MyRackspace Version 6.0
• Rackspace Managed Hosting Product Roadmap
• Cloud Computing
• Fanatical By Design- How Rackspace Uses Net Promoter to Build Customer Loyalty
• Technical Strategies for IT Professionals to Improve Email Deliverability, Reliability & Performance
• PCI Compliance- Where is the Value?
• Uptime 101: Availability Strategies for Web Applications
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices
• What Great Managers Know
• Increasing Profitability and Employee Productivity in a Carbon Constrained World

In addition to all of this, we will also be running data center tours (always an attendee favorite), tours of our new headquarters, a golf tournament, and a guided tour of “haunted” San Antonio. We will also be holding a special murder mystery dinner!

When: Monday, October 27th through Thursday, October 30th

Where: Westin Riverwalk Hotel (on the San Antonio Riverwalk)

Visit www.rackspace.com/conference for full conference details and to register

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!

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

Many of our contestants asked for the solution to the problems we presented. Here is an explanation of the break and a way to resolve the issue. Also noted are non-solutions; this was a break-fix competition in the context of resolving problems on a LAMP system belonging to a customer. Solutions that technically allowed the specified operation to succeed yet without resolving the underlying issue by damaging data, web content or other system functionality did not measure up to the spirit of the competition and were disqualified.

1. Ping www.rackspace.com
# ping www.rackspace.com
PING cirrus.rackspace.com (72.32.191.88) 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted
ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted

The problem was that iptables was configured to drop out-bound connections to www.rackspace.com:
# iptables -L
DROP all — anywhere www.rackspace.com

The solution was to remove the rule or stop iptables. We preferred seeing a lasting solution such as:
# iptables -D OUTPUT -d www.rackspace.com -j DROP
# service iptables save

# ping -c 1 www.rackspace.com
PING cirrus.rackspace.com (72.32.191.88) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from www.rackspace.com (72.32.191.88): icmp_seq=0 ttl=119 time=11.1 ms

2. Run a MySQL insert
The /root/insert.sql file contained the following code (that was not to be modified):
[root@lw3 ~]# cat /root/insert.sql
use world;

INSERT INTO `City` (`Name`, `CountryCode`, `District`, `Population`)
VALUES (‘San Antonio’, ‘USR’, ‘Manitoba’, 1250000);

There is nothing wrong with these SQL statements. Editing the file to something different that would not use the index on word.City would not be a solution in the spirit of a break-fix. Here’s the problem:
[root@lw3 ~]# mysql world < /root/insert.sql
ERROR 126 (HY000) at line 3: Incorrect key file for table ‘./world/City.MYI’; try to repair it

The problem is presented via STDERR: the index for the City table in the world database is broken. We used “dd” to overwrite the first 512 bytes with garbage to make the break. The solution? Also presented via STDERR: try to repair it. Here’s the most popular valid solution:

# mysql -e “repair table City” world

Or,

# service mysqld stop && myisamchk -r /var/lib/mysql/world/City && service mysqld start

3. Alter contents of /tmp/secret.txt
The file currently reads:
[root@lw3 ~]# cat /tmp/secret.txt
This text is to be changed.

But, this file can’t be modified:
[root@lw3 ~]# echo “this file is secret” > /tmp/secret.txt
-bash: /tmp/secret.txt: Permission denied

Here is the permissions of the file (not that it matters; we’re root):
[root@lw3 ~]# ll /tmp/secret.txt
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 28 Aug 5 08:05 /tmp/secret.txt

Here’s the permissions for the /tmp dir. Note that it is properly set with the sticky bit:
[root@lw3 ~]# ls -ld /tmp
drwxrwxrwt 5 root root 4096 Aug 5 14:00 /tmp

The problem is not SELinux:
[root@lw3 ~]# getenforce
Permissive

Nor facls:
[root@lw3 ~]# getfacl /tmp/secret.txt
getfacl: Removing leading ‘/’ from absolute path names
# file: tmp/secret.txt
# owner: root
# group: root
user::r-x
group::r-x
other::r-x

The reason /tmp/secret.txt cannot be modified is that the immutable attribute is set:
[root@lw3 ~]# lsattr /tmp/secret.txt
—-i——– /tmp/secret.txt

Use chattr to remove this attribute that blocks any modification:
[root@lw3 ~]# chattr -i /tmp/secret.txt

Re-run the command:
echo “this file is secret” > /tmp/secret.txt

[root@lw3 ~]# cat /tmp/secret.txt
this file is secret

4. Start Apache
Using the standard Red Hat service command, or /etc/init.d/httpd directly, or your favorite method of choice, try to start Apache. It fails.
[root@lw3 ~]# service httpd start
Starting httpd: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using lw3.bigtools.us for ServerName
[FAILED]

Most everyone – even our 1st Place winner! — solved the ServerName mis-configuration. However, the lack of a reliably determined FQDN for the server is not why Apache will not start. Instead, check the log files:
[root@lw3 ~]# tail -3 /var/log/httpd/error_log
[Tue Aug 05 07:08:29 2008] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
(2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /etc/httpd/logs/nick/es5vm.bigtools.us-error_log.
Unable to open logs

The problem is that Apache cannot open the log files defined in its configuration settings. Specifically, Apache cannot open the error log file /etc/httpd/logs/nick/es5vm.bigtools.us-error_log. The problem is that the directory specified, /etc/httpd/logs/nick does not exist.

[root@lw3 ~]# find /etc/httpd/logs -type d | wc -l
0

However, there are a number of “nick.es5vm*” files:
[root@lw3 ~]# ls /etc/httpd/logs/nick.es5vm*
/etc/httpd/logs/nick.es5vm.bigtools.us-access_log …

The culprit is in Apache’s httpd.conf file that specifies
[root@lw3 ~]# grep -n nick\/ /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
990: ErrorLog logs/nick/es5vm.bigtools.us-error_log

We broke Apache by altering line 990 from nick.es5vm.bigtools.us-error_log to nick/es5vm.bigtools.us-error_log . This “fat finger” mistake can be resolved by either correcting the ErrorLog directive to use “nick.” instead of “nick/” or creating the nick directory where it is expected:

[root@lw3 ~]# mkdir /var/log/httpd/nick
[root@lw3 ~]# service httpd start
Starting httpd: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using lw3.bigtools.us for ServerName
[ OK ]

Confirm that Apache is running:

[root@lw3 ~]# curl -I localhost
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:30:39 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

The final break is fixed.

We had 52 competitors at LinuxWorld this year. Of this number, 25 answered at least one problem successfully. Here’s the break down of the numbers:

Correct number of solved breaks:
1 question: 8 contestants
2 questions: 5 contestants
3 questions: 4 contestants
4 questions: 8 contestants

By problem, here are the number of correct solutions:
Ping problem (iptables): 22 contestants
MySQL (repair table): 13 contestants
Echo (chattr): 13 contestants
Apache (ErrorLog directive): 10 contestants

The winners solved all four breaks in the following times:
1st Place – 8 minutes
2nd Place – 14 minutes
3rd Place – 15 minutes (plus a tie-break question)

We had a tie break round for the 3rd place winner. Three contestants finished the break-fix in 15 minutes each. In such cases we require a run-off for the prize. All three 3rd place finishers in the main break-fix competed in the tie break question and the winner was able to successfully solve the question first.