Open Cloud

In a recent episode of Mad Men, Peggy Olson channels her old boss, Don Draper, when she pitches Heinz ketchup. There’s ketchup, Peggy says, and then there’s the cheap and watery imitation—catsup. “They’re selling their watered down, flavorless sauce by pretending that they’re you,” she says, looking straight at the Heinz executive. “It makes you angry, doesn’t it?”  The exec seems intrigued. A beat later, Peggy says, “But I always say, if you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.” Then she uncovers her concept:

Is capacity planning dead? Will one platform satisfy all future IT initiatives? How much does downtime truly cost your company?

Rackspace Cloud Files users now have finer control over how to manage objects and containers with several exciting new API and Control Panel features that we rolled out this week.

If your mobile app ever gets a featured spot in an app store, Oprah endorses your product or you make an appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank, you are going to experience mind-blowing traffic to your site. Rackspace knows how to keep your app or site online when experiencing a high traffic event. Our customer gdgt knows this first hand as their site has been one of the few to remain accessible while live blogging important Apple announcements amid crushing traffic.

You can now attach and detach networks from a live Cloud Server. You no longer need to create a snapshot of the server, and then build a new server from that image to attach or detach a network to/from a server.

The IT industry continues to evolve. Cloud startups, innovative technologies and new business models are disrupting traditional IT and business economics alike. At CA World 2013 in Las Vegas last month, we had the opportunity to share industry insight from our cloud customers and highlight our approach to helping customers with their journeys to the cloud. Our key themes, Hybrid Cloud, DevOps, Service Oriented Architectures and emerging technologies like OpenStack, map directly to CA Technologies’ global strategy.

You can now provision additional IPv4 addresses on your Cloud Servers in the next generation Rackspace Cloud. Until now, this capability was only available in our first generation cloud.

Last week, we published The Ecommerce Customer Experience to help site operators start thinking about the building blocks of creating an ideal customer experience. Taking the time to focus on the customer experience can mean getting a bigger piece of the pie, as 86 percent of surveyed shoppers say they’d be willing to pay more for an improved site experience. The infographic below details some stats around the importance of paying attention to your site experience and how ecommerce hosting on the cloud can help.

We take customer support pretty seriously around here. Our philosophy is to include super valuable and responsive support with all our offers. For example, when you’re a customer and find out you’re going on national TV to pitch your product, we’ll be there to help with architecting and operating the situation at no additional cost. This is clearly not the standard level of support in the cloud space where even the most basic support costs a lot more on top of core cloud costs. Starting today, we take this already high standard to a new level with the launch of Rackspace Developer Support, an extension of our Fanatical Support specifically for developers.

Whether you have a hot mobile game, or an application that has to be up, you know that any downtime can upset customers. Reliable apps need a reliable cloud, and the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack was created from the ground up to help make sure you stay online.