John Engates, our CTO, recently posted an article about Rackspace and Data Center Efficiency. Having been a part of a lot of those discussions and initiatives, I wanted to briefly touch on what we’ve done specifically to help reduce our carbon footprint on our servers in our Datacenters.

Processor Technology:

AMD Opteron has played a big part in us being able to reduce power. There are several reasons for this. When Opteron came out, they decided to take a different approach and deviate from what was the standard architecture that Intel always used. They integrated the memory controller on the processor and were able to remove the Northbridge from the motherboard. Because of this, the memory was linked directly to the processor and eliminated the usual bottlenecks that the Intel Platforms experienced. This allowed them to stay on older technology memory instead of jumping to the next while maintaining competitive performance. Because of this, we’ve been able to maintain performance with the Intel Xeons while taking advantage of faster memory throughput, reduced power, and reduced cost. One great example of this is that the AMD Socket F platform uses DDR2 memory and has better performance in some cases against Intel Xeon platforms with Fully Buffered Dimms (which take about twice as much power per module). (read more…)

Today we announced the private beta of the much anticipated CloudFS, an Internet-based storage offering that was developed by Mosso and Racklabs. I’ve included a couple interesting excerpts from the press release below:

This file storage offering, CloudFS, allows developers to securely store a virtually unlimited amount of data on the web connected through Rackspace’s infrastructure. At the conclusion of the beta program, the new storage offering will be available as a stand-alone service or as part of Mosso’s cloud hosting solution at competitive storage, bandwidth and transaction pricing. In addition, Rackspace customers will benefit from free local transfers between CloudFS and their managed hosting servers. The ability to tie a scalable and low-cost storage engine to Rackspace’s customized managed hosting environment is unique in the hosting industry.

Mosso is seeking applicants to participate in a private beta program as well as encouraging developers to build tools and services around CloudFS. Developers and businesses interested in the private beta can visit www.mosso.com/cloudfs to apply starting May 5, 2008.

Pricing for CloudFS is strictly pay-for-what-you-use. Current plans target the pricing for storage to start at $0.15 per gigabyte, upon release, including replicated copies for data protection. This competitive rate allows developers to scale their storage-related projects seamlessly and affordably.

The storage platform will be accessed via a ReSTful web services API and language-specific API’s (.NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python). CloudFS will support language-specific libraries, giving customers confidence that they can quickly and easily store data and run applications in a business-class, standards-based environment.

Check out John Engates’ post on the Racklabs blog for an interesting behind the scenes look at the development of CloudFS.

“How do I get my employees to care about customer service?”

This is a common question that we hear. Senior leaders in all types of organizations recognize the power of Fanatical Support, and want to know how they can bring it to their company.

My advice is always the same: If you want to build a culture of customer-centricity, look to the corner office before looking to the front line.

Far too many managers and executives view customer service the same way as public transportation: it’s a great idea – for everyone else but them. The reality is that until customer experience is on your leadership agenda, any efforts to create a service-center culture will fall flat. Why? In my opinion there are two main reasons. (read more…)

As some of you may know, Google recently announced an application hosting offer called AppEngine. Our very own Lew Moorman discusses this, the whole ‘cloud computing’ angle, and Rackspace’s own cloud computing offering Mosso on the RackLabs blog. It’s a very good read. Check it out here.

A common problem across the Internet today is malicious activity. Things like: DDoS Attacks, botnets, IP hijacking, viruses, spyware, worms, and phishing make up just some of the things that we deal with on a daily basis.

From a Networking perspective one of the common things that we deal with is DDoS attacks. Basically, this is that act of someone’s website being targeted with the intent of taking it offline. DDoS attacks can come in many forms and vary in effectiveness, including: SYN floods, ICMP/UDP floods, amplification or reflective attacks, and bulk data to just name a few.

In my years here at Rackspace there has been a great deal of change in the methods and mentalities used to perform attacks, from spoofing IP’s and bulk data to try and just max out someone’s connectivity, to much more precise attacks against applications. Because of this, the detection of attacks can become a lot more complicated, where you are no longer just looking for large spikes in traffic, receiving threshold alerts with SNMP, or traffic anomalies via Netflow. Attacks today can be very small in size, slipping under the radar of some systems, and still be affective at crippling a website. (read more…)

Since our blog is very new, we’ve tossed around some ideas here about what we could do on our blog that differentiates us from other corporate blogs. One idea to come out of the think tank was a weekly profile on different customers. Our customer base is so broad that there are thousands of different, interesting stories out there. If you’re a Rackspace customer and feel that there is something unique about your company that you’d like the world to know, the floor is yours. Just drop me a line at blog@rackspace.com and we can talk.

As some of you know, Rackspace just launched our new virtualization product. It’s been in the works for a while and we’re proud of what we’ve put together. I’m also sure a lot of you are familiar with virtualization technology and how it works. However, just as many of you may be wondering how you can benefit from it.

Reference.com defines virtualization as “the abstraction of computer resources” or “a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computer resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.” So what exactly does all of that mean?

Virtualization allows you to carve up a physical server into individual operating system (OS) instances or Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can run a variety of different types of OSs on a physical server, all operating individually and securely from one another. How many VMs can you put on one server? That depends mostly on your hardware and the resources your VMs require. As servers become more powerful and cores per processor increase, a lot of applications just don’t make use of those extra resources. Virtualization can give you the ability to make better use of those resources and reduce the number of servers you deploy, which eases system administration and can be more cost effective.

Usually you’ll see two common types of virtualization implementations. The first one is called a Hypervisor. A Hypervisor is essentially the OS layer of the machine that enables virtualization. It’s typically a very small footprint, allowing for better performance and more available resources for the physical machine.

The other type of virtualization implementation is application based.  In this case, the virtualization software installs on top of a running OS. This usually reduces the amount of features available, in addition to reducing performance and allowing fewer resources dedicated to VMs.

A lot of the larger players in the game are developing their virtualization software to go the Hypervisor route.  VMware’s ESX, also known as VI3, is one of the dominant players  when it comes to Hypervisor based virtualization.  They’ve been one of the leaders in virtualization for a while and have a very large feature set when compared to Xen or Microsoft’s Hyper-V, which is unreleased at this time. 

Some key virtualization features: (read more…)

Most companies are familiar with one or more types of Business Process Modeling. Many are also used to donating time, money or other resources to charity. While each are common practices, what happens when they collide and the gift is actually helping a non-profit diagram how it works? Well, through our Rack Gives Back program, a small group of Rackers and the San Antonio Food Bank are learning just that.

Things didn’t start out this way. At first, it looked like your typical corporate/non-profit interaction with the Food Bank approaching Rackspace for some help - preferably improving some technology they use or developing new tools. As a company, we were already assisting them with hosting, food drives and volunteers from our various teams. For this initiative, Long-time Racker, Cultural Warrior and User Experience Designer, Brett Elmendorf was first brought in to help find a solution. Instead of just offering up coding or some similar service, he realized that the Food Bank needed to take a step back and diagram the processes for their key areas of operation. Once there was a clear picture of how things work today, they could figure out changes and Rackspace could find ways to help with any systems or tools that would facilitate those improvements. So calls were made, and a small team was assembled.

I won’t bore you with the details of the type of process modeling we are using or spend too much time on the details of what specific tasks have been completed to date, but I will say that the San Antonio Food Bank has never quite looked at their business this way before. Also, those of us who are “veterans” to the process modeling methods in place are finding new challenges and questions you wouldn’t see in a for-profit business. Some of them include: (read more…)

Rackspace sponsored a case study presentation yesterday entitled “Determining the Right Infrastructure for SaaS and Web 2.0 Companies,” presented by Emil Sayegh (VP, Product at Rackspace) and Kraig Kuipers (CEO of Pangea Foundation). The case study walked through Pangea Foundation’s move from a colo provider to Rackspace.

I’ve embedded the presentation below for your viewing pleasure. I’m interested in your thoughts!

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I’m here in sunny California, home of the world famous In-n-Out Burger. No, I didn’t travel 1,700 miles for a cheeseburger (even if it is a double-double, animal style). I’m here for SaaSCon, the premier Software as a Service conference that brings together application developers, IT managers and infrastructure gurus. Over the next couple days, I will be providing you with a recap of the previous day’s events.

The big news is that business of all sizes are starting to incorporate more and more SaaS applications into their IT stack. From the IT managers that I spoke with, it appears that the most compelling reason for incorporating SaaS offerings is to free up resources to focus on other activities.

I spoke with a CIO from a consumer goods company who told me about how he was able to build an incredibly successful custom application funded entirely with the budget that was freed up when they turned to a SaaS-based email provider. He took money that was going towards a non-differentiating activity (email), and applied it to something that gave his company a significant competitive advantage. (read more…)