open cloud

Alan Perkins recently joined Rackspace as Director of Product and Technology, Asia Pacific. In this two-part series, he discusses why he joined Rackspace. In Part I, he highlighted the company and its values.

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:

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.

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.

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?

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).

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:

Marketers are concerned with two things when it comes to digital campaigns: ease and performance. They need simple solutions that work with their timeline demands and can withstand traffic spikes due to campaign efforts and seasonality.