We really love this stuff.

Two web developers (and Rackspace coworkers) expressed envy of the clustering, load-balancing, and virtualization they saw the large enterprise customers using to stay online. All modern web applications need that sort of redundancy and scalability. Was there a way to democratize advanced technology? (Admittedly a leading question.)

The two developers somehow convinced Rackspace that thousands of customers buying servers and devices didn't actually want any servers and devices. Instead they wanted... wait for it... a cloud. (Well, truth be told, "cloud" wasn't vogue yet and they didn't know what to call it. But it was apparent there was a big shift coming. Rackspace, luckily, was visionary enough to see past the poor presentation skills of two developers and buy into the idea.)

Mosso.com, a new Rackspace Venture, launched with the offer that would become Cloud Sites. People awed at the advanced technology now available for $100 per month. They also pondered the name and how the heck to pronounce it.

Some of the best technical talent at Rackspace worked towards building massive, distributed storage. This technology would later be used at Mosso for the basis of the Cloud Files™ product.

Rackspace announced that Slicehost and JungleDisk, two emerging companies with rabid fan bases, would join Mosso in building out the cloud strategy.

Slicehost worked with Mosso to launch Cloud Servers™. Mosso worked with Rackspace to launch Cloud Files™ with an integrated CDN. All this collective effort needed a collective name. It was decided to bring things closer to the mother ship and call it The Rackspace Cloud. (We were on a big kick of clear over clever.)