This time last week I was sitting at my desk in my pyjamas in aid of comic relief.  During the day we had cake sales and games tournaments including Pool, Table Tennis and Table Football, as well as a competition between departments of how many Rackers we could fit in our Mini (the winners squeezed in 17 Rackers)!

It was a great day, for a great cause and we raised over £850.

Giving back is one of the aspects of our culture that really helps to define Rackspace and what we’re all about. We all know that we’re not just an Hosting company. We are a bunch of people defined by Fanatical Support and that extends from our customers through Rackers and out into the community.

In the last couple of years we’ve raised around £30k for our charity partner Cancer Research UK, our support for them was prompted by the death of a colleague to this terrible disease. Rackers have got involved with everything from Racky Races to cake sales, dressing up daft, sporting challenges and climbing mountains.

However, it’s always good to review what we’re doing and the results from our employee survey last year indicated that we were keen to get more involved in charity work – particularly through volunteering.

The shortlist includes local charities where we feel we can make a real difference as well as Cancer Research as it remains a disease that affects so many of us.    We’d welcome all  Rackers, customers, partners and interested parties to let us know their preference in who we choose to support as our charity in 2011.

– Michael Sobell House Hospice in Northwood, Middx
– Trinity Homeless Projects (West London)
– Leonard Cheshire Disability (national but with a day centre in Slough)
– The Children’s Liver Disease Foundation (national)
– Cancer Research UK (national)

Post a comment with your feedback on who we should choose and why.

Last week, tickets went on sale for the Olympic Games via the official London 2012 website. In a week which saw both the unveiling of the ‘official’ countdown clock and its spectacular breakdown only hours later, all eyes have been on the website to see if it would cope with the sheer volume of people looking to purchase tickets for the different events.

We don’t host the website, but as a fellow hosting provider, we are pleased to say that so far no hitches have occurred at all and despite the constant flow of traffic, inquires and information, it is holding up very well.

As past concerts and sporting occasions have shown, getting the online ticket service right isn’t always easy and in many cases sites have gone down within minutes of them going live – creating consumer frustration and a sheer buying panic. A lot of pressure and national pride is riding on the success of the London 2012 Games and this was the first major hurdle organisers had to face. As proud hosters and Brits we are pleased to see the process go smoothly.

Now let’s bring home the gold!!

Today we’re pleased to announce the Rackspace Cloud Domain Name Service (DNS) API Private Beta to US and UK Cloud Customers by invitation only. This service will allow customers to programmatically create and manage their DNS records.  Currently, the operations available through the API include:

• List, add, modify, and remove domains
• List, add, modify, and remove DNS records

Additionally, we’ve exposed several features in the API that previously required a support ticket, including:

• Management of the default time to live (TTL) and resource record time to live (TTL) values
• Advanced record types – TXT, NS, AAAA, DKIM, and SRV
• Ability to configure the priority of all resource records

While this release is limited to the API only, we’re working in parallel to improve the customer DNS experience in the control panel as well.  The control panel will soon feature domain management as a top-level feature and provide a full suite of self-management features that are now being exposed through the API.

As we work through the beta development phase of this project, we’re looking for customers to evaluate and test this service. The ideal customer will have Cloud Servers in their configuration and be familiar with the Rackspace RESTful web service APIs.

If you would like to apply for early access to the Rackspace Cloud DNS API Private Beta program, please email dnsbeta@rackspace.com. Tell us about your current configuration and use case ideas on how you would use this new service.  We’ll start sending out invitations for the Private Beta next week.

We’re excited to work with our customers to finalise this new offering as the feedback received will be crucial to making this product a success.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog for future product announcements.

Here in the UK, the recession and the election have taken over much of the news agenda, which can lead us to neglect the other sociological and economical trends which are starting to have a serious effect on the macro environment.  A recent article from the IBA group, highlighted by IT journalist Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, looked at three trends – sustainability, the aging population and security – which are all having a profound impact on business and our daily lives. It also questioned how many executives on the buy or sell side of the outsourcing equation have considered just how much their own marketplace might change this century, especially in Europe.

Whilst the aging population has been a challenge for governments and health services for the last few decades, it is now impacting the IT sector in previously unforeseen ways. This IBA blog estimates that in the next forty years, for example, half of the German population will be of economically inactive age. The net effect on the economy will be a workforce which relies more and more on outsourced and shared services, to compensate for the lack of available on-site staff. This will have a clear and significant effect on the outsourcing market.

Indeed, history shows that outsourcing trends change direction at each new computing innovation, for example when Web-based architectures emerged, outsourcing re-surfaced from its mainframe days and was followed by enterprises boosting internal IT as the cost of servers continued to fall. As this story highlights, the embrace of outsourcing is happening again and there is a new wave of computing taking over: Computing-as-a-Service.

CaaS holds a remarkable benefit to businesses: the elimination of capital expense in the IT budget. Importantly, the shift between outsourced providers and in-house IT will end not only due to sociological trends, but also because there will be no systems to depreciate, decommission, or cling to in the hope of RoI. In short: No More Servers!

We at Rackspace have already worked to solve these problems and help our customers take advantage of these opportunities by offering both dedicated hosting and cloud computing, depending on the business need. We can offer as much or as little help as our customers require, supporting them every step of the way and give them peace-of-mind that whatever the economic, socio-political or environmental climate, Rackspace is the outsourcing partner of choice.

So whilst it’s important to consider the effect that these trends will have on your company and the economy, when it comes to technology, Rackspace has your back.

Rackspace prides itself on maintaining a good pedigree throughout every layer of our own technology stack. We also carry that thought through to how we connect with partners and other third parties. Because of this we are proud to be working with DreamStake, a company that works as an incubator for business entrepreneurs, artists and other creative professionals.

DreamStake’s current objective is to build a vibrant network of talented individuals with experience across a wide range of disciplines. Balancing this, our objective at Rackspace is to support this initiative and the entrepreneurs themselves, giving them award winning IT systems that will enable and empower their businesses.

The Female Superheroes event that DreamStake ran on March 8 this year was an exciting evening with a great buzz. Packed with entrepreneurs starting up new businesses, the attendees were hugely receptive to assistance and support as they build their proposition for the ‘next-big-thing’.

Rackspace is always happy to sponsor networking events like these as they fit perfectly with our Cloud & Hybrid offering – low initial costs and highly scalable hosting services, for email, storage, websites and applications. I was really struck at this event by the focus and determination that these female entrepreneurs have.

The speakers included Maria Constantinescu, the founder of SlickFlick, who was an inspiring and creative lady with a funky new business which really reveals how much is now possible online – and how important it is to be able to focus on your content and core business whilst your website and applications do all the work in the background!

We’re looking forward to working more closely with DreamStake and its community over the coming months and years and attending many more events like these.

Matt

Over the months we’ve told you a lot about exciting new ways of using the cloud, and you can look forward to plenty more exiting cloud and hybrid hosting news over the course of 2011.

Today I wanted to share a quick note detailing the mechanics of how our customers have actually used the cloud in 2010. From a survey we did last year, we discovered that the most popular use for the Rackspace cloud is actually for hosting corporate web sites.

This isn’t a complete surprise to us – we know from other research that we are neck-and-neck the joint preferred cloud provider (alongside “another well known company”) for hosting the world’s top 500,000 websites. However, those same stats also tell us that only 7,000 of the top 500,000 websites are hosted in the cloud – not even 2%.  But more than half of all Rackspace cloud customers are hosting corporate websites – which indicates that cloud is a firm favourite with smaller organisations.

Of course it’s not all about websites, and in fact the second most common use of the cloud is for test environments. Again not surprising – we always figured that the convenience of servers-on-demand would make our cloud a firm favourite with developers. Over the months we’ve noticed that all types and sizes of organisation like to use the cloud for test & development – smaller firms love the commercial simplicity of pay-as-you-go, while larger firms like the short lead-times (it’s about getting down to coding quicker).

It goes without saying that usage trends will evolve over time, and we’re sure that new hybrid solutions like RackConnect will trigger greater demand by traditional IT users.  In the meantime, we’ve been busy this week looking into how usage trends differ between US and Europe – more on that in a future blog…

Simon