Rackspace Says ‘No More Servers’

For many customers, the path to the cloud runs through social media. That appears to be a key strategy at Rackspace, which today launched an online community called No More Servers: The End of In-House Servers. The lead blogger will be long-time hosting industry analyst Andy Schroepfer, who recently joined Rackspace as vice president for strategy.

The initiative, which targets enterprise customers and advances Schroepfer’s vision of an “all cloud enterprise,” is the second online community Rackspace has launched to discuss the future of hosting. Building 43, a community led by Robert Scoble and focusing on Internet tools and services for small businesses, launched in June.

No More Servers will feature regular blog posts by Schroepfer, as well as links to relevant content from around the web. The site’s focus will reflect “an evolution towards the world where people aren’t buying in-house servers anymore,” Schroepfer says in an introductory video. “It’s not that the world’s going to be without servers. They’re just all going to be with people like Rackspace. We’re trying to say (that) the end game is that you won’t have any more servers in-house.”

Andy Schroepfer Joins Rackspace

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) has hired Andy Schroepfer, a familiar face to many in the hosting and data center industry, as its vice president for strategy, the company said today. Schroepfer began his career on Wall Street, tracking the web hosting industry for Piper Jaffray and Goldman Sachs. He then founded Tier 1 Research, which specialized in analysis of the hosting and data center sector and was acquired by The 451 Group in in 2005.

More recently, Schroepfer has managed the technology sector fund Exponential Capital and explored the intersection of social media and regulatory compliance with a startup called CagedTweets.com that archives posts to Twitter accounts. He also offers commentary on the financial markets on CNBC.

“Andy’s goal is to quicken the pace that businesses see, and act on, the reality that the future of computing is not about servers, but about service,” Rackspace notes in a blog post, adding that Schroepfer will fcous on the “All Cloud Enterprise” that operates without servers.

GitHub Departs Engine Yard for Rackspace

The fast-growing code repository GitHub announced today that it will move to Rackspace, ending a lengthy hosting partnership with Engine Yard. The GitHub team said its decision was driven by the rapid growth of the site, which is adding 400 users and 1,000 coding projects a day. The announcement came a week after Engine Yard had publicly announced that GitHub would be transitioning to another host.

“The move to Rackspace will bring about a new backend architecture and a lot more servers, leading to a much improved user experience for everyone,” writes GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. “We need to take drastic action now to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will allow us to provide you with a top-notch user experience.”

While GitHub characterized the move as being driven by performance requirements, Engine Yard cited philosophical issues as well. Engine Yard specializes in hosting Ruby on Rails sites, and said its agreement to provide GitHub with “value swap” hosting (free hosting in return for free GitHub accounts for Engine Yard customers) was rooted in GitHub’s importance to the Ruby on Rails community.

Rackspace Wins UK Defense Deal

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) has won a three-year managed hosting deal with the UK Ministry of Defense that will consolidate the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force websites onto a single virtualized platform. Rackspace beat 18 other companies to win the contract to support the Joint Server Farm (JSF), a secure hosting infrastructure that will make it easier to manage, scale and secure the Ministry of Defense web sites.

“We are delighted to have extended our relationship with the MOD by winning this tender in what was a hard fought pitch by lots of companies,” said Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director for Rackspace Hosting. “At a time when costs and efficiencies are being brought to the forefront, we know we can truly help simplify the MOD infrastructure to meet these challenges.”

Rackspace Launches Cloud Tools Ecosystem

A screen shot of the Rackspace Cloud Toosl partner application catalog.

Rackspace Hosting wants to make using the cloud easy for its users, and is enlisting partners in its effort. This morning the company rolled out Cloud Tools, a portal to showcase partner solutions that offer applications and services built atop The Rackspace Cloud, its cloud computing suite.

The portal offers developers a way to showcase their offerings to Rackspace’s large customer base, which includes more than 51,000 cloud computing users and nearly 20,000 managed hosting customers. The move also extends Rackspace’s effort to establish itself as the leading operator of an “open cloud” ecosystem offering an alternative to powerhouse proprietary platformks from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

“This tool-sharing service, along with our commitments to collaborate with the community to build an open cloud, lays the foundation for a large ecosystem,” said Jim Curry, vice president of corporate development, Rackspace Hosting, who noted the company’s goal to “constantly seek out new opportunities to connect our customers with quality services. With the recent release of our APIs, we’ve seen an influx of interest in developing applications for our cloud computing offerings and we’re pleased to announce that such applications can be featured in our new Cloud Tools site.”

Rackspace Expands With Chicago Data Center

A look at finished data center space inside the DuPont Fabros CH1 data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill., where Rackspace Hosting has leased 36,700 square feet of space.

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) will open a new data center in Chicago, continuing the steady expansion of the company’s infrastructure as its expands into cloud computing. Rackspace will lease 36,700 square feet of raised floor space in a huge facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village.

The leased space, which equates to 5.6 megawatts of critical power load, will come online in late 2009 and support additional growth in Rackspace’s managed hosting and cloud computing businesses, as well as disaster recovery options for customers in the company’s other facilities.

The Rackspace lease is a huge customer win for DuPont Fabros, which has struggled to lease space in its 495,000 square foot Chicago building. With the Rackspace lease, the first phase of CH1 is now 48 percent filled. The deal also depends the working relationship between the two companies, building upon Rackspace’s lease of a pod in DuPont Fabros’ ACC4 facility in Ashburn, Va.

Rackspace Open Sources More Cloud Resources

The Rackspace Cloud has announced several moves to make its platform more attractive to open source developers and customers  wary of being locked into proprietary cloud platforms. Rackspace has open sourced the application programming interfaces (APIs) for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files services under a Creative Commons license. Today it has also made langage bindings for Cloud Files available under the MIT license, and posted technical guidelines for language bindings for Cloud Servers to the GitHub social coding service. The announced last night at the OSCON conference in San Jose, Calif. 

These initiatives will make it easier for developers to create apps that can run on different programming languages on the Cloud Servers compute service and Cloud Files storage service, and make it easier for customers to migrate their Rackspace-hosted apps elsewhere.

Differentiating Through Openness
It also differentiates Rackspace (RAX) from larger cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google that have not yet participated in efforts towards open clouds that would allow customers to easily move apps between cloud services.

“Our goal with all of this is to make the Rackspace Cloud really easy to use,” said Erik Carlin, Senior Architect at Rackspace. “The power of the API is is it’s ability to allow developers to build powerful stuff on top of the platform.”

Roundup: CSC, Equinix, i/o, Rackspace

It’s been a busy news day. Here are some of the latest news announcements from data center and hosting providers:

• CSC today announced that it will team with Microsoft Corp. to help independent software vendors (ISV) and enterprise customers build applications atop the Windows Azure platform. utilize the Windows Azure platform. With more than 2,000 .NET developers, CSC can support large scale development projects with public cloud computing benefits delivered by Windows Azure. The company also announced the formation of a dedicated CSC Global Competency Center located in Vietnam specializing in Windows Azure. “With a global commitment to Windows Azure, CSC is embracing cloud computing in a very aggressive fashion and we applaud the innovation this agreement will drive in the market,” said Doug Hauger, General Manager of Windows Azure. “The partnership between our companies is a perfect match of software and services capabilities.”
• Colocation and interconnection specialist Equinix Inc. (EQIX) said that the Boston Options Exchange(BOX) will locate its primary matching engines for its all electronic equity options market at the Equinix NY4 data center in Secaucus, New Jersey. The move will provide BOX customers, including algorithmic trading firms, with a scalable data center infrastructure from which they can directly connect to the BOX matching engine. “Operating within Equinix’s NY4 center will put BOX’s order matching engine in the middle of an existing community of financial trading companies and electronic trading networks, while providing our customers with a high-performance trading environment from which they can link to BOX with the lowest levels of latency,” said Alan Grigoletto, senior vice president for BOX. “This means we can now pair BOX’s ultra-fast matching engine with the advantages of colocating, thereby eliminating any geographic latency.”

Rackspace CEO Napier on Dallas Outages

Rackspace has updated its blog with a message from President and CEO Lanham Napier on the recent outages at the company’s Dallas area data center, and posted an incident report (PDF) encompassing the June 29 and July 7 incidents. Rackspace has also posted a video in which Napier provides additional information about the recent problems at the DFW facility and how Rackspace plans to address them. This video runs about 5 minutes.

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