2011 marks my sixth year participating in Movember at Rackspace, and I’m proud once again to be growing my Mo for charity.

Movember is the month formerly known as November, where gentlemen across the world unite and grow a moustache, or ‘Mo’, for charity.  Known as ‘Mo Bros’, these fearless men attempt to grow the most ridiculous Mo they can, and ask their friends and family to sponsor their Mo for the Prostate Cancer charity.

Prostate cancer is a disease that over 100 men are diagnosed with each day in the UK, and will affect most of us in one way or another throughout our lives.  Each year I proudly wear my Mo, I find more and more people who have been affected by this terrible disease.  The Prostate Cancer Charity supports and informs men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer, and also fund vital research into the causes, treatment and prevention of prostate cancer.

To be honest, Movember has to be the easiest way I’ve ever helped a charity – in the past, I’ve run marathons, climbed mountains and cycled from London to Brighton.  With Movember, all I need to do is stop shaving my upper lip for a month.                                                                                                                 

In my six years of Movember, I’ve found that the message spreads. Each year I meet more people who are joining in.  Just yesterday I was in a meeting with one of my suppliers and noticed that his upper lip was looking stubblier than usual – it turned out that he too was growing a Mo.  Many sports personalities and teams are now getting involved, and helping spread the word

I have been able to recruit 35 other male Rackers this year to unite with me in hairy upper lipness, which includes a large number of colleagues in our Amsterdam office.  We also have a number of Rackers in our San Antonio and Austin offices who are joining in, making this a truly global Rackspace effort!  Each year in the London office, we have a Mo-Off at the end of the month, where all of our Mo Bros strut their stuff on a catwalk and award one Mo Bro the title of ‘Rackspace Man of Movember’

Over the past six years at Rackspace, we have raised almost £20,000 for the Prostate Cancer Charity, just through Movember.  I am proud to participate each year, and look forward to continuing to raise more funds with Movember in the years to come.

If you’d like to donate to the Rackspace Movember team, please click here – all donations go straight to the Prostate Cancer Charity.

Tune in next week for more updates on our mos,

Matt

There’s so much buzz at Rackspace today – in fact it’s fair to say we are leaping about, shouting with joy and generally celebrating!

“But why?” we hear you ask.

Well, [drum roll...] Rackspace is delighted to announce that last night at a swanky event in the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, we won the much-coveted Employer of the Year 2011 at The National Business Awards sponsored by Croner!

Me with the judges

The judges said Rackspace is fast maturing but maintaining its youthful spirit while still providing Fanatical Support to customers and delivering a fantastic employer brand.”

The National Business Awards are among the most high-regarded professional accolades in the UK with companies such as BSkyB and Intuit also shortlisted as finalists in the ‘Employer of the Year’ category. Key to Rackspace’s success in this award category was the creation of a winning UK workplace through strong leadership, open communications and employee skills investment. The company’s achievements are carried forward by the incredible team of ‘Rackers’ that fill its headquarters to serve their best every day, creating what the company proudly calls “an awesome experience” for all customers.

A bouncing David Kelly, our VP International is naturally thrilled: “It is fantastic to get external validation that Rackspace is a truly great place to work. To be recognised ahead of some of the biggest brands in the world is something that all Rackers should be proud of.”

Even a certain David Cameron had something special to say “These awards, they really do show off the best of British. Category after category, celebrating outstanding achievements. The true pride of Britain and the true wealth creators in our economy’

There’ll be cakes all round this afternoon…

Awesome work everyone.

Brooke

Following the launch in the US, I’m please to announce that we’ve just launched our Cloud DNS API service here in the UK.  We launched a beta service back in July, and have made a number of improvements since then before we decided to launch the API service

Our US-based guru for all things Cloud is Daniel Morris. Here’s a copy of the blog he posted just a few days ago about the launch.

Domain and record management underlies nearly every web application and we have designed this API to make it easier to control this critical aspect of your web-based solutions.  The Rackspace Cloud DNS API enables you to automate and simplify your DNS management and has the features you have requested, including:

•    REST-based API with comprehensive management capability
•    New record types  (e.g. recent additions include TXT, AAAA, and SRV)
•    Enhanced infrastructure with new regional DNS endpoints
•    Decreased propagation times
•    Full TTL Control
•    Migration –import or export a BIND9-formatted file of domains and configuration details

Since July, we have also made significant updates to our underlying DNS infrastructure.  We are adding additional nameserver endpoints and have successfully improved response times and decreased the time to propagate changes.

If you want to learn more about this service in the UK, visit our Rackspace Cloud DNS web page.

And we’re not done yet.  While there is some DNS functionality already available in our current Cloud Control Panel, we are working to integrate the full set of Rackspace Cloud DNS API operations into our new Cloud Control Panel to deliver a first class user experience in 2012. Our goal is to expose the capabilities that are available via the API, including full management of domains and records, TTL settings, import/export, and more.

Pricing

Rackspace Cloud DNS is FREE.  That’s right, there is no cost for using the Rackspace Cloud DNS in combination with other Rackspace Cloud products.  Existing Cloud Servers™, Cloud Servers with a managed service level, and RackConnect™ customers have access to the Rackspace Cloud DNS by default.

Cloud DNS is backed by Fanatical Support.  For support details, visit our Cloud DNS page.

The API

Implementation and management of our Cloud DNS solution is available through our API. To use our API, customers should have a general understanding of DNS management and be familiar with:

• RESTful Web Services
• JSON and/or XML Data Serialization Formats

To get started, download the API Developers Guide.

Check out the Rackspace Cloud DNS Knowledge Center FAQs.

As always, we want to hear what you think about our offering.   Head over to our product feedback site and be heard.

Let us know if you have any questions about our new offering.  If you need the ability to automate and simplify your Domain Name System management, give our Cloud DNS API offering a try.

Matt

We arrived at work to find the ghosts and ghouls had come a calling during the night… cobwebs clung to computers, mist crept among the gravestones and a bloody collection of zombies, witches, werewolves, vampires and other creatures of the night had replaced our friendly Rackers. There was even, somewhat bizarrely, a giant hot dog and banana hiding among the ectoplasm…

Let’s face it, we don’t exactly need much of an excuse to raid the dressing up box at Rackspace – it’s almost a part of recruitment procedure… so there was no way we’d miss the opportunity to pull on something scary for the spookiest day of the year. If you’re not of a nervous disposition, then you’re welcome to take a peek at Halloween at Rackspace…

Be afraid… be very afraid…who would be the scariest Racker and Most Terrifying Team…

Would it be blood and guts…?

Beauties and Beasts?

Cirque du Hell?

Well, frightening as these were, our Scare Factor Judges decided there could be only two winners….

Team Winners –  SMB ZOMBIES

And Warren our individual winner … Muah ha ha!!

The Rackspace Cloud Builders training team recently brought its OpenStack training prowess to a London-based group of attendees, all of whom were focused on updating their technical skills in relation to this open source infrastructure project. Driven by both technical and commercial imperatives, a collection of engineers from five different countries and nine different organisations coalesced to learn how to best implement the latest OpenStack standards into the company initiatives and service offerings being developed by their own organisations.

Attendees were drawn from both small, medium-sized and large consultancies and most had operational experience with VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other virtualisation and cloud-related technologies. Given the class member’s acute responsibilities for implementing the latest cloud technologies to their firm’s customer base, the obligation to adhere to current OpenStack deployment and operational best practices is of paramount importance.

Rackspace Cloud Builders deployment engineers are very much aware of these real world challenges and so used the sessions at the Rackspace UK headquarters to learn at both a ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ level in terms of how these technologies work in practice. The OpenStack training course is designed to allow students engage in OpenStack design discussions where many share their experiences operating in diverse environments, but the course is largely centered on labs for deploying and configuring OpenStack itself.

Students work with the CLI, API, and the Dashboard so they can understand how to operate and troubleshoot OpenStack. Whether the goal is to implement OpenStack Compute (Nova) or to implement Object Storage (Swift), students walk away with the knowledge, the code, and the reference builds to get started with OpenStack in production.

This is not a training class like many others where the trainers are following a script and questions beyond the printed material are dismissed. This is Rackspace Cloud Builders, so a “let’s try it and see what happens” approach is taken — and this in fact was the catalyst for some of the most engaging discussions and discoveries of the week.

For additional information and training schedule please visit www.cloudbuilderstraining.com

Do you use cloud services every day? The likely answer to that question is probably a resounding yes! But most of us aren’t even fully conscious of the impact that cloud services are having on our day-to-day lives. Our work and personal lives are more ‘connected’ than ever through devices like smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi, broadband, social media, e-readers, emails and cloud-based services like Spotify, Flickr, Facebook, Gmail and Hotmail*.

Rackspace commissioned the ‘Generation Cloud’ study in association with the centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST) at Goldsmiths University of London to look into how cloud services have really changed the way we work and play in every aspect of our existence. The research that has come from this study is truly interesting and reveals that (without being fully aware of it) a significant 66% of British users are relying on cloud computing services every day.

This study’s accompanying white paper is entitled “Generation Cloud – A social study into the impact of cloud-based services on everyday UK life” – and is a deeper dive into cloud usage in the UK. The paper includes key survey findings and defines four distinct cloud user profiles as well as tips from Rackspace to consumers and businesses.

Highlighting the fact that we already have masses of information digitally stored in the cloud and this amount is only going to increase, our study has examined just how reliant we are on these online services? Now is an important time to examine just how much of our information is held in or shared via the cloud. We also need to ask whether we are exposing ourselves and our ‘digital treasures’ to significant risks?

Click here to download the white paper and find out just what we uncovered.

Rackspace Advice For Conscientious Cloud Consumers

• BE SELECTIVE: Be sure that your chosen cloud provider is big enough to have a reputation to lose so that when problems arise, they will make a genuine effort to fix things.
• TREASURES: Make sure your digitalassets are adequately protected with strong passwords – or better, passphrases.
• PRIVACY: Be aware that cloud services are inherently accessible, so consider how you would feel if your cloud content became public. If your content is private, consider using encryption software to make it secure before you store it in the cloud.

Rackspace Advice For Business Cloud Customers

• ECONOMICS: Generally, best value solutions are superior to lowest cost. Consider all the factors including support, customer service, reputation, reliability, etc. when measuring value.
• SECURITY: Data security, privacy and intellectual property protection in the cloud computing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model should be approached with exactly the same levels of exhaustive defences as traditional IT security provisioning.
• TRUST: There is often a lack of trust of cloud service providers; 69 per cent of respondents questioned regarding the privacy or security of their information mentioned lack of trust. There is much user education on the cloud still to be done.

Generation Cloud Infographic

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