open cloud

I just finished a thought provoking book on behavioral psychology: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.  The gist of the book is how institutions and individuals can “nudge” people to make better/improved choices without being paternalistic or sales driven.

Security continues to be a concern for customers as they consider moving to the cloud. However, some aspects of a secure infrastructure are common in many customer deployments.

Jonathan Siegel is a repeat entrepreneur, angel investor, father of six and leader of Exceptional Cloud Services – Rackspace’s most recent acquisition.

Do you love to shop, but don’t like the hassle of the traditional mall, strip center or brick and mortar shops? A couple of guys from Arkansas are changing the way you can shop online, making it social and fun with Shoplinkz.com. The site keeps track of all of your favorite products and stores all in one place. Shoplinkz.com lets you shop socially with your friends. It’s one wish list, one registry, coupons, promotions, last minute discounts and more.

We are excited to announce that we have acquired Exceptional Cloud Services and its suite of developer solutions, including error tracking and Redis-as-a-Service capabilities. This acquisition continues to enhance our toolset for developers deploying and managing applications on the open cloud.

There is often a lot of confusion around licensing as Microsoft IT Pros look to move their configuration from an on premise location to a cloud hosting provider. Some common questions we here from IT Pros include:

There are five essential pillars of cloudiness. In this recurring blog series, we’ll count down from No. 5 to No. 1. Last time, we looked at agility returns. In this third post, we discuss scaling horizontally.

Academic and scientific research often involves the construction of mathematical and numerical models to solve scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these complex and intensive computational models have been implemented on super computers or high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.  These models are difficult to setup and operate, and can create a painful experience for researchers who often have to wait in a long line to use their university’s super computing infrastructure, whether it’s for a few hours or a few days.

As developers begin deploying their applications to the cloud, one thing that they should consider is the infrastructure of their cloud host. It is well documented that companies struggle to build an application on an unreliable cloud. Not all clouds are made equal, and it is important to understand how Rackspace has designed our cloud for better reliability giving developers the ability to focus on building a great application.

Businesses that have been apprehensive or unsure about transitioning their Microsoft applications to the Rackspace Open Cloud can feel more at ease now that we’ve added Microsoft Active Directory administrator support to our Managed Cloud Fanatical Support. The new support options include installation, configuration, monitoring and patching and troubleshooting; support features that were previously only available to our dedicated hosting customers.