// November 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Community, Events
Interview with Lew Moorman, President of Cloud, Jim Curry, VP of Corporate Development and Mark Collier, VP of Business Development at the recent Oracle OpenWorld 2009. They talk about Cloud Computing, Hybrid Hosting and WebLogic Suite.
// October 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // Community, In the news
Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven
In a previous post, we announced that Rackspace Cloud Customer, Cybernautic was selected to lead the Brady Homes web project for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition which aired this past Sunday, October 25th on ABC. Senior Producers of the show told Chad Parker, CEO and President of Cybernautic, it was inevitable the website will go down once the show aired.
The show aired and ExtremeBradyHomes.com performed flawlessly, serving millions of visitors continuously throughout the life of the project without a single failure. In the press release, Conrad Ricket, Executive Producer at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition quotes:
In over 150 shows, it has been rare to find an Internet hosting company that was equipped to handle the traffic of thousands of people coming to a builder’s website. No doubt this is a testament to The Rackspace Cloud for handling what, in most cases, is an impossible task. And, without failure, The Rackspace Cloud was able to keep the pipeline open to hundreds of subcontractors and trade workers, and thousands of volunteers who wanted to step up to help a family.
The site handled over 300,000 hits since going live including a spike of 41,000 users at once during peak times, such as during taping and construction, and immediately following the house “reveal.”
Cybernautic not only launched and managed the ExtremeBradyHomes.com website, they also managed the Facebook and Twitter accounts for some 13,000 fans which served as hub of all online activity associated with the episode. Extreme Makeover released a minimum of two news releases per day through the site, and reporters covering the project depended on the site for these news updates. Over 5,000 volunteer applications were submitted via the site for roughly 2,500 available positions.
Check out this cool video they did on the recap of the project.
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition - Philo from Cybernautic Design on Vimeo.
Congrats to Cybernautic on a successful project!
Read the full press release here.
// October 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Community
Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven
It’s that time of the year again - jack o lanterns, haunted houses and gooey candy. It’s Halloween! And what’s the most important part of Halloween? 
Costumes of course. It’s the only time of the year when you get to put your favorite Star Wars or Star Trek outfit on…well, maybe not the only time of the year.
If you do a search for “Halloween Costumes” right now, Costumes4less.com will show up on your first search engine page. Costumes4less, a long time Rackspace Cloud customer, is a leading online retailer for costumes offering the largest variety at very competitive prices. They’re able to offer low prices by keeping operating costs low such as not having physical retail stores, not spending wasteful money on marketing/advertising expenses or expensive print catalogs and utilizing cloud computing for their hosting infrastructure. And they have very loyal customers.
Although costumes are purchased throughout the year for various occasions, Halloween is unarguably the busiest time for costume retailers. Since traffic spikes up only once a year, Costumes4less needed the option to scale accordingly and not have to set up an expensive dedicated server environment that was only needed for such a short time frame.
When I asked Niranjan (Nick) Pardasani, CEO of Costumes4Less, on why he chose the Rackspace Cloud, he quotes:
We were in shared hosting environment which was OK for all year except the most important time of the year - Halloween season. Shared hosting environment could not deliver the performance during our peak season. We did not want the costs and hassles associated with a dedicated server solution. The scalability claim of The Rackspace Cloud was the main selling feature for us.
On a busy day, Costumes4less receives 54,000 visitors, 479,000 page views and an average time on site of 4.25 minutes.
I checked their Alexa traffic statistics to get a gauge of the percentage increase in traffic:
// October 23rd, 2009 // 9 Comments » // Community, Development
Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven
It’s not enough for us to tell you why you should use our services. We believe that it is more powerful when you hear real stories from customers on how they are utilizing our cloud computing platform. It’s even better when customers are not only using us but also trying out another provider so they can do a comparable analysis. This is the cool stuff.
Chris Meller, an Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Servers customer, chose Amazon CloudFront as his first choice for offloading all his static files to a CDN. Being a fan of our Cloud Servers offering, he didn’t want to rule out Rackspace Cloud Files. So he tried both CloudFront and Cloud Files and compared his results.
He did find annoyances on both ends as he quotes:
“So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.”
Click here to see his results.
// October 22nd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Community
Rackspace partner, AvePoint, announced that its DocAve software platform will fully support the delivery of its SharePoint backup and archiving files directly to our Cloud Files platform.
Once you download their software and setup a Cloud Files account – all you have to do is configure Cloud Files as a data repository in the DocAve Manager. After that, data is seamlessly transferred to the Rackspace Cloud but still managed and accessed from SharePoint.
Below are two videos. One that shows a farm being restored from the Rackspace Cloud and the other, files being stored in the Rackspace Cloud but being accessed from within SharePoint.
Restore from the Cloud
Extension Archiver
If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact Jeff Deverter via email: jeff.deverter@rackspace.com
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