Last week all Rackers received the following email from Larry “Sugarbear” Reyes, Rackspace Culture Czar:

‘Twas the day before Open Book and all through the floor…
Lanham was exclaiming we need one competition more…
To my desk I sprang to email his mission…
Guess what Rackers, we’re having our first Annual Outrageous Christmas Sweater Competition!…
So come one, come all, to Open Book wearing your sweater…
It can be outrageous, festive, crazy and even better…
All Rackers and External Customers will be the judges…
So BRING IT before you hold any grudges…
This is a competition and it could be wild…
But please keep this Friends and Family and not over styled…
The winner wil receive a special recognition…
Something that will reflect this season of appreciation!!!

And now I present for your voting, the top 4 contestants:
Contestant #1

Contestant #2

Contestant #3

Contestant #4

So who do you think should win? Let us know in the comments section and have a Happy Holiday!!!

Rackspace recently gave our second annual Fanati™ award. The award honors the one customer that has best demonstrated excellence when it comes to customer service. Douglas Hanna, one of the contest judges, has written a special guest post about the contest and the winner.

A Fanatical Competition

As a customer service consultant and journalist, I have the opportunity to work with and report on a variety of companies of all shapes, sizes, and specialties.

I first started covering Rackspace in July 2006 and have enjoying following company since then. I have had the opportunity to meet and interview several Rackers and when I was asked to participate in the process of deciding which of Rackspace’s 31,000 customers would win THE FANATI contest award in September, I gladly accepted.

THE FANATI contest has a simple mission: to recognize Rackspace customers who value customer service as much as Rackspace does.

With that goal and my understanding of what Fanatical Support meant to me in mind, I reviewed a small stack of finalist applications and graded each finalist on a scale of one to ten in five areas. To me, Fanatical Support isn’t about responding to emails in a timely manner or being polite (that’s expected in today’s market). Instead, Fanatical Support is about going the extra mile. The companies that have set themselves apart as exceptional service providers are the companies that consistently go the extra mile for each and every one of their customers. (read more…)

Robert Scoble just posted two new video interviews on FastCompany.tv that were filmed right before the Rackspace Cloud Event.

John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, and Dave Wright, CEO of Jungle Disk talk about Jungle Disk joining Rackspace

Matt Tanase and Jason Seats, co-founders of SliceHost talk about joining Rackspace

This is not the first time that we’ve been featured on FastCompany.tv. Here are three of our previous appearances:

A Real Business Leader
Rackspace Tears into New Headquarters
Radio Rackspace

As I mentioned in a previous post, today we unveiled some big news about our cloud hosting offering. You can watch the rebroadcast at RackspaceCloudEvent.com, but the big news is that we have acquired two companies that are doing great things in the cloud: Slicehost and Jungle Disk.

Slicehost is a leader in Xen-based virtual machine hosting with more than 15,000 “slices” online today. Jungle Disk offers reliable cloud storage solutions that allow users to easily share an unlimited amount of cloud storage between multiple users through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup.

With these two companies joining the Rackspace family, Rackspace now offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud offerings to go alongside with our Managed and Platform hosting services.

Rackspace’s cloud strategy is supported by three core offerings, all part of Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud hosting division).  The three core offerings are:

If you are interested in the cloud, you’ll want to join us on Wednesday, October 22 @ 12:00 pm CT for the Rackspace Cloud Event.

Rackspace and our cloud hosting division, Mosso, are holding a customer event and live webcast entitled ‘Live and Unplugged: A Conversation with Rackspace about Cloud Hosting and What’s Coming’.

We don’t do events like this often, but we’ve got some great stuff in the works and are excited to share the news with our friends.  The webcast and event will offer listeners the opportunity to hear strategic and product announcements from our managed and cloud hosting businesses about the future of the hosting cloud.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier and Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman, along with our partners and customers, will be on-hand to discuss emerging hosting trends.

Please join us for this exciting event via Webcast or in person from the historic KLRU studios on the Austin City Limits stage

Visit http://www.rackspacecloudevent.com for more information!

Have you registered yet for the Rackspace Customer Conference?

This year’s conference promises to be the best yet.  Our keynote speaker will be Paul Bell, President of Dell Americas, who will be discussing the future direction of the IT industry. We also have a ton of interesting, informative sessions lined up - with both a technical and a business track. Here are just a few of the sessions that are on the agenda:

• Hurricanes, Typhoons and Tornados - Disaster Recovery Options
• Live Launch of MyRackspace Version 6.0
• Rackspace Managed Hosting Product Roadmap
• Cloud Computing
• Fanatical By Design- How Rackspace Uses Net Promoter to Build Customer Loyalty
• Technical Strategies for IT Professionals to Improve Email Deliverability, Reliability & Performance
• PCI Compliance- Where is the Value?
• Uptime 101: Availability Strategies for Web Applications
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices
• What Great Managers Know
• Increasing Profitability and Employee Productivity in a Carbon Constrained World

In addition to all of this, we will also be running data center tours (always an attendee favorite), tours of our new headquarters, a golf tournament, and a guided tour of “haunted” San Antonio. We will also be holding a special murder mystery dinner!

When: Monday, October 27th through Thursday, October 30th

Where: Westin Riverwalk Hotel (on the San Antonio Riverwalk)

Visit www.rackspace.com/conference for full conference details and to register

Rackspace’s very own Emil Sayegh has a great article posted on CIO.com titled “Navigating the Labyrinth: Choosing a Hosting Infrastructure.” Here is a teaser:

Making the decision to host your IT infrastructure is a complicated task—so complicated, in fact, that we sometimes hear customers refer to the process as “navigating the labyrinth.” But hard as it is, navigating the decision can be easy if you focus on a single question: What is my strategy for success? In other words, if your business is an instant sensation in the market, how will you scale to meet the demand? A success strategy must be built into your IT plans from day one. This includes laying out plans for the architecture, support, supply chain, language, features, operating system and hosting service level you require.

You can view the whole thing here.

If you would like to see more from Rackspace in CIO magazine, please be sure to rate this article!

Here is a special guest post from Robert Taylor, a Rackspace Senior Systems Engineer.

Rackspace Break-fix Competition
LinuxWorld 2008
San Francisco

Rackspace Hosting held a break-fix competition at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco. The competition pitted System Administrators comfortable with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Perl) platform against one another in a 4 question, 20 minute contest. The top three competitors who answered the most questions in the shortest time won one of the following prizes:

1st Place: Apple iPod Touch
2nd Place: Nintendo Wii
3rd Place: Garmin GPS

A break-fix competition presents problems with an otherwise working system that must be resolved. System administrators call upon their knowledge and troubleshooting abilities in a break-fix competition and is a good gauge of the depth of those skills and abilities. The Rackspace break-fix is tailored toward the Hosting industry as that is our forte.

Contestants were given root access to a remotely-hosted virtual machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. The questions for this break-fix were as follows:

1. Using the ‘ping’ utility, successfully ping ‘www.rackspace.com’ at 72.32.191.88.

2. Successfully run the command:
mysql world < /root/insert.sql

(Valid solution will leave the insert.sql file as is).

3. Successfully execute the command:
echo “this file is secret” >/tmp/secret.txt

(Valid solution will not affect functionality of the /tmp directory.)

4. Successfully start the Apache web server, without losing any configured functionality (read more…)

Every time I talk to customer that is joining the Racker family or run’s into an issue with scaling their IT infrastrcuture, I find that they either don’t know how backup and storage needs will effect their business or how to best enable today’s storage product’s to better enable their business needs. It seems that when it comes to architecting the largest most bullet proof solution in the world either the storage portion or the backup solution are thought of last. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why this is the case and in most case understand why it is the last thing to consider. However I would like to recommend a new way to think about architecting your solution when storage or backup is needed.

The new approach I like to take is what I call “Block-up” infrastructure planning. Block-up planning is a very easy process. You first decide how much data space you need (in term of GB), what do you need it for (In terms of a business application, like a database) and how much this data is worth to your company/business? I will give you an example of this and how this is important. (read more…)

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) requires that if you accept, transmit or store credit cardholder data you must meet the requirements contained within the standard. The problem is that many people don’t know what that means. If you deal with credit cards and are required to meet the PCI DSS, my advice is to find a way to limit the scope of your compliance as much as possible. Rackspace recently concluded a two-year effort to receive our PCI Service Provider Report on Compliance (ROC) as a Compliant Level 1 Service Provider from Visa USA.

Rackspace pursued this compliance so that we can provide a PCI Compliant Hosting Infrastructure for its customers. Infrastructure, in this case, includes:

(read more…)