Open Cloud

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.

Want to know what our new Cloud Control Panel is and what it means for you and your business? Want a behind the scenes look at how we built and designed it? Curious how you can get the most out of our open cloud products and services that are available through the Cloud Control Panel?

RentHouseMap (previously known as Cravify) is a property search engine that aggregates rental and shared properties from the largest real estate portals in the United Kingdom and displays them on a single, interactive map that allows users to easily browse only the properties they want. The company collects information about rental and shared properties from the most popular portals in the UK, including Zoopla, Rightmove, SpareRoom, Gumtree, Adzuna, EasyRoommate, Vivastreet and Nethouseprices.

Cloud-based platforms are key to pushing colleges and universities ahead of the curve in academic and scientific research. That’s exactly why schools like the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are turning to open source technologies like OpenStack and the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud to fuel their scientific research efforts.

I spoke several times recently mostly promoting Google Glass (so much so that a few people are wondering if Google is paying me, I assure you I bought my own Google Glass for $1,500 and Google isn’t paying me).

We’ve been hearing a lot lately from customers who are frustrated by the limitations of one-size-fits all clouds, whether they’re based on public cloud or private cloud or bare metal servers. These customers want each of their workloads to run where it runs best and most cost-effectively. And that’s what we at Rackspace work to deliver to them, through our hybrid cloud.

You can build a slick site filled with popular products and rock-bottom prices, but if customers don’t trust your site or find themselves unable to navigate from browsing to cart to payment, your site could be doomed for failure.

Many CIOs still look cautiously toward the cloud – and rightly so. For large enterprises, making the move to cloud can be quite an undertaking and involve decision-makers from across the organization. The move also may require completely rethinking the way IT is provisioned. Despite the effort involved, it’s hard to ignore the payoff and long-term benefits of cloud. In the article 5 Reasons Cloud Computing is Enterprise Ready, we explore the top reasons CIOs need to consider cloud in their long-term IT strategy. Here are few intriguing stats from the article:

Roughly 30 Rackers attended DevOpsDays Austin last week (April 30 and May 1), an event that has become the conference that brings development and operations together. This year’s was the largest yet with almost 400 attendees – it was twice the size of last year. The energy there was contagious, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.