GameTable Online (GTO) is an online game site featuring web versions of popular, real-world tabletop games, based in Northampton, Mass. GTO’s specialty is turn-based strategy games—and the site makes them look and feel like the real thing.

While users enjoy getting to play both free and premium games, game creators and manufacturers benefit from exposing a new generation to classic offline games, like Axis and Allies. And the audience for these games is big—more than 11,000 games of Axis and Allies have been played so far this month. GTO’s audience is highly motivated, and it turns out that their online behavior affects their offline purchases—a survey showed that a whopping 20 percent of the players who were introduced to the game 10 Days in Africa on GTO went on to purchase the game.

To support an audience that fluctuates throughout the day, GTO needed a flexible hosting solution and could cut costs where needed. Their traditional dedicated hosting environment was too costly and turning servers off and on was timely.  They needed the ability to expand to more servers quickly and on demand, to cater to a game’s spiking popularity or allow the site to host multi-player tournaments. Expanding to more servers on the cloud would allow them to offer their clients an affordable price, while scaling as needed. They also wanted to separate their web servers from their game servers so when they made changes to one, it didn’t affect the other. GameTable Online turned to the Rackspace Cloud.

The system GTO came up with using Rackspace Cloud is a perfect fit for their needs. Using Cloud Servers, GTO set up their web, database, and game servers separately. This layout lets them use private web servers for client development and testing, while using their other servers for alpha testing. They also keep a backup of their live servers on Cloud Files, using the Cloud Servers snapshot feature to clone the server images.

The results have been impressive: GameTable Online cut their hosting expenses by 30%, without compromising their bandwidth or service. They are able to easily support varying numbers of players—often 250 players are concurrently logged in and playing. But with the ability to adjust the number of servers according to how many active players are logged in, GTO is able to keep costs (and premium activation fees) as low as possible.

“The ability to start small and grow rapidly is essential to meeting our schedules with a limited staff and budget,” explains GTO Operations Vice-President Robert Eng.

Instead of dealing with server headaches, GTO’s staff is able to focus on adding more games to GTO’s list of offerings, and continually improve user experience. It was the performance and ease of use of Rackspace Cloud Servers that convinced GTO to also start using Cloud Files.

“It’s allowed us to increase efficiencies in how we distribute the game code,” says Eng. “Our Rackspace Cloud Servers are invaluable to us.”

We’re pleased to have GTO bring game strategy to users all over the world on our cloud. Game On.

Lew Moorman did a keynote, Toward an Open Cloud, at OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon last week. It was a big week for Rackspace as we announced OpenStack which Lew discusses further in his presentation. He highlights how Rackspace got started and  has succeeded through the years which is by taking standard based technologies and making them into great services. We have progressed with our cloud computing development, serving over 100,000 customers, and we’re now committed to opening our cloud technologies to the world. We think this is the best way to bring services to our customers. He talks about our OpenStack commitment in 4 opens: open design, open development, open community and open source. Take a look to learn more.

We’ve talked about Standing Cloud, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner, and you may have heard about them on TechCrunch. Standing Cloud allows you to easily deploy and manage open source applications on Rackspace Cloud Servers in minutes! Most IT professionals use cloud computing to get their configuration online quickly – Standing Cloud takes it to the next level. They are taking the headaches out of learning how to configure a series of open source applications and have turned it into a simple 3 click process for you.

Standing Cloud currently supports over 50 open source applications, including all the usual favorites such as Wordpress, Drupal, and SugarCRM, as well as more special-purpose systems like Hudson and Mantis.  They continue to add several new applications each month, and not only LAMP-stack apps – there are also Rails and JBoss applications available, and they’re always taking requests.

Learn more about Standing Cloud and how they can help you manage your open source applications seamlessly in their upcoming webinar. In this webinar you will learn how to install and launch an open source application on a  Rackspace Cloud Server in under one minute as well as see how powerful features, such as backup and restore, can be presented in an easy-to-use manner. Details below.

Date: Thursday, July 29th
Time: 11am PST / 1pm CST / 2pm EST

Click here to sign up.

Blake Yeager is the Product Manager for Rackspace Cloud Servers.

It’s been a few months since we announced the Beta release of our Cloud Servers for Windows offering and we’d like to provide you with an update on the progress we’ve made.  With the feedback received from our customers using Cloud Servers for Windows Beta, we’ve been hard at work completing some of the most requested functionality that was not initially released with the Beta and have been carefully monitoring performance and stability.

Rescue Mode

We launched the Rescue Mode feature two weeks ago, which you may have noticed.  Rescue Mode allows you to mount the drive from a Cloud Server that is not booting as a secondary drive on a new temporary Cloud Server.  This provides the ability to repair the Cloud Server or copy any critical data off the drive.

Snapshots/Backups

This week we are launching two more features: On-Demand/Scheduled Images (aka Snapshots/Backups) and the ability to Resize Up your Cloud Server.  With the On-Demand image feature you are able to make a copy of your entire Cloud Server instance (called an image).  This image can then be used to create new Cloud Servers or it can be used to revert your Cloud Server back to the point in time when the On-Demand image was created.  Scheduled Images allow you to specify a daily or weekly time window where the system will create an image of your Cloud Server instance.

Resize Up

The Resize Up feature allows customers to increase the size of an existing Cloud Server.  If after creating a server and configuring your application you realize that you need more memory or disk, a simple click of a button will scale your server up to a larger size.  Right now, you are unable to resize down but it’s a feature we are working on for the future.  While we are continuing to look at options, we recommend that you start with the smallest size Cloud Server that can run your application and only resize up to a larger size when you are ready for the change to be permanent.

Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)

Modern versions of Windows include VSS, a standardized mechanism for taking volume-based snapshots.  To ensure consistent backups, VSS signals applications to flush data and pause while the snapshot is being taken.  Our intention is to support VSS pass-through (a process by which Cloud Server backups/snapshots coordinate with the Windows guest VSS to ensure data is consistent), but at the present time, this is not functional.  Since Microsoft does not support snapshots that have been created outside of VSS pass-through, they are unable to offer support for Cloud Server instances created from a snapshot, backup or any instance that has been resized up.  Rackspace will attempt to support any Cloud Server created using these methods, however, until we get VSS pass-through working, we recommend that customers who require full Microsoft support use a built in backup tool such as NTBackup or Windows Server Backup to create and manage their backups.  We will of course notify you once we have full VSS pass-through support.

Additional Changes

In addition to these new features, we’re also making the following changes to the offering based on Microsoft’s recommended specifications and to ensure optimal performance:

• In order ensure that our offerings meet all of Microsoft’s minimum requirements for all versions of Windows we will no longer be offering the 512MB size option.  Any existing 512MB Cloud Servers will be grandfathered in at their current size but all new Cloud Servers must be 1GB or larger.

• We have also changed our vCPU allocation for Windows.  Instead of allocating 4 vCPUs to every Cloud Server we are now scaling the number of vCPUs that we allocate with the size of the Cloud Server.  This change effectively increases the guaranteed minimum CPU time that Cloud Servers are allocated.  The table below details the new vCPU allocations.

It is important to note that the changes we are talking about will only apply to Cloud Servers for Windows.  Sizes and vCPU allocations for our Linux Cloud Servers remain unchanged. As before, Windows Cloud Servers are still allowed to ‘burst’ and utilize any spare CPU cycles on the host.  We will be rolling out the vCPU changes to existing Cloud Servers for Windows customers over the coming weeks.

We are very excited about these new features!  We anticipate being able to remove the Beta label and offering a full SLA around Cloud Servers for Windows in the coming weeks.  We can’t thank our customers enough for providing critical feedback needed to make Cloud Servers for Windows a success. As always we will continue to release new functionality and improved features we hope will help you be successful. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post here and I will get back to you.

Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere.  A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers.  In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it.  Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.

Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.

I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.

“The cloud” at its most fundamental level is all about a massive supply increase in computing power.  The PC era was all about putting a computer on every desk.  The cloud era goes a step further, putting the power of supercomputing at the literal fingertips of every individual at anytime.   Whether it’s enabling a youth soccer coach to schedule practice across the online calendars of 18 families, or helping a scientist fold proteins to design new cancer drugs, or encouraging a frontline employee to instantly and cheaply test a new marketing campaign, the exponential growth in computing power and applications is changing every corner of our economy and society.  And, this era is truly just beginning.  We have seen only a tiny fraction of the potential gains that arise from cheap, ubiquitous computing power.

As this landscape has evolved, some have dismissed cloud computing as just a return to the mainframe era. This view is fundamentally wrong.  Mainframes were available to only the smartest employees at the richest companies.  The cloud is accessible to all, and usable by anyone, at low cost.  Its ubiquity is the source of its power.

However, there is one area where mainframe concepts are intruding into the cloud – the vertically integrated technology stack.  As hardware and software merge into services, the danger of locked down proprietary software stacks are emerging in the cloud space.  The cloud world changes everything, and that is not good to many entrenched interests of the old guard.  Core technologies from operating systems to hypervisors to databases are being used to tie cloud customers into an integrated view of the world.

If the web has taught us anything, it is that open systems, portability, and choice drive innovation.  The open Linux system brought us a mountain of software and tools to help accomplish almost any task.  And, each component, whether a database or a widget could be moved in and out freely based on the job getting done.

We at Rackspace have long talked about an “open” cloud.  And as a service provider built on our Fanatical Support difference, we have never had an interest in creating technical walls around our service.  But, given that no standards tools have emerged to build massively scalable clouds, we too have had to build custom software that creates some level of wall around our cloud offerings.  For months we have debated how to drive greater standards and increase the velocity of cloud technologies in general.  We finally converged on the obvious answer:  open source our cloud technology.

Today, we announced a new open source project that includes those core technologies: OpenStack.  And, we are not alone.  As we looked at all the projects that already existed to drive standards we saw that other efforts were underway that complemented what we have done.  We saw a ton of promise in the Nebula computing project built by NASA and are making it a core part of the project.   Taking the contributions of Rackspace and NASA as a starting point, OpenStack forms a powerful foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

The community, which we plan to actively support and drive, is live today at openstack.org with code available for download.

Last week we assembled a strong group of cloud community leaders and developers to meet and review the architecture, engage on technology direction and contribute code.  The effort attracted more than 100 participants from 25 companies including hosting companies, telecom providers, hardware manufacturers, cloud ecosystem companies and beyond.  This enthusiasm and collaboration around OpenStack has laid the foundation for a vibrant and innovative approach to building the core software to power the future cloud world.

What do we expect OpenStack to mean for the cloud community?  Some pretty major things.  One, anyone will be able to run this cloud and do it anywhere.  Enterprises and governments will be able to build private clouds.  Service providers will have the same technology used by Rackspace and NASA to build new offers.  Choice and portability are inevitable in this world.  Two, the whole tech ecosystem can build around this foundation.  With wide adoption, there will be a market for new services all around this core engine.  From storage systems to monitoring tools to management systems, there is no end to what can be attached to the core project.  Three, the cloud will advance faster than ever.  Between just NASA and Rackspace, an army of developers are committed to the continued advancement of OpenStack.  With our emerging supporters in the project, we expect to dramatically expand that army.  Finally, a core set of standards will be freely available and totally open.  New technologies can be attached.  Better solutions will be driven into the product.  And, the use of this powerful technology will not tie you to the use of any other technologies.

For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains.  Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.

We could not be more excited about the launch of this project and the enthusiasm around it.  As a company that has invested a great deal in the development of cloud technologies, we did not take the decision to open source lightly.  We think this decision will serve our interests and those of our customers.  While we at Rackspace hire top developers and engineers to make sure our technology is second to none, seeking a technology advantage has never been our approach.    We have our own vision about how to deploy this technology and serve customers – by giving them seamless access to scalable computing with the trusting partnership that comes through Fanatical Support.  But, there will be many approaches and winning formulas.  We think by welcoming those approaches and driving standards and more rapid innovation we will all win.

We hope you join us in this cause.  We know there are many parties who might want to join us in the effort, please reach out to us on this blog or through openstack.org.

We look forward to updating you as we make progress. Stay updated by following OpenStack on Twitter, joining the IRC channel #openstack, joining the OpenStack mailing list or following the OpenStack blog.

This post was written and contributed by Randy Hayes, CEO and Co-Founder of Capacity Calibration, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the on-demand capacity it provides for either expected or unexpected surges in traffic.  There’s a Catch-22 here, which is that nobody knows when they will need extra capacity or how they will handle it without testing, and fortunately the cloud itself provides the solution – the ability to handle extra capacity and the ability to generate it go hand in hand.

Capacity Calibration, or CapCal, was designed for the cloud of the Internet itself, and for several years it used the seti@home model where people from all over the world downloaded the CapCal agent and received $0.30 per hour that their computer was used for testing.  While this allowed some very large tests to be run, $0.30 is 10 times the cost of a 256MB Rackspace Debian Linux instance and far less reliable (since agents on the Internet can drop out or check in at any time).  So now, rather than having a network of over 15,000 computers with no more than 10% to 15% being online at a given time, we can spin up as many as we need on the Rackspace Cloud in less than 3 minutes and tear them down when finished testing.

Clearly the emergence of cloud computing gave CapCal a superior platform for load generation, but the fact that is was designed for the cloud in the first place has given us a decided advantage – testing the scalability of a solution designed to test scalability is another Catch-22, and fortunately we were able to encounter and solve these issues early on.  Because of its distributed, Web-based design we have been able to run tests in excess of 300,000 users delivering several million hits per minute requiring over 500 agents.

The CapCal agent running on the Rackspace Cloud takes less time to start up than the Windows desktop I use for development and its available bandwidth is far greater than what 99% of all the older CapCal agents ever had.  This means we can generate way more virtual users per agent without affecting the test results and this helps to keep costs and complexity way down.  For example, NASA used CapCal to prepare for the first live broadcast of its shuttle launch in 2001 and the average agent bandwidth was only 56k, so what took over 1000 agents to generate in those days can now be done with 50 or less.  But 50 is still a big number when it comes to physical boxes, and once again the cloud solves the problem simply and inexpensively.

Using the Rackspace Cloud API, a new instance of the CapCal agent is fired up in a minute or two at the most and reports directly to the CapCal server, which can handle up to 1,000 agents in its base configuration.  Each agent can generate anywhere from 200 to 1,000 virtual users depending on the bandwidth requirements of the application under test, so the kinds of tests that most people need to run (500 to 5,000 users) will require just a handful of agents.

Thank you, Rackspace Cloud, for helping to reinvent the industry and making the sky the limit of what we can do in web application testing!

Paul Ford, from Rackspace Corporate Development, is Your Connection to the Rackspace “Cloud Tools Partners” Ecosystem . To find out more about how CapCal and other tools can increase your productivity, satisfy your IT needs, and generally make your life easier, contact him any time at paul.ford@rackspace.com

This post was written and contributed by Nati Shalom, CTO & Co-Founder of Gigaspaces, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.

The NoSQL movement faults the SQL query language as the source of many of the scalability issues that we face today with traditional database approach.

I think that the main reason so many people have come to see SQL as the source of all evil is the fact that, traditionally, the query language was burned into the database implementation. So by saying NoSQL you basically say “No” to the traditional non-scalable RDBMS implementations.

This view has brought on a flood of alternative query languages, each aiming to solve a different aspect that is missing in the traditional SQL query approach, such as a document model, or that provides a simpler approach, such as Key/Value query.
Most of the people I speak with seem fairly confused on this subject, and tend to use query semantics and architecture interchangeably. So I thought that a good start would be to provide a quick overview of what each query term stands for in the context of the NoSQL world. Then, I’ll try to break some common misconceptions — which led me to come up with the YeSQL term.

Common Query Semantics in the Post Only-SQL world
The following are some of the common query semantics in the NoSQL world. For those that are interested in code examples i’ve linked each category with the relevant GigaSpaces reference API.

• Key/Value query: Key/Value query, as the name suggests, is probably the most basic form of query. Each data item is associated with a unique identifier (key). In the NoSQL world, memcache is one of the most common implementations of such an interface. A common pattern to perform complex queries with memcache is to defer them to an underlying database which is used as a search engine. The result of these queries is a key or set of keys that is then used to perform subsequent fetching of the values through the memcache data store. The reason they gained new momentum in the post-SQL world is because they lend themselves fairly natively to the concept of partitioning and distribution, which is a key piece in making a data store scalable. In other words, people were willing to trade the rich query functionality provided by most traditional RDBMS for scalability with only basic query support if that was their only choice.
• Document-based query: The roots of this model are in the search engine world, where it is very common to store different types of documents, even if each one represents a completely different object. In the NoSQL world, a document is not the typical Word or PowerPoint that you would see in search engine, but rather objects in the form of Jason or XML, or binary objects associated with a set of key/values, as in the case of Cassandra. In SQL terms, a document can be seen as a blob that is associated with a set of keys, each indexed independently and maintaining a reference to this blob. Each blob can be a different type (tables), each blob can have different set of associated indexes (keys). Matching is done through the associated indexes. The result-set often includes multiple types, each containing a different set of data. Because the indexes and the blob don’t need to conform to a strict structure of rows and tables, it is referred to as “schemaless” — i.e., it can have different versions of the same type, and add fields to new types without having to modify any table or update older version of the data. Examples that support the document model are CouchDB and MongoDB.
• Template query: Template queries were common in JavaSpaces and even in later versions of Hibernate. With template-based matching, you can fetch an object based on class type or inheritance hierarchy, as well as values of the attributes of that object. In more object-oriented versions of template matching you can also perform matching based on specific items within a graph attribute. GigaSpaces is one of the better-known implementations that support the JavaSpaces template query model.
• Map/Reduce: Map/Reduce is often used to perform aggregated queries on a distributed data store. A simple scenario would be Max, or Sum. In such scenario the query request need to be executed independently in each partition (Map) and then aggregated back to the client (Reduce). An implicit Map/Reduce can take a certain query request and spread the execution of that query implicitly. The client gets the aggregated query as if it was a single query. The explicit model allows you to execute code in free-form, where you can control the mapping model — which call goes to which data, the code to run in each node (aka tasks), and the results. In a typical Hadoop implementation, Map/Reduce is often done through the explicit model. Frameworks like Hive and Pig provide an abstraction model that can handle that process implicitly.
• SQL query: If you think about it, SQL is yet another form of dynamic language that was specifically designed for complex data management. With SQL, data is often ordered in tables and rows. Some of the query semantics in SQL, such as Joins, distributed transactions, and others are known to be anti-pattern for scalability. It is mostly this aspect of SQL semantics that associates SQL with scalability limitation. Examples of NoSQL implementations that support SQL are Google Bigtable using JPA, Hive/Hadoop, MongoDB and GigaSpaces. I will discuss in further details below what that actually means.

YeSQL — There’s Nothing Wrong with SQL!
Now that we’ve covered some of the concepts behind query formats, it becomes more apparent that there is nothing really wrong with SQL. Like many languages, SQL gives you a fairly long rope with which to hang yourself if you choose to, but that is true of almost any language. If you design your data model to fit into a distributed model, you may find that SQL can be a fairly useful format to manage your data. A good example is Hive/Pig/Hbase and Google JPA /Bigtable. In both cases the underlying data store is based on a scalable Key/Value store, but the front-end query language happens to be SQL-based. MongoDB aims toward a similar goal with the main difference that it provides SQL-like support and doesn’t fully comply with any of the existing standards.

It’s About the Architecture, Stupid!
NoSQL implementations such as Hive/HBase as well as JPA/Bigtable can be a good example of how next-generation databases can support both linear scaling and a SQL API.
The key is the decoupling of the query semantics from the underlying data-store as illustrated in the diagram below:

Supporting a SQL API on top of a NoSQL data store in Google Bigtable

Convergence is Underway
Last week I spent some time at the Hadoop summit. Hadoop created a fairly generic substrate that led to an innovative ecosystem behind it. There are already many new frameworks today that provide different levels of abstraction to the way Hadoop manages data in both query and processing, such as Hive, Cascading, and Pig. Many of them provide tools that the original creator of Hadoop never even thought of.

Which brings me to the point that we can apply the same decoupling pattern I mentioned above to support a document model in connection with SQL. In other words, I believe that most of the leading databases will support all of the semantics listed above, and we won’t have to choose a database implementation just because it supports a certain query language.

We’ve already seen a similar trend with dynamic languages. In the past, a language had to come with a full stack of tools, compiler, libraries, and development tools behind it, making the selection of a particular language quite strategic. Today, a JVM in Java or a CLR in .Net provides a common substrate that can support a large variety of dynamic languages on top of the same JVM runtime. Good examples are Groovy and Java or Jruby.

Final Words
As I pointed out throughout this post, SQL is actually a fairly good query language and will continue to serve a major role in the post only-SQL world. However, the concept of one size fits all doesn’t hold up. The data management world is going to be built from a variety of tools and data management languages, each serving a particular purpose. Ideally, we should be able to access any data using any of several query languages, regardless of how it was stored. For example, I should be able store a JSON object using a document model and then, at any time, query that JSON object using SQL query semantics or a simple Key/Value API.

Paul Ford, from Rackspace Corporate Development, is Your Connection to the Rackspace “Cloud Tools Partners” Ecosystem . To find out more about how GigaSpaces and other tools can increase your productivity, satisfy your IT needs, and generally make your life easier, contact him any time at paul.ford@rackspace.com

Last month Bitcurrent issued the findings of a comprehensive study on cloud computing performance. The Rackspace Cloud was among the five top providers targeted for rigorous testing and we’re proud of how we came out.  The other cloud platforms were Salesforce’s Force.com, Google’s App Engine, Terremark’s vCloud, and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

Given the growth of the cloud market and the fact that the term “cloud” has come to mean many things—from hosted web applications to fully-fledged platforms—Bitcurrent wanted to assess the current state of cloud performance.  They wanted to see if the promise of pay-as-you-go economics and elastic capacity could live up to the demands of large-scale enterprises.

As part of their testing regimen, Bitcurrent teamed up with Webmetrics, a web monitoring firm. They tested four aspects of performance across the five cloud networks. The test agents are described below:

• A simple web request, to measure the responsiveness of the system for a trivially small, static object.
• A request for a large (2 Megabyte) object, to test the network throughput.
• A request that triggered a million mathematically-intensive calculations, to test computing power.
• A request that searched 500,000 rows of a database for a string, to test the back-end I/O of the system.

The tests were executed, using the agents, from multiple locations around the world. The results of the tests can be illustrated in the diagram below.

The Rackspace Cloud performed well across all categories—responsiveness (1-pixel GIF), network throughput (2MB GIF), computing power (CPU), and I/O (database search).  While no provider was a clear winner in every category, Rackspace Cloud was in the top tier for each test. We even managed to surprise the testers on the CPU front:

“The PaaS providers did well, largely because of their shared storage model that is optimized for large data sets across many machines.  We were surprised by how well Rackspace’s cloud handled the simultaneous traffic despite being a PaaS-based solution.”

The summary of the Bitcurrent report as well as the complete report, with all the testing details, are available for download.

As committed as we are to open standards, there’s no better place for us to be at then O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention 2010. We have an extensive schedule of speaking sessions and other events. If you’re in Portland, we’d love to meet you and talk all things open source and cloud computing. Make sure to follow the talk from @rackcloud. Here’s a schedule snapshot:

The Gearman Cookbook
Eric Day, Sr. Systems Architect, The Rackspace Cloud
Cloud Computing – Monday, July 19 – 1:30 pm Location: D 139/140

Hands-on Cassandra
Eric Evans, Systems Architect, The Rackspace Cloud
Databases – Tuesday, July 20 – 1:30 pm Location: Portland 256

Cloudy Futures? The Role of Open Source in Creating Competitive Markets
Rick Clark, Project Lead, The Rackspace Cloud
Cloud Summit – Tuesday, July 20 – 3:50 pm Location: Portland Ballroom

The Debate – Open Source and the Cloud
Panel Discussion – Rick Clark, Neil Levine, Marten Mickos & James Urquhart
Cloud Summit – Tuesday, July 20 – 4:10 pm Location: Portland Ballroom

How to Build a Large, Distributed System to Operate at Scale
Will Reese, Cloud Files Architect, The Rackspace Cloud
Products & Services – Wednesday, July 21 – 10:40 am Location: E141

Using Drizzle
Eric Day, Sr. Systems Architect, The Rackspace Cloud
Databases – Wednesday, July 21 – 11:30 am Location: Portland 255

Keynote: Open Source Cloud
Lew Moorman, Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer
Keynote – Thursday, July 22nd – 10am Location: Portland Ballroom

Meet & Geek
Come Talk The Talk…If You Can Write The Code. Develop The Future With Us.
Join Racker recruiters, developers and the cloud team for free food and an open bar
from 7pm-9pm and then continue the fun with live entertainment into the night
during the Linux Fund event.

Thursday July 22, 7-9 pm
Club Barracuda
9 NW 2nd Ave (@ W Burnside)
Linux Fund event & live Band Start at 9 pm

This article was written and contributed by Adrian Cole, Senior Technical Evangelist at Opscode, Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner. Adrian is also founder of jclouds.org, a popular open source cloud framework for the Java community.

I’ve spent most of my recent life in cloud APIs. While common belief may suggest otherwise, clouds generally don’t come with a “make my IT problems disappear” button. There are a lot of tools that help you launch a predefined image of an operating system. However, stopping there leaves you with what I’d call Cloud Toys, all the drawbacks of unmanaged servers on a cool API Luckily, we don’t have to stop there. Read through this and you’ll see how you can make some serious cloud server action.

IaaS provisioning APIs such as Amazon EC2, GoGrid, vCloud, and Rackspace Cloud Servers are totally sweet. They take stress away from you: the hows of provisioning nodes and scalability concerns of doing that en mass. They use HTTP, and that is still awesome: it works over proxies and in really restricted environments such as devices or Google App Engine. Integration is easier. Software packages and policies frozen in an operating system image guarantee you a baseline state, but there’s more to it than that. How are changes managed? How do I load in my users, firewall rules, etc? While it is possible to create an image for each change, that sounds too much like work. Moreover, image construction is very hard to do portably across clouds. Say you did. Next comes head scratching about connecting the dots (Integration). Which pair of EBS volumes go with this node? Should this machine become a slave or a master? What’s the monitoring url? Without a holistic process, you’re cloud servers end up like a tricycle on a major highway with a really fancy phone. Cloud servers want to be more, and you don’t want to be stuck in vm sprawl suck.

Infrastructure as Code’s goal is to “Enable the reconstruction of the business from nothing but a source code repository, an application data backup, and bare-metal resources”. Read the book, it’s good, but here’s a hint. Provisioning is step one in at least three stages: Configuration, and Integration follow. Moving into infrastructure as code moves you from cloud toys to cloud servers. Chef and the Opscode platform do this.

Chef defines a repository for cookbooks, roles, and other metadata that define your infrastructure. Version control this repository and upload it to the Chef server or the Opscode Platform. Now, you can completely rebuild any system, or your entire infrastructure, easily, and at scale. You can even run ad-hoc queries to find what nodes are running what configuration, or who is the master! As GI Joe taught us, knowing is half the battle, right? Ok, so here’s how to connect your cloud provisioning process to Chef’s configuration and integration process. To integrate with Chef, a node needs a few things.

• Ruby and the Chef client libraries
• A run-list of roles to become at startup. Ex. hadoop-slave
• A key and url of a chef server. Ex. https://api.opscode.com/organizations/acme

Push these things onto a node, run chef, and voila! Your really cool ubuntu cloud node is now a defined and managed piece of your infrastructure! Technically running the above is easy.. just use knife. Knife is our commandline tool and uses a really cool cloud api called fog to run cloud servers. However, I’ll show you how to fish on this: Let’s recap: Cloud provisioning API gives you a node, and now you need to upload some files and run the chef client command. One way approach is: wait until the node is up, SCP the files, and use ssh to run the chef client. Pretty standard really… but… there are a couple drawbacks. Needing to SSH in implies that

1. You have to “wait around” and poll for ssh to be ready, handling all the error conditions, remembering passwords, etc.
2. SSH must be running (generally on a public ip address), and you must gain access to root through it
3. You have an SSH client or library handy
4. You can open TCP sockets that SSH uses across the network
5. Your ability to scale is no longer limited to the cloud: It is limited by your SSH process. All this work is needed for every node in the potential thousand you are firing up.

Wouldn’t you rather dodge this, and push all of that work to the provisioning cloud?  For some clouds, you can’t, as there’s no means to place files on disk outside of SSH. However, the Rackspace Cloud Servers API has a wonderful feature that makes this possible: file injection. While the file upload problem is solved, but there’s a constraint. The Cloud Servers API requires that all files are read only, and not executable. How do we run the chef client if we cannot make a file executable? I took this constraint challenge to the #chef-hacking irc channel for an extra shot in creativity. Dan “The Awesome Cron Master” DeLeo aka types: try cron I don’t know about you, but I totally missed that cron can do stuff at reboot time. Here’s the super sweet cron line that connects the provisioning system to the Opscode Platform:

@reboot (bash /etc/install-chef && /usr/bin/chef-client -j /etc/chef/first-boot.json && rm /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root)> /var/log/chef.out 2> /var/log/chef.err

Using this cron entry (or knife), you can do everything via HTTP, which works so nicely in my iPad and behind proxies and firewalls. You also get to lean on Rackspace to scale out the connection of provisioning to configuration/integration.

Rackspace attended Gigaom’s 3rd annual Structure event held in San Francisco a few weeks ago. The conference is focused on cloud computing and this year’s headline was, “Put Cloud Computing to Work.”

Lew Moorman had the opportunity to speak onstage in a fireside chat with Om Malik. Lew discusses how hosting has evolved over the last 10 years and what the role of cloud computing is in the IT world today. He goes on to discuss what companies are moving to the cloud and for what reasons. For building something new, companies are building it in the cloud. For legacy applications, companies are challenged with the question, “how do I make that switch?,” and with that challenge comes time before these legacy applications will move to the cloud – within the next decade Lew predicts. The biggest opportunity Lew sees for start ups is to address the challenge of helping businesses move onto the cloud. How can they make the cloud run more efficient for them and make cloud a seamless part of a company’s IT operations?

Click the video below to see the full interview.

gigaomtv on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

This post was written and contributed by Chloe Jackson, Senior Marketing Manager for Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner, Wavemaker.

Have you ever tried to find a really easy-to-use, open source, WYSIWYG development platform that includes direct deployment to The Rackspace Cloud right out of the box?  Yes?  Then you’re in luck.  WaveMaker just so happens to be exactly what you’re looking for!

Let us tell you a little bit more about it…

WaveMaker’s mission is to eliminate complexity in web and cloud application development so that developers everywhere can get their jobs done more quickly and with less hassle.  To that end, we have built the easiest, most intuitive cloud development platform available.  And did we mention it’s open source?

But don’t just take our word for it – WaveMaker is supported by a 15,000-strong developer community and customers like the Center For Disease Control, Macy’s and KANA. WaveMaker’s visual, drag and drop tools can flatten your Java learning curve by up to 92%!  For example, SAIC just recently used WaveMaker to cut the training time for college grads to become proficient in building Java web applications from 2 years to 2 months.

Even better, WaveMaker can eliminate over 90% of the code required to build form-driven web applications. For example, National City Bank migrated a a 26,000-line .NET application to WaveMaker, using only 330 lines of code – that’s 98% less code!

As if all that is not enough, how about slashing maintenance costs by 75%?  WaveMaker customer KANA is deploying call center software based on WaveMaker to over half of the Fortune 500. KANA expects their SaaS customers to save over 75% of their maintenance costs by using WaveMaker’s drag and drop tools to customize and extend their call center solutions without custom coding.

Oh – and did we mention that WaveMaker applications also include built-in support for multi-tenancy and elastic scaling?  WaveMaker also includes one-click database import, one-click creation of CRUD data forms, rich data entry field validation, built-in data grid pagination, auto-complete search boxes, support for single sign-on security and role-based access controls, support for all the major databases, J2EE application servers and browsers, and…the list goes on.

What’s most important, however, is that WaveMaker – like Rackspace – believes in open standards.  That means we’re not only the easiest way to build cloud applications but also the most standards-based.  WaveMaker’s studio generates plain ‘ole standard Java .war files that you can extend in any Java IDE and deploy to any Java server.  Just another way we’re trying to help eliminate application development complexity.

Try out WaveMaker’s WYSIWYG development and one-click deployment to The Rackspace Cloud, try us out online at cloud.wavemaker.com or download the desktop version at wavemaker.com/downloads.

To learn more, don’t miss the upcoming webinar. Here are the details:

Title: Build and Deploy Rackspace Cloud Applications in Minutes

Date: Thursday, July 22nd

Time: 1pm CST

Click here to sign up. Paul Ford, from Rackspace Corporate Development, is Your Connection to the Rackspace “Cloud Tools Partners” Ecosystem . To find out more about how WaveMaker and other tools can increase your productivity, satisfy your IT needs, and generally make your life easier, contact him any time at paul.ford@rackspace.com

Bret Piatt held a session on Cassandra at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference last week. He was interviewed by Matt Slocum while there and addresses the following questions:

• How does Cassandra differ from traditional relational databases?
• What types of sites and services work best with Cassandra?
• Is there a tipping point for a site or service moving to Cassandra?
• Why are open standards so important for cloud computing?
• Will we get to the point where businesses will rely on cloud resources instead of building out their own infrastructure?

Click below to see the full interview:

Rackspace was recently listed as a “Champion” in Info-Tech Research Group’s Cloud Infrastructure vendor landscape.  Info Tech Research Group’s vendor landscape report provides a detailed, head-to-head, analytical comparison of products in a given market. Rackspace was one of nine vendors assessed in the recent vendor landscape report assessment entitled “Select the Right Cloud Infrastructure Service Partner.”

This report is designed to recognize vendors that provide quality products and services to their clients, and therefore is a tool that can help enterprise IT decision-makers identify a short list of vendors for their IT programs. The landscape report assesses each cloud vendor in six categories including; features, affordability, usability, vendor viability, geographic presence and support to compute a ranking for each vendor.

The Info-Tech Research Group’s latest vendor landscape report for the category of Cloud Infrastructure is available through the company at www.infotech.com.

Click here to read the full press release here.

When making the switch to the Cloud, you want to have a conversation with someone who knows what they are talking about without being overwhelmed with all their technicalities, right? That’s our Cloud Expert team. They can talk all things Cloud Computing but they each have fun, unique personalities that will make you feel comfortable. One of our Cloud Experts has a creative side to him and sketched each of his teammates. Take a look:

Don’t they look like a fun group of people? They are all ready to answer your Cloud questions, so give them a call or hop into live chat anytime.

This post was written and contributed by John Willis, VP of Training & Services for Opscode, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.

This is a special blog article for me today.  Nearly three years ago I started hosting my blog on what was then called Mosso (now called Cloud Sites).  At that time Lew Moorman–now President, Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer–was just another cloud enthusiast like me. He generously gave me a free account to test out the Rackspace cloud offering.  In fact my first <put name here> effect happened soon after and I wrote this blog article commenting on how great Rackspace was for elasticity.  Since then I have maintained a great relationship with the Rackspace folk, doing Cloud Café podcasts and prophetalizing their great services.

When our Rackspace friends asked us to write a blog article in regards to our limited beta release of the Opscode Platform, I was thrilled.  Being a fan of Rackspace and being extremely excited about our “Opscode Platform“ offering I thought this was a great opportunity to explain why our Opscode Platform announcement with Rackspace is so important.

I have been waiting for this set of events for decades (true ephemeral infrastructure – cloud – and infrastructure automation).  I often joke with people saying: “Opscode is the first real job I have had in 30 years.”  The truth is that I have been an operations junkie for thirty years waiting for the rubber to actually meet the road.  Working for Opscode and solving huge infrastructure at scale problems and working with a great cloud offering like Rackspace is a dream come true (too bad I had to wait 3 decades for this to happen).

Last year I fell in love with Chef, the open source project developed by Opscode. I knew then that I needed to lobby Adam Jacob, Opscode CTO and Jesse Robbins, CEO to join their team. For thirty years I have been hearing promises from large vendors with phrases like Infrastructure Automation, Autonomics, Policy Based Orchestration–however I had never seen the correct tools and infrastructures to provide the framework for these ideas.  About six months ago after relentlessly pestering Adam and Jesse they finally gave in and made me the VP of Services and Training.

When people ask me why I am so excited about working for this Opscode including a world class team -  I usually give them two main reasons.  First, I believe that open source frameworks, like Chef, for configuration management and systems integration has been a long unanswered need–taking one-off scripts and socializing them through the enterprise has been needed for a long time, most any sysadmin can tell you that’s a problem.  Second, running configuration management as a hosted service is the right way to manage infrastructure in 2010 and beyond and consistent with the adoption of fully hosted infrastructure in the cloud. I like, Rachel Chalmers’, an industry analyst at The 451 Group, analogy “Itʼs [Opscode] the salesforce.com of configuration management.”

With the permission of my good friend Mark Hinkle at Socializedsoftware.com I am going to use some of his excellent commentary about Opscode and Chef and how we can solve the current challenges of server configuration…

____________________________________________________________________________

The Challenges of Server Configuration

A large part of configuring infrastructure is repetitive and time consuming. Many sysadmins rely on their own scripts to help manage the process but it’s still a one-off for each administrator and their individual knowledge seldom if ever gets institutionalized throughout the entire organization.

Having a framework for maintaining configuration data is important. Configuration scripts are often authored as shell scripts or Perl or even Python but are seldom maintained or used beyond the original author. Some technologies use plugins that could be used to abstract configuration variables; users and systems then shared among users of the technology but plugins are often specific to a given technology and non-transferable.

Despite the breadth of this problem there are relatively few solutions that can easily be consumed by medium-sized enterprises outside of large management suites available from the Big Four (HP, IBM, CA and BMC). The independent software vendors have all been consumed by bigger less focused organizations including Opsware (acquired by HP), Bladelogic (acquired by BMC) and Configuresoft (acquired by VMware). In my opinion there is no real leader in this space.

Opscode CEO, Jesse Robbins, notes in his experience maintaining availability as a top ops guy and “master of disaster” at Amazon.com he had no access to these tools, they were simply sold in a way that was inconsistent with the way he evaluated and consumed products and services.  Opscode, a relatively new company develops the open source Chef project, which automates IT management via a client-server platform.

Opscode’s approach to server configuration challenges is to use recipes written in Ruby, the chef domain specific language (DSL). Then these cookbooks can be executed securely by the Chef client-server architecture and finally Chef is available as open source software to download, use and redistribute. In a nutshell Opscode met the following criteria is what interested me about their technology, which is relatively easy to use, share configuration recipes and consume.

Chef, The Open Source Project

Chef is a systems integration framework released under the Apache License Version 2.0.  Chef, can manage servers by writing code in Ruby stored in configuration recipes called cookbooks. Chef can integrate with existing infrastructure like LDAP via libraries using arbitrary Ruby code, either to extend Chef’s or to implement custom classes. Users can also configure applications that have dependencies on other parts of the infrastructure like databases and discern that information via the Chef server. However, I like Robbins’ description of Chef — a sysadmin robot performing configuration tasks automatically and much more quickly than a single admin could ever hope to.

Though Chef was only released on January 15t, 2009 it has gotten rapid adoption and gained a large number of contributors. According to the Opscode wiki there are 157 approved contributors to Opscode projects and well over 20 companies. Beyond that the #chef IRC channel is typically attended by over 100 users and Opscode staff, signs of a healthy, growing open source community.

Opscode, The Platform

The Opscode Platform is the commercial offering from Opscode Inc. It is a centrally managed data store hosted by Opscode into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and more delivered as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This data on the Opscode Platform can be accessed and becomes useful in the following ways:

• Search-based Automation: All the data collected by the Opscode platform is indexed and searchable. Users can dynamically query this data from within Chef recipes to configure services that require complex configuration.
• Role-based Access Control: The data index is has an access control system enabling administrators to centrally manage the level of infrastructure access.
• Portability: The data stored on the Opscode Platform serves as a virtual blueprint of a given infrastructure, making it much easier to create perfect clones of a production environment.

The Opscode Platform is in a free beta release for the next 60 days. After the trial period, participants can manage up to 20 nodes on the Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node. Pricing and availability information is available on the Opscode website.

Opscode, The Company
Opscode recently announced that the close of an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures (who also was an investor in BladLogic before it was acquired by BMC) and includes a follow-on investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson(DFJ) whose other open source investments include SugarCRM and Fonality. DFJ led Opscode’s Series A round of funding of $2.5 million, bringing the total amount raised for the company to $13.5 million, a sizable amount of capital to bring this technology to market.

Opscode is also seeing good adoption of Chef, not only do they have a few thousand active users on their wiki plus chef is currently in production at numerous top websites, including 37Signals, Etsy, IGN Entertainment, Scribd, and Wikia. Not only are web jockeys using chef but other large infrastructure providers are contributing to the project. Engine Yard, Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware have signed on to contribute to the project. They are even being very public about it as seen in this endorsement:

“We are excited about the open source contributions the Springsource Division of VMware has made to Opscode Chef.” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Springsource Management Products at VMware. “Chef is an important tool for automating infrastructure management and we look forward to its continued growth and success.”

Making Sysadmins into Superheroes

Opscode Chef is a hugely powerful tool that can greatly amplify the knowledge an effectiveness of systems administrators by automating a significant number of their maintenance tasks, improving their productivity and allowing them to focus on higher value tasks. Not only does Chef provide a framework for building systems but repairing them, keeping availability high and time to resolution low. This gives IT professionals a lot of leverage in getting their tasks done, allowing them to solve a problem once and then automate the process going forward. In other words Chef can turn systems administrators into super heroes by vastly improving their productivity and overall quality of service.

The need that Opscode addresses can be filled to some degree through other software. Cfengine, Puppet and bcfg2 are all open source software solutions that address server configuration needs and have been around for some time. As mentioned above there is also large management suites that handle the same problems though they are expensive and have their own limitations. What is unique about Opscode approach is that they offer a robust fully featured software platform as open source and a commercial offering that has full compatibility with the open source project.

This is somewhat unique as many commercial open source projects have a specific feature set that are only available to their enterprise customers. In a conversation with Opscode VP of Service, John M. Willis we discussed those users who are not interested in the Opscode platform but still want commercial support. He said that Opscode is building a select high-quality partner network that can handle these requests. Most recently Opscode has announced a partnership http://www.opscode.com/blog/2010/06/14/press-release-opscode-partners-with-dto-solutions/ with DTO Solutions who employ members of the Control Tier project http://controltier.org/wiki/Main_Page and is a big proponent of the DevOps approach to infrastructure management. Other partners will soon be onboard as well.

I am very much a fan of Opscode and their approach though my description probably doesn’t do it justice. Theoretically, a systems administrator who successfully implements automation tools such as Opscode can improve not only their productivity but the uptime of servers by improving speed to resolution for outages.  Opscode has a great opportunity thanks to a talented team, a novel go-to-market plan and a real need for these types of tools among IT professionals.

When I mention to developers that I work at Rackspace and we are supporters of Cassandra, a common response I get is “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to look into that as well as CouchDB and MongoDB.  I should know more about those.”  I agree.

At South by Southwest Interactive, Rackspace sponsored the InfoChimps Data Cluster Meetup and a “Non-Relational Database Smackdown” to help developers evaluate the costs and benefits of Cassandra, CouchDB and MongoDB.  This panel features Rackspace’s own Stu Hood, Wynn Netherland of The ChangeLog, and Jan Lehnhardt from CouchDB.  The panel also stars a surprise guest Werner Vogels, who comes from another hosting company that will remain nameless here.  He is discussing the virtues of their own database, SimpleDB.

Rackspace supports an open cloud with both our dollars and our sweat.  We believe customers should be able to use a scalable “NoSQL” database across providers without the fear of vendor lock-in, similar to how MySQL is used across the web today.

Bookmark or take about 45 minutes out of your day to watch this video both praising and panning various NoSQL alternatives, and please share what you think the right solution is in the comments.

enStratus™, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner,  is a cloud infrastructure management platform for deploying and managing enterprise-class applications in the cloud. enStratus has a multi-cloud architecture that focuses on security and high availability for mission-critical web applications. Here’s a glimpse of what they deliver:

Highest Level of Security

• Keep your authentication and encryption credentials off of your public cloud servers except when they are needed to perform vital functions through their patent-pending security architecture.
• Ability to enforce two-factor authentication into cloud servers.

Up to Six 9’s Reliability

• Automatically manages multiple levels of backups and ‘self-healing’ recovery system for load balancers, application servers, and databases.
• Define your deployment architecture, including desired availability levels, security profile, auto-scaling, and auto-recovery parameters.

Easy To Use Rackspace Cloud Management

• Easy to use web console to interface with Rackspace Cloud including file directories.
• Easily manage servers, security groups, machine images and more.
• Support for Rackspace Cloud servers, images, Cloud Files, and Rackspace CDNLe.

Flexibility

• Works with any application using any architecture on any operating system supported by the Rackspace Cloud.
• Support for web services calls and command-line utilities for managing your applications.
• User management across multiple accounts and departments.

To learn more about enStratus, sign up for their webinar, Wed June 30th at 1pm. In this webinar, George Reese, CTO of enStratus, will demonstrate how to:

• Add role-based security to limit the launching, pausing or deleting of your cloud infrastructure
• Incorporate advanced security including key management, encryption, and auditing
• Add financial controls such as billing codes, quotas and reporting
• Auto scale your environment to ensure resources match demand
• Deploy auto recovery and automated backups to meet service level requirements

Details of Webinar

Date: Wed, June 30th

Time: 1pm CST

Click here to sign up. Paul Ford, from Rackspace Corporate Development, is Your Connection to the Rackspace “Cloud Tools Partners” Ecosystem . To find out more about how WaveMaker and other tools can increase your productivity, satisfy your IT needs, and generally make your life easier, contact him any time at paul.ford@rackspace.com

This post was written and contributed by the Continuent team, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.

Continuous data availability means having your data available when and where you need with consistently fast response times. This is the key requirement for databases operating in today’s 24 x 7 environments. Swift changes in database technology and data processing as a whole have made ensuring continuous data availability quite challenging. Large data volumes, high numbers of users, and always-on operation raise the bar for application developers as well as database administrators. The emergence of disruptive but highly economical open source technologies is both an opportunity as well as another potential headache. There is the universal need to cut costs and process data more efficiently.

Like many successful businesses, you probably started out using an open-source database (MySQL, PostgreSQL) platform because the cost of entry was extremely low, or even zero.  Based on our experience of providing solutions to companies similar to yours you are either currently, or soon will, experience increasingly higher costs to maintain your current MySQL based database infrastructure due to the added complexity, need for additional support and unique development requirements.  You may even find yourself considering an expensive and complex transition to a commercial database system because you simply cannot scale, manage your open-source based infrastructure or find the talent to develop and integrate the functionality you need. If the above sounds like you, then looking at Continuent’s Tungsten solution could be for you!

Five9, a fast growing virtual call center software provider and customer of ours, agrees:

“Based on the work Continuent has been doing for Five9 – I would highly recommend their company and expertise.” Jim Dvorkin, CTO, Five9.

Continuent offers a unique solution that helps you manage data cost efficiently and scale to larger more complex environments while still meeting customer or internal SLAs, help manage costs and, most importantly, while preserving your investment in your infrastructure.
Our solutions allow you to:

• Automatic failover upon master failure by automatically promoting one of the slaves as a new master
• Something about read/write splitting, performance increase using load built in load balancing
• Perform zero-downtime maintenance and upgrades to handle schema changes as well as software and hardware migrations without service interruptions
• Manage complex, multi-site database topologies using our simple and intuitive management tools
• Handle·   Handle customer data for multi-tenant applications that are typical of software-as-a-service businesses
• Replicate data across multiple applications in complex environments – fast parallel replication which surpasses capability of native MySQL replication
• Focus your developers on advancing the capabilities of your applications rather wasting 100’s of hours developing and managing in-house built middleware and infrastructure

In the next few weeks Continuent will host a webinar to explain just how they can manage complex open source database environments.

We know database clusters can solve a host of problems ranging from improving database uptime to increasing performance but, as stated above, existing database management technology ranges from complicated to downright scary. Tungsten is returning database clustering to helping you handle the fundamentals: manage, find and copy data so you can have it all in a solution that you can easily install and operate.

In the webinar we will discuss the basic management procedures for Tungsten, including:

• the basic overview of why clustering is important
• understanding the basic components and what they do for you
• how these components deliver speed and flexibility
• how to manage expansion
• handling server failures and maintenance operations
• recovering from failures

Details of webinar

Date: Thursday, July 15th

Time: 1pm CST

Click here to sign up.

One of the most requested features from our Cloud Servers customers is the ability to save a server image to Cloud Files.  Snapshots as we call them facilitate the de-coupling of the server image from the server instance. We are happy to announce we are now rolling out this functionality to many of our customers. And since Cloud Files has nearly unlimited storage, there is no limit to the number of Snapshots you can store in your account.

Backups On-Demand or Scheduled – You Choose

Here at Rackspace, we offer two types of saved server images:

•    Snapshots are server images of a server instance offered on-demand.

•    Backups are server images that are scheduled to occur at predetermined intervals.

Cloud Servers Snapshots enable customers to create new on-demand images, move existing images to Cloud Files, and restore a server – or create as many news ones as needed – from a single server image with the click of a button.  In other words, you can create your own “custom” image, store it in Cloud Files and utilize the benefits persistent storage provides. Your image will always be there when you need it since the server image is no longer tied to the server instance. Previously, when you deleted your server instance, the saved server image was also deleted.  The only charges for these Snapshots are standard Cloud Files usage charges of $0.15/GB per month.

Snapshot Feature released to DFW Cloud Servers Customers Only

As mentioned above, Cloud Servers Snapshots to Cloud Files are now available for most customers with Cloud Servers in our DFW data center.  We are continuing to roll out this feature to DFW Cloud Servers customers over the next couple of weeks. Customers with Cloud Servers in our Chicago (ORD) datacenter will be enabled over the next two months when Cloud Files is fully deployed within that datacenter.

Are you a Cloud Server customer with instances in DFW and want to see how to get started with snapshots? Take a peak at this short demo on how to enable snapshots in our control panel.

We’re very excited about this feature, as it’s the first feature at Rackspace that has two Cloud products working together to provide value to our customers.  We’re not stopping here. Stay tuned.