Here we take a look at a few stories which featured Rackspace for the week ending April 6, 2012.

A Deep Dive Into OpenStack

Wired took a strong look at OpenStack in a piece by Cade Metz that dove into the open source cloud software’s history and surmised that it’s the “free cloud software that’s changing everything.” The story paints a picture of OpenStack from its infancy – the coming together of Rackspace and NASA – to now.

Wired write: OpenStack is software anyone can use to build their own version of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, the massively popular web service that gives developers and businesses instant access to virtual servers. The roots of OpenStack stretch back only about four years to a skunk works project inside of NASA, but it has already overturned the status quo in both the private sector and the public. … More than that, their code bases were complementary. While NASA was building Nova, Rackspace had built a platform called Swift. Nova provided virtual servers — i.e., processing power — and Swift provided storage. Whereas Nova mimicked Amazon EC2, Swift was analogous to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). At dinner, the two parties resolved to combine the two projects and open source them as one under the banner “OpenStack.”

Server Management Dominates IT Department Time

Citing a Rackspace study that examined how time consuming server management can be, eWeek’s Nathan Eddy showcased that server management and troubleshooting can really tie up IT time. Time spent with server management takes time away from value-added activities, the study revealed.

According to eWeek: IT teams from midsized U.K. and U.S. businesses polled still spend more than half (56 percent) their time on server management and troubleshooting in a typical month, and only 28 percent on strategic, “value-added” activities, according to a survey released by cloud computing specialist Rackspace Hosting. … According to [Rackspace Vice President of Cloud Fabio] Torlini, the way the cloud and managed hosting market is maturing, as suggested by the study, represents a challenge to users and cloud and managed hosting service providers alike. “In 2009, almost two out of five (40 percent) of respondents didn’t know what cloud computing was. In 2012, everybody does, and is looking at it – the benefits and the issues,” he explained. “The challenge for midsized businesses is to stop unnecessarily holding onto their in-house physical servers, and give themselves a chance to focus on more important and valuable work. The challenge for cloud service providers is to provide the right advice and services to help more of them overcome the barriers to doing just this.”

Cloud Sites Updates Take Hold

Over at the Web Host Industry Review, Justin Lee covered recent updates to Rackspace Cloud Sites, the website hosting service, were highlighted. Among the new features is support for a wider range of programming languages, including PHP 5.3 and .NET.

Lee wrote: Web hosting and cloud hosting provider Rackspace announced on Tuesday it is targeting advertising agencies and web design firms with new, enhanced features for its Cloud Sites service that are designed to help companies seamlessly host reliable and scalable websites and blogs.

Here’s a look at four stories where Rackspace was the news this week:

Rackspace And The StartupBus

As the SXSW Interactive wound to a close, TechCrunch TV chronicled the travels of the StartupBus, which carried startup entrepreneurs – dubbed “buspreneurs” — from San Francisco to Austin, and made a pit stop here at The Castle for a day of interaction with and advice from some of Rackspace’s senior leadership before continuing north to SXSW.

TechCrunch TV wrote: The “buspreneurs” have arrived in Austin! The StartupBus, which began a four-day journey from San Francisco/Silicon Valley on Tuesday morning, completed the final leg of the voyage yesterday. The teams of entrepreneurs hoping to debut new products at South by Southwest Interactive arrived by way of San Antonio, where they received an enthusiastic welcome at Rackspace. “We live in a magic moment of innovation and entrepreneurship right now,” remarked Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier as the StartupBus teams took another break from the road.

Rackspace Locked In At No. 2 In Cloud

GigaOm’s Barb Darrow dove deeper into the cloud computing market, ranking the top seven cloud rivals looking to steal the No. 1 spot from Amazon. Rackspace placed No. 2 overall, receiving the distinction as the second largest cloud provider.

According to GigaOm: While Rackspace encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses, it’s also a major cloud provider with actual, paying customers.  Measuring by revenue and VMs, Rackspace currently has a lock on the No. 2 slot by a wide margin, said Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. As one data point, Rackspace public cloud revenue rose to $189 million in fiscal year 2011, up from $100M the previous year. Going forward, that business should only grow as Rackspace brings more OpenStack implementations online.

Fanatical Support Gets A Nod

It’s no secret that Rackspace is all about Fanatical Support in all we do. Rackspace strives to wow the customers, and that’s just what the Harvard Business Review recognized Rackspace for in a piece by Bain & Company Fellow and author Fred Reichheld, who is also a Rackspace board member, that examined amazing tales of customer service and the value in wowing customers. Reichheld explains that it doesn’t cost much to make customers happy, but following the “Golden Rule” in customer service can have a tremendous impact.

One of my favorite examples of this happened at Rackspace, the managed hosting and cloud computing company. An employee on the phone with a customer during a marathon troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry. As she tells it, “So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited.” I’d have been pretty excited, too, if I were that hungry customer. Another “wow!” moment, Reichheld’s Harvard Business Review piece exclaimed.

A Server By Any Other Name…

Computerworld’s JR Raphael went on a quest to determine the naming conventions that some companies have for servers. In his search for clever and amusing server-naming strategies, he spoke Cormack Lawler, a Rackspace data center director. From super heroes, to Simpsons characters to inside jokes, server nomenclature takes many forms. But when it comes down to it, you better be able to locate the right server when you need to.

Computerworld noted: What’s in a name? When it comes to servers, as it turns out, quite a lot. … Server names are designed for functionality: They let system administrators easily identify each machine and keep track of what it does. For some companies, that means coming up with a cut-and-dried alphanumeric convention. For others, it means taking the opportunity to get a little creative. … ”The basic rule is that the name should be unique with enough options so that [it] can always be informative,” says Cormack Lawler, a data center director at Rackspace.