Tag Archives: virtualisation

Rackspace Hosting Announces General Availability of Cloud Servers for Windows

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world’s leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing, has announced the general availability of its Cloud Servers for Windows offering. The new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next social networking phenomenon.

Designed for small to medium businesses, .NET developers, system administrators, IT Pros, and current Rackspace customers, Cloud Servers for Windows features include:
– Custom configurations with full administrator access
– Ability to upgrade server size on-demand
– Add or delete servers on the fly
– Rescue mode
– Management via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel and the Cloud Servers API
– Ability to add additional IP addresses
– Pay only for what you use with a utility payment model with hourly billing; no contracts or upfront costs
– Backups and Snapshots to Cloud Filesâ„¢ (coming soon)
– Enterprise-class SLAs
– Support for a broad array of the latest Microsoft Windows Server Images including:
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit; Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit; Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 32-bit; Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 32-bit

“Microsoft is committed to delivering a broad set of enterprise-ready products and services that build on the existing capabilities and skill sets of service providers like Rackspace,” said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide Hosting for the Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. “As a long time partner of one of the industry’s top cloud hosting providers, we are excited that Rackspace’s Cloud Servers for Windows offering has exited beta and is now available to the thousands of businesses that have built their infrastructure around Microsoft Windows and Microsoft .NET technologies.”

SpaBooker, a SaaS scheduling and point-of-sale (POS) application specifically designed for the spa, salon and wellness industry, utilizes Rackspace’s hybrid solution by using managed dedicated servers in addition to their cloud computing solution, Cloud Servers for Windows. Daniel Lizio-Katzen, SpaBooker Managing Director, states: “When we set out to look for a cloud computing solution, we didn’t hesitate to look at Rackspace Cloud first as we’ve been very pleased with the high level of support received from their managed dedicated servers. Rackspace Cloud Servers has been the ideal solution to separate our actual application from our public facing website. We currently have our entire staging environment running on the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta and the overall ease of use has been phenomenal. The cost savings compared to traditional dedicated hosting are also substantial.”

Via EPR Network
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Rackspace Announces Plans To Collaborate With NASA On OpenStack Project

Rackspace Hosting has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

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Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud hosting industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files. The next component planned for release later this year is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Using these components, organisations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

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Rackspace Urges UK Businesses To Update Legacy IT To Stay Ahead

Rackspace, the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, has released the findings of its latest commissioned research which indicates that UK businesses may be missing opportunities around new approaches to technology and continuing to over-invest in legacy IT.

Rackspace Urges UK Businesses To Update Legacy IT To Stay Ahead

The research, surveying over 400 IT decision makers, including 218 from the UK, revealed that 93% of the UK companies surveyed do not believe that they have a cutting-edge approach to adopting new technology.

The survey also highlighted that less than a third (28%) believe they are ‘early adopters’ of new technology approaches, such as on-demand computing, which may indicate a need for better education on the benefits of moving to new IT systems. This finding is reinforced by Forrester’s report* that around half of IT software budgets are spent on maintaining or upgrading old solutions. Therefore, it appears that companies are not investigating how new technologies can support and evolve their business.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Rackspace Managing Director commented: “Organisations are under intense pressure to innovate, but the majority simply don’t have enough time to do this. IT staff seem to be tearing their hair out, with almost half (48%) of the (UK) survey respondents keen to get involved in more proactive, strategic initiatives, but UK respondents indicated that less than a third (27%) of their IT team’s time is spent on them. However, we are starting to see an evolution in the way IT is managed for everything from servers to social media, with many organisations looking to external experts to free up time that will enable them to focus on developing the business.

“Our business is a good example of this evolution in outsourcing servers, where we deployed more than 2,000 servers in the last three months of 2009, taking the total number of servers we manage to almost 57,000.”

When considering server solutions, respondents stated reliability (78%) and utilisation (76%) as the most important, indicating that uptime and efficiency are top of today’s server management needs.

Almost half of the UK IT decision makers (41%) stated a lack of knowledge or experience as the biggest concern when calling IT supplier helplines, followed by time taken to access support (36%) a lack of overnight assistance (36%), and rude, unhelpful staff (30%). This indicates a real need for IT organisations to review the level of support they are providing, which can help to avoid customer churn.

Brian Thomson concluded: “These findings indicate to us that organisations are being hindered by in-house IT systems and that there is a real need to focus on strategic initiatives to help the business. We believe this means a new approach to technology is on the horizon as organisations look to hosting, cloud computing and SaaS to power corporate computing and boost competitive edge.”

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Rackspace Puts Microsoft SharePoint in the Cloud

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, has announced the launch of hosted Microsoft SharePoint, the popular collaboration and file sharing platform, uniquely backed by Rackspace’s 24x7x365 Fanatical Support. With the addition of hosted

Microsoft SharePoint, Rackspace’s suite of cloud applications now includes business-class collaboration, email and storage solutions.

Rackspace Puts Microsoft SharePoint in the Cloud

“With SharePoint, Rackspace is offering businesses the most powerful file sharing and collaboration software on the market today,” said Pat Matthews, General Manager of Rackspace Email & Apps. “With our cloud delivery model, businesses can take advantage of all the power Microsoft SharePoint has to offer without the hassle of having to manage the software in-house. Microsoft SharePoint backed by Fanatical Support is the recipe our customers have been asking for.”

The Rackspace offering includes an intuitive control panel that allows administrators to quickly initiate SharePoint, add/remove users, and create SharePoint sites with only a few steps. The control panel also gives administrators the ability to manage Rackspace Email & Apps’ full suite of applications, including hosted Microsoft Exchange, Rackspace Email, Email Archiving, and Rackspace Cloud Drive and Server Backup, in one dashboard.

With SharePoint from Rackspace, employees can become better equipped to collaborate on projects and share ideas across the organisation, with a centralized place to store, organise, and access documents.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in the Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Virtualisation,Dedicated Servers and Email and Apps.

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Rackspace Hosting Announced That Leading Viral Video Advertising Agency, Keta Keta, Will Be Hosting Its Video Portfolio In The Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, has announced that leading viral video advertising agency, Keta Keta, will be hosting its video portfolio and movie previews in the Rackspace Cloud.

Ronen Lefler, CEO, Keta Keta said: “Effectively showcasing our viral videos has become a real challenge as the amount of content that we have to stream has grown. Moving to the Rackspace Cloud has enabled us to showcase videos to a global audience without interruption. We chose Rackspace due to its focus on customer service and support, as well as the flexibility and efficiency of The Rackspace Cloud Files solution.”

As the viral video market continues to explode, with traffic increasing 178% over the last 12 months (Source: Econsultancy’s 2009 Internet Statistics report), Keta Keta needed to maximize opportunities across consumer brands by promoting its videos to a global audience. It launched a new corporate website in March 2009 to support this need and turned to Rackspace Hosting to provide a reliable and cost-effective hosting solution to stream multiple movies to over 100 different countries.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace Hosting said: “Hosting business critical applications in the cloud is something we do on a regular basis and we are delighted that Keta Keta has chosen us to support its corporate awareness drive. We understand the demands placed on websites by streaming rich media content and believe the cloud’s flexible, pay-as-you go structure makes it an ideal choice to meet these new media needs.”

Keta Keta, the viral video partner of ad:tech 2009, is an advertising agency with in-house creative, production, seeding and tracking departments. It has launched hundreds of successful viral video campaigns that have entertained and engaged people around the world for customers including LG, Fiat, MSN, L’Oreal and Orange.

About Rackspace
Rackspace’s portfolio of hosted services includes hosted exchange, managed hosting, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, virtualisation and managed exchange.

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