Cheersable is out to make it easy to clink glasses with friends, despite location. Cheersable, a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, has created a new app that enables friends to send and share drinks nationwide. Its database boasts 4,000 partners restaurant locations, which guarantees there’s always a convenient place for the recipient to pick up a beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail, wherever they live. Whether you’re celebrating a birthday, a new job or just catching up, Cheersable helps celebrate those cheers moments and share them with friends, even if you can’t be there in person.

Marco Aponte, founder and CEO, says Cheersable came to fruition from him wanting to celebrate over drinks with friends scattered across the country.

“I was born in Austin, went to school in Georgia, and am currently living in San Francisco. I have friends across the country and wanted to be able to celebrate moments with them. I was sitting at a bar in San Francisco and saw that it was my best friend’s birthday in Austin. I did the obligatory Facebook post, but wished I could do more. I looked down at my beer and Cheersable was born. You already connect with friends over drinks, so we give you the ability to do this with friends anywhere.”

Sometimes it’s tough to stay in touch with your friends across the country. Cheersable takes the online gifting process and makes it hassle-free for both you and your friends. Cheersable allows you to send a drink, and your friend can decide where to redeem it. Cheersable provides the best of both worlds; you get to say cheers to friends and they can enjoy their drink at any partner restaurant.

Some of the inspiration for Cheersable came from Aponte’s restaurant business background and his interest in the social dynamic around people gathering for drinks.

“I and my two business partners, Sachin Gangupantula and Chris Barnett, started working on this business about eight months ago,” explains Aponte. “I have a background in the restaurant space so it was always fascinating for me to see how people come together around drinks. Three guys, one fun idea and the determination to do what most thought was impossible. Isn’t that how most great companies start? We believe that friendship, like beer, is a terrible thing to waste. So don’t waste any more time, and reach out to your friends across the nation and celebrate ’Cheersable‘ moments! Our entire team is passionate about helping people creating meaningful social experiences.”

The social aspect of meeting up for drinks is the perfect excuse to get back in touch with friends you haven’t seen in a while or surprise someone who lives in a different area. Life gets so busy sometimes, so the Cheersable mission is to help people slow down, make time for friends who are important to them, and enjoy spending some time over their favorite beverage. This allows people to stay in-touch with friends anywhere.

Aponte goes on to say that the Rackspace Startup Program has helped Cheersable on several fronts.

“In addition to the great visibility from Rackspace, the main thing we’ve been amazed by is their willingness to help. They offer great mentorship to start-ups through advice and perspective as a company who has been there. Starting a business is hard, but getting support from their Fanatical Support team has been invaluable. Chris, our CTO, has worked closely with their team to move our entire infrastructure over to Rackspace and their tech staff is the best of the best. We have a small team at the moment, so being able to defer the task of helping with migrations and scaling saves us valuable time. Finally, we’ve had some great networking opportunities at several events so they’ve also help us grow our network in the startup community.”

And, now, Cheersable’s mobile app is ready to rock and roll and spread good cheer nationwide, Aponte adds.

“Our app just launched on Android, and we are working on our iPhone app, which will be out in less than two weeks,” concludes Aponte. “We’ve gotten great feedback from our early beta users so we’re working on additional social features to make Cheersable even more useful. From the business side, we’re aggressively growing our restaurant and bar network, which will provide more options for people to stay connected. This year, we are focused on building the best experience for our users and making sure they celebrate friendship with Cheersable.”

Cheers from the Rackspace Startup Program! We can assist you in launching your business by providing a world class open cloud computing platform powered by Rackspace and backed by Fanatical Support™. Just talk with the Space Cowboys!

Founded by Facebook, Intel and Rackspace, the Open Compute Project aims “to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost.”

Crawford says both Open Compute and OpenStack are built on answers to the question “What if?” For OpenStack, that led to this week’s Summit with almost 3,000 attendees. For Open Compute, that led to innovations such as widening standard 19-inch racks to 21 inches to include more hard drives and blade architecture.

The result is what Crawford calls a “platform for rapid innovation.” Hardware has gone from design to completed circuit boards in six months. Companies in Japan are investigating hanging racks from the ceilings of data centers as a better way to guard against earthquake damage. A new cabling technology called silicon photonics will move data at up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is much faster than current technology and speedy enough to effectively connect equipment even if it’s not physically located close together.

Crawford says the project’s journey is only 2.5 percent complete. As one of the biggest fans of the project, we can’t wait for the remaining 97.5 percent.

Although universities have used cloud-based applications for years (e.g., email), today the cloud computing trend is quickly evolving into a premium model for scientific computation and Big Data. However, the idea of running HPC in public clouds has both limits and specific use cases today.

When it comes to scientific computations and numerical models, we can categorize the workloads into the following:

• Workloads with a high degree of parallelism that can ideally run in public clouds.
• Workloads with parallelism but with a high degree of dependencies between nodes. These workloads are extremely chatty and require very fast communication between compute nodes (high throughput network bandwidth and latency).

The second category describes the majority of HPC environments, and many public clouds are not ready or optimized for these workloads. However, an OpenStack-powered open cloud provides researchers a completely new model to utilize hybrid computing infrastructure (private cloud for on-campus, public cloud for off-campus). A hybrid model makes it more viable for researchers to rent high performance computing.

Why Open Cloud for Universities?

Universities have always been at the forefront of innovation because of their focus on research and their embracing of open standards and collaboration. When hundreds of researchers contribute to a shared purpose, everyone benefits. In fact, open-sourced software has proven that proprietary ownership often precludes innovation.

The scientific community can trust the wisdom of collaborative communities with common goals for following reasons:

• An open cloud fosters collaboration. When researchers use an open cloud to build their scientific research, they know their experiments run anywhere in the world.
• An open private cloud based on OpenStack provides researchers with the flexibility they need to build customized high bandwidth and high performance clouds with full interoperability and compatibility with OpenStack-based public clouds.
• For years, the fundamental mission of universities has been teaching and research. Open source technologies empower scientists to join, collaborate with and contribute to open source communities, such as Open Compute and OpenStack. They can leave lasting changes to the computing industry.

It’s amazing to imagine that Rackspace, with its humble idea of open sourcing the cloud, is enabling collaboration and the wisdom of the communities to help shape academic and scientific researchers push the envelope and forge the next generation of innovation.

The USB device creates a virtual two-foot cube above it where it can precisely discern all 10 fingers and the motions they make in 3D. So grabbing a block and moving it to another position or molding virtual clay are just some of the possibilities. While impressive for games and simulations, the controller could also change the way we interact with web sites sand web applications. Leap Motion’s director of developer relations Avinash Dabir walked us through how the new controller could advance the idea that best user interface is no interface. Check out his demo in this video:

While Leap’s web site demo is still in the works, developers can check out its JavaScript API.

And, today, we’re doing just that.

At the Open Compute Summit this week in Santa Clara, Calif., we continue our journey to the open cloud by contributing compute and storage designs to the Open Compute Project community.

Later this year we plan to purchase servers built on those Open Compute Project designs. And in the first half of 2013 we plan to have servers installed and running in one of our new data centers. This three-phase journey is around open standards, open hardware and, ultimately, open data centers.

Through the Open Compute Project, we work with like-minded companies to advance our vision of truly open computing. Last year, we officially launched the Rackspace open cloud, and today we highlight our plans to leverage open hardware designs in our data centers.

The Rackspace open cloud and our work with the Open Compute Project help tear down the walls of lock-in that come with proprietary technologies while fostering adoption of open standards.

We are committed to the journey toward true openness; and we’re excited about where it’s taking us and the industry.

The first thing to check is your web layer. Whether you are running Apache or IIS, there will always be an opportunity to change certain values and parameters to serve your content as efficiently as possible. Keep in mind, every time you launch a Cloud Server powered by OpenStack, those parameters are going to be fairly generic, so you will want to go in there to make sure that it is suited for you.

If you are running an application server, you want to make sure that the framework you are running it on, such as PHP, is tuned with the best values and parameters. You want to make sure that the server is tuned for both the code that you uploaded as well as the size of the server you are running it on.

Finally, you will want to optimize your database. There are a lot of different things that you can do to optimize your database layer, including caching, and we have a lot of resources in the Rackspace Knowledge Center that can help you out. Furthermore, our support team can advise you on other strategies to test and optimize your database traffic.

To check this list twice, we always encourage our customers to spend a little bit of time load testing their configuration before the big traffic rush hits.

Interested in finding out more to help you prep for the holidays? Check out Joseph’s white paper now. You can also view his previous post where he gives tips on caching for the holidays. In his next post, he talks about load balancing your cloud configuration for the increased holiday traffic.

We believe that working together in the open is the best way to solve a complex set of problems. We do not want to solve things repeatedly on multiple overlapping fronts. We favor working collaboratively to solve a challenge one time, in the most effective manner possible. New pursuits should deliver value in new areas or should distinctively improve existing solutions. Those of us working on Open Compute would assert that this is the best way to innovate on these hardware platforms.

An example of this is a partner of ours who has a very effective fabric interconnect solution, but does not engineer a power supply; they simply consume an off-the-shelf power supply and have integrated it into their product. They have some concerns about how to optimize or tune that power supply subsystem, but their focus on the fabric is what really distinguishes them.

Our belief is that Open Compute can fill the gap where such design problems exist. In the example above, the project encourages work on the power supply problem to proceed through the community with specialists who really distinguish themselves in that arena, while the partner with interconnectivity fabric expertise can acutely focus on its own area of prowess. Open Compute keeps one from working in a single silo across the entire stack, and makes development more like a pyramid where work builds upon on a strong and open base and provides opportunities for more focused and distinctive innovation at the pinnacle.

The Open Compute Project needs requirements, perspectives and inputs to help us ensure that we are solving the right problems. We’ve seen providers willing to open source attributes of their computational fluid dynamics software, and other providers open sourcing elements of their CAD or eCAD software to enable development of electrical or mechanical designs by the community. As activity and involvement escalate within the project, the community hopes to see more of these things become available to open up new opportunities for involvement.

The Open Compute Project has a high degree of synergy with OpenStack because it ultimately becomes the foundation, or the platform, on which the operating system of the cloud can run. In very similar fashion, Open Compute has a large community of people working together to optimize and define what is needed in data centers and hardware platforms. When you have multiple people working together in the open, you can accomplish great things.

Together, we think that OpenStack and Open Compute represent a complementary utopia for the cloud computing industry. In this utopia, even competitive parties can collaborate and find opportunities to deliver value across the entire solution stack. I often say this means we are driving to be truly open “from the gutter to ground.” This spirit of openness and collaboration can take us to exciting new places that we have not yet be able to go before.

Dell came out swinging Tuesday morning when it revealed that it’s working with Morphlabs, a converged infrastructure platform, to offer customers a private cloud appliance based on OpenStack. Dubbed mCloud Helix, the cloud solution leverages Dell blade servers and Crowbar cloud software; Morphlabs’ mCloud technology; management and support services; and OpenStack technology. The two companies also announced that hosting provider Media Temple now offers private cloud services using mCloud Helix.

During his keynote presentation at OpenStack Summit on Tuesday, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said Ubuntu 12.10 is available now and runs OpenStack Folsom and that the upgrade path for Ubuntu 12.04, which adds Folsom, is also ready. Shuttleworth showed the audience how to upgrade a production cloud with services running on top of it from Essex to Folsom using a new Juju GUI – in just three minutes.

At the Summit on Tuesday, cloud storage player Zadara Storage unveiled the integration of its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service with OpenStack Cloud Block Storage (Cinder) for public and private cloud.

Leading up to the Summit, OpenStack Foundation member SolidFire, in conjunction with Canonical, announced a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Block Storage. At the Summit, SolidFire demonstrated the deployment of 1,000 production-ready VMs with predictable performance and quality of service.

And in a keynote presentation, former-NASA CTO Chris Kemp, now CEO of Nebula, dug deeper into why attendees ventured to OpenStack Summit. “To service customers and to build opportunities on this platform,” Kemp said, later adding that OpenStack as a community has “an opportunity to define what Amazon does next.”

Another big draw at this year’s Summit was the “unconference” track, which let attendees present ad hoc sessions and discussions. One notable unconference that popped up Tuesday was the Women in OpenStack Unconference led by Rackspace Content Stacker Anne Gentle.

And for fun, here’s a photo of me and Tristan Goode, Aptira CEO and OpenStack board member from Australia who gifted me some amazing Australian cookies! And awesome Aussie cookies weren’t the only hot bit of schwag at OpenStack Summit. The duffel bags given out are going to be a hot commodity for attendees to carry home the show. From dozens of t-shirts and stickers that pledge OpenStack allegiance to Raspberry Pi computers and reusable water bottles from vizvid topped off with an IPA.

Be sure to check out the news from day one of OpenStack Summit San Diego. And don’t miss this brief video looking at how community and collaboration are two pillars of the OpenStack Summit.

Join Rackspace’s experts at various presentations and sessions throughout the Summit.