Rackspace

Rackspace is a web host based in San Antonio, Texas. The company is one of the largest representatives of its industry, the company's customers include GitHub, Vodafone and Mazda. Since August 2008, the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange shares are traded.

History

Rackspace goes back to the company Cymitar Technology Group, which was founded in 1996 by Richard Yoo. It dealt with the development of websites and other web-based applications. Due to the increasing demand in the field of web hosting began two years later Rackspace as a spin -off with the operation of dedicated servers for customers in the Cymitar Technology Group. In 2009 the company received a loan of 11.5 million U.S. dollars, has to, inter alia, Sequoia Capital, and Red were involved.

In March 2006, Rackspace created a subsidiary called Mosso, which in 2008 was again fully repurchased. Core offer was a platform that could be hosted on the sites without having to worry about the necessary technical infrastructure and in particular the scaling. In the aftermath Mosso was hired as an independent brand and formed the basis for the Rackspace Cloud, which is in competition with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure. 2010 Rackspace has launched together with NASA, Dell and Citrix released the open-source OpenStack project to life, which is to provide a platform for open source cloud computing. Later Rackspace transferred the power of the OpenStack project from a foundation. As of mid-2012, gradually all the services of Rackspace Cloud have been converted to OpenStack, starting with the servers.

Products

Rackspace offered initially to only dedicated servers and expanded its range through the acquisition of the so-called Rackspace Mosso Cloud. This consists largely of cloud server ( virtual server) Cloud Sites ( Web applications ) Cloud Files ( storage service) and cloud databases ( databases) as well as various offers for management and configuration. These included services for the domain name system and virtual networks, particularly load balancers in particular. As a variant of the so-called Rackspace Cloud Private Cloud is offered. It is hardware and software that have been agreed by Rackspace another and is intended for operation in a separate data center.

Unlike other providers Rackspace placed in the external representation instead of the technology of its products great value to its customer service, which is known as Fanatical Support. Rackspace operates nine data centers, of which five of them are located in North America.

Criticism

In 2009, Rackspace was criticized after server and cloud services in what was then the largest data center provider in Dallas had failed several times. The uninterruptible power supply has repeatedly failed to start as expected. From the failure of many popular online services were affected, including, of course Tumblr. As a result of the failures of the CEO announced to review the entire technical infrastructure. In addition, Rackspace refunded its customers a total of about 3.5 million U.S. dollars in fees.