The Rackspace Cloud now offers a broad portfolio of cloud products and services, including Cloud Databases, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks, a new Control Panel and next generation Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, all backed by Fanatical Support.  It also sets the stage for the era of open clouds.

We’ll have full video from this morning’s launch event soon, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek and some first impressions from industry leaders about what these innovations mean for Rackspace customers, partners, the market and anyone interested the future of the open cloud.

Rackspace’s Robert Scoble emceed a panel of cloud all-stars including Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier and President Lew Moorman; SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos; and Nicira Co-Founder and CTO Martin Casado. Rackspace Vice President of Product Mark Interrante ran demos of each new product, showcasing the power of the new production-ready cloud architecture when he created hundreds of new Cloud Servers in the span of just a few minutes. From there, Interrante used the slick and speedy new control panel to add servers and load balancers with a click. (It was awesome.)

We spoke with Tom at SOASTA about what the Rackspace Cloud means for his company, which has been spinning up tons of Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack to load test for events like the 2012 London Olympics:

In talking with Dave Murphy, SOASTA’s senior vice president of delivery, we learned that he’s a cloud API fiend — he works with 17 different APIs, sometimes using the APIs from four or five vendors at once. Here he talks about how the new Rackspace Cloud Servers API stacks up:

Vyatta is building software-based networking for cloud infrastructure. Scott Sneddon, Vyatta’s director of cloud solutions, told us what OpenStack and Cloud Servers mean to them:

The OpenStack Design Summit & Conference takes place this week here in San Francisco, and Rackspace’s event this morning kicked off the week in a big way.  We’re excited to share these powerful products with our customers and partners, and to continue building the OpenStack community. The open cloud is here, now.

KarmaCRM, a startup providing SaaS customer relationship management, is representative of the trend. “As a small company, I need to leverage all the affordable technology I can,” explains KarmaCRM founder John-Paul Narowski. “The cloud both provides a strong backbone to my services and allows me to compete with the big boys with large technology budgets.”

They needed an affordable, scalable infrastructure that wouldn’t take man-hours away from the development of their core product. As a cloud-based service, KarmaCRM needed a host with stability and support in order to guarantee its customers that same level of dependability. “By leveraging Rackspace’s cloud offerings, we gain access to a wealth of services that we couldn’t afford to create or manage in-house,” says Narowski.

Narowski (pictured left) chose Cloud Servers with a managed service level, better known as Managed Cloud, and it has been a great fit for the company. “The experience has been A+, alleviating a lot of pressure we previously felt before switching to a managed, monitored solution. Rackspace gives us all the services and tools we need to ensure our CRM application is stable, fast, and always available to our customers.”

As software options have proliferated, Narowski has found simplicity by using a number of complementary Rackspace solutions, including hosted email. As Narowski points out, just because they’re a startup doesn’t mean it makes sense to do everything by themselves. “It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of doing everything in-house and waste your IT talent managing email servers instead of growing your business,” he says. “Our business is CRM, not IT, and everything we can do to help keep that in the forefront helps us remain lightweight and competitive.”

Cloud monitoring via Cloudkick (soon to become Rackspace Cloud Monitoring) has also given KarmaCRM greater control and peace of mind. “It alerts me to any issues or warnings on my servers,” explains Narowski. “I have alerts set up to allow me to preemptively fix any load-balancing issues my servers might have. The ability for Cloudkick to monitor CPU and memory usage and dynamically spin-up or resize instances is going to be a crucial part of our system stability and automation over the long haul.”

Would Narowski recommend these cloud solutions to other SaaS businesses? “Without question,” he says. “The peace of mind it brings is worth its weight in gold as you are starting up. For web-based software companies without a dedicated sys admin, it’s a no-brainer.”

To read more about the technical aspects of KarmaCRM’s configuration at Rackspace, check out the full case study: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/karmacrm

For more information on using KarmaCRM to manage your customer relationships, visit KarmaCRM.com.

If you’re going to SXSW, you’ve got to go big. And you’ve go to go AWESOME.

For SXSW 2012, Rackspace is hitting Austin in full force. And—for the first time ever—Awesome is starting in San Antonio!

Check it out–here’s what’s in store March 8 – 15.

RAX @ SXSW Calendar of Awesomeness:

Tuesday – Thursday March 6-8 – San Antonio, Texas

Hermione Way (pictured at right) from The Next Web broadcasts live from the Castle (aka Rackspace HQ) “The BusTracker Show” capturing the StartupBus Tribes’ cross-country journey to SXSW via Rackspace.  Live-streamed on Startupbus.tv.

Friday, March 9

In San Antonio:
StartupBus: Hijacked by the Rack
Yep, you read that right: Rackspace is hijacking and detouring the StartupBus to San Antonio.

Join us at the Castle for a morning of Lessons Learned and Rapid Fire Pitch Sessions with a crew including Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure, Sequoia Capital, Gapingvoid and more.

Free and open to the public 8 a.m. – 12 p.m.  Click here for details and to RSVP.

South by Southwest Interactive – Racker Speaking Engagements
Austin, Texas

Friday, March 9

5 p.m. – 6 p.m.
“Software Alchemy and the Arc of Technology”
Alan Cooper (Cooper), Christie Dames (TechTalk/Studio) and Robert Scoble (Rackspace, pictured at right)
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom BC
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13308

Saturday, March 10

9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
The Lean Startup
With Eric Reis (Lean Startup) & Dave McClure (500 Startups)
Hilton Downtown Austin, Salon C
http://leanstartupsxsw.co/

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
NoSQL Databases: Breaking the Relational Headlock
Gary Dusbabek, Systems Architect at Rackspace
Hilton Downtown Austin, Salon FG
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12722

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Cloudy with a Chance of Gaming
Panel moderated by Bloomberg Businessweek writer Ari Levy includes Megan Wohlford (Rackspace), George Miranda (EA), Allan Leinwand (Zynga) and Darryl Eaton (RightScale)
Palmer Events Center, Room 4-5
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100101

5 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Small Business, Big Party
First come, first served.
Coyote Ugly Patio – 501 E. 6th St.
http://guestlistapp.com/events/91470

Sunday, March 11 – Austin, Texas

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Open Source & The Changing Tech Landscape
Jonathan Bryce (Founder, Rackspace) & Frank Frankovsky (Director of Hardware Design & Supply Chain, Facebook)
Hilton Downtown Austin, 616AB
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12731

11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
CloudCamp
CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.
Bat Bar – 218 E. 6th St.
http://cloudcamp.org/austin/2012-03-11

5 p.m. – 8 p.m.
The Small Business Web’s E-commerce E-Party
First come, first served.
Coyote Ugly Patio – 501 E. 6^th St.
http://guestlistapp.com/events/91479

8 p.m. – 2 a.m.
Party your AWESOME Off!
Heard about legendary Rackspace parties at South by?
This is it–featuring the crew from the Hijack in an Awesome Sauce mixoff against Robert Scoble.
Must RSVP—click here. First come, first served.
Bat Bar – 218 E. 6th St.

Monday, March 12 – Austin, Texas

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Events Are Now Platforms: Seven Tools for Success
Brian Duggan (Building Alliances) & Loic LeMeur (LeWeb)
Hilton Austin Downtown, Room 616AB
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP10496

11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
SXSW Tradeshow
Rackspace Booths: #1335, 1337, 1434, 1436
Austin Convention Center, Halls 3&4

12 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Small Teams, Big Impact Live Video Broadcast
With Robert Scoble at the NewTek streaming stage
Austin Convention Center Expo Hall, Booth #716

5 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Y Combinator Start It Up Party
First come, first served.
Coyote Ugly – 501 E. 6th St
http://guestlistapp.com/events/91488

Tuesday, March 13 – Austin, Texas

11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
SXSW Tradeshow
Rackspace Booths: #1335, 1337, 1434, 1436
Austin Convention Center, Halls 3&4

Wednesday, March 14 – Austin, Texas

11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
SXSW Tradeshow
Rackspace Booths: #1335, 1337, 1434, 1436
Austin Convention Center, Halls 3&4

Thursday, March 15 – Austin, Texas

11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
SXSW Tradeshow
Rackspace Booths: #1335, 1337, 1434, 1436
Austin Convention Center, Halls 3&4

So sit back, drink a warm beverage, and watch the story of how an ambitious team of developers linked up with NASA, built a supergroup of cloud architects, found a partner in Rackspace, and cracked the cloud wide open.

For more information, check out Rackspace Cloud Builders and the Cloud Files Resource Center.

The need? A place for DJs to share their music—and not just a sample or two, but a whole set, the way you’d hear it in a club. Of course it had to be streaming, searchable and legal. That’s just what Dubset has created: the next generation of Internet radio, curated by the world’s top DJs. (They’re also a part of the Rackspace Startup Program.)

Dubset succeeds by keeping the human element amid the endless sonic choice on the Internet. “All of these music startups out there try to outsource your playlist to an algorithm,” says Charlie Robbins, Technology Director at Dubset. “But we’ve crowdsourced it to real people—DJs. It’s going to be challenging for a computer to ever get that good.”

Because Dubset’s business is streaming music, they needed a hosting solution that could easily scale up, and that wouldn’t cost them enormous bandwidth charges. Rackspace Cloud Files was the ideal solution.

“We use a lot of Cloud Files, because we’re streaming to CDN,” says Robbins. “We were on Slicehost for a while, literally serving this stuff off the disk. But our tra­ffic got to a point where we couldn’t even back up the servers on Slicehost, because it was too big. If you get above 50GB or so, it becomes a network storage issue.”

So Robbins and his team moved their data onto Rackspace Cloud Files. “Cloud Files works great,” says Robbins. “It’s really simple, and it’s cheap. We’re streaming 1.5-2TB a month—a huge amount of data. With Cloud Files, we don’t have to worry about it, it just works.”

Cloud Files’ CDN powered by Akamai is a major advantage for Dubset, says Robbins. “Most of our tra­ffic is on CDN. By using Cloud Files, we’ve off-loaded a ton of the work that used to be done by the server onto the CDN.”

For Robbins, the options allowed by the Rackspace Cloud were a major selling point. “One things about the Rackspace Cloud that I like is you can get really small slices,” he says. “Other providers have sizes that are too big for a lot of applications. If you want to take full advantage of virtual servers, you want to have ones that are small enough for low traffic sites.”

“When you’re developing, most of the time you want to turn on a server and leave it on, especially in dev mode,” explains Robbins. “You’re just testing; it’s not live traffic. If you need five servers, why spin up five full-size servers elsewhere for $75 for a month, when you could spin up five Rackspace servers for $10 a month?”

Robbins also appreciates the reliability he has found with Rackspace: “We’re a platform built on Rackspace. We had 100 percent uptime last year.”

For Robbins, the attraction of the Rackspace Cloud was both the Cloud Servers and Cloud Files API. “They are modern, RESTful, JSON-based APIs that are easy to work with.”

Furthermore, says Robbins, “Creating images is super easy on the Rackspace Cloud. To back up Cloud Servers, I can literally make that call for the Rackspace API—that whatever’s on this machine right now, that’s an image. That goes in Cloud Files, and it’s really easy and friction-free. That’s far more appealing than the process for creating images on other hosting providers.”

As Dubset grows, they’ll consider using dedicated servers, as well. “At some point we will use a combo of cloud and dedicated,” says Robbins. “Rackspace would be the first [provider] we look at. It makes sense for the company I’m getting hosting from to have hosting as their primary business.”

Are you a Rackspace customer with a story to tell? Send us your story.

Which days are big days depends on your business. And whether that’s V-Day or every day, Rackspace can help you prepare your site for whatever customers come your way.

So if you’re expecting high traffic for Valentine’s Day (next Tuesday), give us a call or chat with us to let us know. We’ll work with you to make sure your site has the oomph it needs to handle all the lovebirds.

And to learn strategies for optimizing your site’s performance any time of year, take a (longing?) look at the video below.

The holiday rush can cause a welcomed increase in traffic on your website. But it’s important to take steps to optimize your site, so you can handle all of your customers with ease.

Check out the video below, which offers four suggestions from our Cloud team on how you can optimize your site’s performance, so you don’t miss a single customer.

Click here to also check out this infographic with Web Site Tips to help you prepare for the holiday season.

For the tech press that handle such up-to-the-minute info, it’s predictable chaos—last Wednesday, the more Apple CEO Tim Cook took his time revealing whether an iPhone 5 was coming, the more we at our desks tuned in to live blogs assessing the odds.

The crazy traffic spikes and unrelenting page loads of sites covering Apple keynotes are enough to take down even the most experienced media sources. According to PCWorld, “almost every site covering Apple’s event live–including Wired, Engadget and Ars Technica–suffered down time. Even Apple itself wasn’t spared as users rushed to order a new iPhone.”

But amidst the auto-refresh carnage, one site kept plugging, serving up news and photos like it ain’t no thang: gdgt. The San Francisco-based site features user reviews of products, and from its founding in 2009, coverage of live events has been a major feature of the site and its community.

So how do they remain standing, when the other big guns fall by the wayside? “We use Rackspace Cloud Sites and Cloud Files,” says gdgt co-founder Ryan Block, who is also the former editor of Engadget. “From the very start, we’ve counted on Rackspace to help us scale to handle major traffic during these events.”

The Apple product announcements require significant preparation, says Block, because they present the most challenging scale—a huge audience in one short, intense window of time. “We wanted to work with a hosting partner we knew would be able to stand up to the pain,” he says.

That preparation comes from teams at gdgt and Rackspace working together. “It’s really about making sure that everybody knows the ins and outs of the system we built to actually provide this live coverage,” says Block. “And making sure we know where the faults and issues are in terms of scaling to so many requests. Before this event, I looked at our previous stats, and was able to establish that we were expecting 10 million-plus requests to the live updating system that we built.”

But in reality, the numbers were even bigger. “Sure enough, with Rackspace, we delivered 11.6 million update requests over the course of an hour and 45 minutes.” At the keynote’s peak, gdgt’s live coverage had about 85,000 simultaneous users, each using auto-refreshing updates.

Block attributes gdgt’s success to using a system on their side that has proven itself, and then choosing the right provider. “We really needed to pick the right type of service that helps us scale rapidly. Our software platform that delivers the live blog is relatively simple, so Rackspace can easily spin up new instances and add infrastructure to it to prevent us from falling over. It’s a very rapid process.  Within 30 seconds on a call with your team, they had moved us over to some of the most robust architecture anywhere. That ability to react and respond quickly to load has been really important for keeping us live.”

“For short term, high traffic spikes, there’s just nothing like the almost instantaneous scaling power of a cloud hosting provider,” explains Block. “And what sets Rackspace apart here from the AWSes of the world isn’t just the ability to rapidly scale infrastructure, but that we were also able to work with a team who was with us every step of the way in preparation, who was in the chat room with our team during the actual event communicating with our team members, and who followed up afterwards with a post-mortem. That’s not something you’re going to get at other cloud providers. And I think that really underscores Rackspace’s commitment to support.”

As a tech veteran, Block has seen a fair share of successes—and failures—when traffic spikes massively. “I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very long time,” says Block. “I used to do it at Engadget, which is the biggest consumer electronics news site on the Internet, and my experience there was that even at AOL we would sometimes fall over. It’s a huge challenge.“

“I really can’t stress enough how impressive it is, what Rackspace does. That’s the kind of magic of what a great hosting provider can do—taking some really difficult hosting issues, and making it look completely effortless to our team and our users.”

We’re looking for apps that exhibit that rare blend of innovation and creativity, solid usability, and mass-market appeal. They also need to integrate with Rackspace Cloud Files technology. It’s up to you whether you submit an existing app that you’ve ported to Cloud Files, or you build something brand new.

Either way: wow us!

To enter, create a video showcasing your app, and submit your app through the registration form at www.rackspace.com/kingoftheapps by March 3, 2011.

The first two finalists will be announced on March 6 and invited to duke it out in front of a live audience and panel of judges at the Lean Startup Track at SXSWi in Austin on March 12, 2011.

And who is at the Round Table judging the joust? Oh, just these folks:

Robert Scoble, Video Blogger and Media Innovator, Rackspace Hosting

Eric Ries, Author/Speaker/Consultant, The Lean Startup

Stacey Higginbotham, Senior Writer, GigaOM

Dave McClure, Founding Partner, 500 Startups

Bill Boebel, VP of Strategy, Rackspace Hosting

If you nail it, $5,000 in cash + $5,000 Rackspace Cloud credit are yours

Second place wins a $1,000 Rackspace Cloud credit.

The showdown at SXSW is the first in a series of King of the Apps contests. The reigning champ will compete at the next round to defend the title—and the chance to take home more cash and prizes.

And in case you were wondering…Queens of the Apps are especially welcome.

We can’t wait to see what you’re building on the Cloud.

Now show us what you’ve got to earn the crown!

Punchbowl.com is the one-stop site that helps smart moms and savvy professionals plan a party from start to finish. Punchbowl offers a modern, effortless way to plan a celebration with party-planning features including customizable digital invitations, potluck organization, personalized favors, and local vendor search. Punchbowl is taking parties well beyond the online invite, and offering logical services that party-planners need.

Over the last year, Punchbowl has grown significantly. They’ve built a product that their customers love to use, established several key partnerships, and have garnered the support of key industry executives whom they’ve added to their board. They also recently launched their new Digital Invitation Studio, a collection of customizable online invitations, envelopes, postage, and decorative embellishments for events and celebrations.

But all this success was predicated on having the right hosting solution. Punchbowl’s first hosting solution wasn’t flexible enough to meet their needs. “As a fast-growing startup, we’re very agile and require a hosting solution that gives us flexibility to make changes quickly and at little or no additional cost,” says Blake Carlson, Chief Architect, Punchbowl.

In their previous set-up, Punchbowl had a static hosting configuration that required a time-consuming, costly process to make changes. “We wanted something that was more on-demand and could grow with us,” says Carlson. “We really like the cloud solution because it’s self-service and allows us the flexibility to make changes.”

To get on the cloud, Punchbowl turned to Rackspace. “We chose Rackspace because we were already an existing customer for dedicated hosting. Our customer support experience was positive so we felt comfortable using The Rackspace Cloud—we knew Rackspace would be responsive to our individual needs.”

Punchbowl has been very happy with their hosting solution from Rackspace, and they complement the Cloud’s scalability and quick deployment with offerings from Rackspace dedicated hosting. “We use Rackspace Cloud Servers for application servers, databases and other backend processing and internal applications,” says Carlson. “We also use dedicated hosting for our various outgoing email needs and other email applications.”

Thanks to the flexibility and 100% uptime of The Rackspace Cloud, Punchbowl is gearing up for the holiday season with confidence and focus. “We have been able to grow our business as we’ve needed while keeping hosting costs stable,” Carlson says.

Punchbowl now counts more than one million registered users, and they’re continuing to grow rapidly. In addition to powering Punchbowl.com, they also license their technology to leading retailers such as Oriental Trading Company and 1-800-FLOWERS.

“There are several cloud providers available but we chose Rackspace because they have a proven track record as a leader in cloud hosting,” says Carlson. “Our customer experience has also been extremely positive. The Rackspace reputation combined with outstanding customer support makes Rackspace one of the best options for cloud hosting.”