Help for Heroes goes Hybrid with Rackspace
London, UK – 24 October 2013 – Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, today announced that Help for Heroes is building a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud platform to help optimise performance and resilience of the charity’s websites and databases, and in doing so help even more British servicemen, servicewomen and veterans.
Help for Heroes is a major UK charity formed in 2007 to provide an enduring national network of support for those who have been wounded in Britain's current conflicts. It relies on public donations to fund its vital work.
Handling a 10x increase in online demand
Historically, the charity’s main website, ecommerce site and related databases ran on a dedicated platform hosted and managed by Rackspace. This solution worked well for Help for Heroes until earlier this year when it experienced a sudden tenfold increase in visitors overnight to both its main website and its online shop.
“We’ve always had outstanding service from Rackspace,” said Charles Bikhazi, head of development at Help for Heroes, “and earlier this year we experienced how important its Fanatical Support is when you’re in need. When online demand jumped overnight, Rackspace’s support teams went over and above any expectations we had. In a matter of hours we had a stripped down version of the website on public cloud servers in a load-balanced environment.”
Building for the future
With a successful short-term solution in place to manage demand spikes, Help for Heroes decided to start building for the future. The charity is deploying a Rackspace Hybrid Cloud solution that incorporates public cloud, to provide the agility to accommodate sudden data peaks at any time, and dedicated servers, to host its database applications and ecommerce platform and ensure their performance, resilience and security. This hybrid cloud works as a unified platform linked by a single network powered by RackConnect.
Bikhazi said, “The colossal demand we experienced earlier in the year was a wake up call for us. We depend on the generous British public for our work, with almost 100 per cent of donations going to servicemen, servicewomen and veterans, and proceeds from our online shop going towards our overheads. Any downtime means we may miss out on this vital income, so Rackspace’s hybrid cloud is therefore mission-critical.”
Ongoing innovation
According to Bikhazi, the migration to the Rackspace public cloud is complete, and building the clustered database for its main website is progressing well. “Rackspace experts continue to help us with the entire process, and we know that with such Fanatical Support we’ll be able to keep innovating for the future.”
Jeff Cotten, Managing Director of Rackspace International, said, “Help for Heroes is a positive force for so many people in Britain, and an innovator in the charity sector with its adoption of cloud technologies, so we get great satisfaction from helping the team do their good work. With the hybrid cloud we’re building together, Help for Heroes is now in a strong position to manage future peaks and ongoing growth in online activity, as well as more donations and other offers of support.”
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to run their workloads where they run most effectively — whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with the Rackspace’s hybrid cloud solutions, federated cloud services or other associated products and services; anticipated operational and financial benefits from Rackspace’s hybrid cloud solutions, federated cloud services or other associated products and services; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include including the possibility that expected benefits from the Rackspace cloud network program or the products and services offered through the Rackspace cloud network program may not materialize because the products or services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the products or services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products and services or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the products or services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the product, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the platform, products and services, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the year ended March 31, 2012, filed with the SEC on May 9, 2013. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
