Rackspace.html



Rackspace US, Inc.

Type	Public Company (NYSE: RAX)
Founded	1998
Headquarters	9725 Datapoint Drive, San Antonio, TX 78229
Key people	Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf, Patrick Condon, Co-Founders Morris Miller, Graham Weston, Executive Chairman Lanham Napier, President, CEO
Industry	Hosting
Website	http://www.rackspace.com

Rackspace US, Inc. (dba Rackspace) is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands¹ and data centers operating in Texas, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008. A subsidiary of Rackspace, Mailtrust, operates in Blacksburg, VA.

Rackspace's support ideology - termed Fanatical Support - and team structures involve all "Rackers" (employees).

History

In 1996, Richard Yoo started a small ISP out of his garage apartment called Cymitar Network Systems in San Antonio, Texas. Quickly, this company began to provide application development work, in addition to basic internet access and web hosting. In 1997, Yoo brought on Dirk Elmendorf and the company formally began to develop internet applications as its primary business and a new company was formed called Cymitar Technology Group. As Cymitar Technology Group grew, Patrick Condon was recruited from California and joined the team in 1998. Coincidentally, all three were students at one time at Trinity University in San Antonio.

The pre-2008 Rackspace Logo

Although they began as application developers for end-users, they found that most companies didn't know how to host their applications, or didn't want to be involved in the hosting. They wanted to keep their focus on the application development - not the hosting - but they were unable find an opportunity to outsource the hosting work. Eventually, the three men realized that it would be better to make a product out of the hosting need, and launch it as a company. Rackspace was created and launched in October 1998 with Richard Yoo as its CEO. The beginnings of Rackspace's Fanatical Support started once Rackspace realized that no company at the time could fulfill their unique requirements. Most companies focused on the technology end of hosting, but much less on service and support. ² On March 28, 2000, Rackspace received funding through Sequoia Capital. ³

In January 2008, Rackspace went through a rebranding and changed from "Rackspace Managed Hosting" to simply "Rackspace". The company's tagline became "Experience Fanatical Support" rather than the older "Managed Servers Backed By Fanatical Support". The new logo and service marks keep the same colors as the original logo, but the overall design changed drastically.

Business model

Rackspace has two main service level segments: Managed and Intensive. Both service levels receive support via the usual means - e-mail, telephone, and ticket systems - but they are designed to fit the needs of different businesses.

The Managed support level consists of "on-demand" support where proactive services are provided, but the customer is welcome to contact Rackspace when they need additional assistance.

The Intensive support level consists of "proactive" support where many proactive services are provided, and customers receive additional consultations about their server configuration. Highly customized implementations generally fall under this level of support.

Some services and products are only available for certain support levels. ⁴

Involvement with other companies

Rackspace launched ServerBeach in San Antonio in January 2003 as a lower-cost alternative for dedicated servers designed for technology hobbyists who want flexibility and reliability. Richard Yoo was a catalyst in the startup of ServerBeach. A bandwidth and colocation provider, Peer 1 Network, purchased ServerBeach in October 2004 for $7.5 Million. ⁵

Mosso Inc. launched their shared, clustered hosting environment called The Hosting System with the support of Rackspace in October 2006. The company was founded by two former Rackspace employees: Todd Morey and Jonathan Bryce. ⁶

On October 1, 2007, Rackspace acquired Webmail.us, a private e-mail hosting firm located in Blacksburg, VA.

Recent news

Rackspace has made plans to move their headquarters from a building once occupied by Datapoint Corporation to the unoccupied Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, Texas. Rackspace's Chairman, Graham Weston, owned the Montgomery Ward building in the mall until 2006, when it was sold to a developer. The city of Windcrest is purchasing 111 acres (0.45 km²) south of the mall to create a residential and retail complex. ⁷

The Fortune Magazine's "Top 100 Best Companies to Work For 2008" placed Rackspace as #32 the first year that Rackspace applied for consideration. The company was praised for its transparency. Regular "Open Book" meetings are held where the top level leaders share in-depth financial information with all employees. ⁸

On August 8, 2008, Rackspace opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RAX” after its initial public offering (IPO) in which it raised $187.5 million⁹. The initial public offering included 15,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $12.50 per share.¹⁰ Unfortunately, the IPO did not do well in the public market and lost about 20% of its initial price almost immediately.¹¹

Downtime

Rackspace claims to have a "Zero-Downtime Network" with a 100% uptime guarantee.¹²

At around 7:40pm CST November 12, 2007, Rackspace experienced an outage for some of their customers, e.g. 37 signals[1][2].

Without notifying us the utility providers cut power, and at that exact moment we were 15 minutes into cycling up the data center’s chillers. Our back up generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again—a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could irreparably damage customers’ servers and devices. We made the decision to gradually pull servers offline before that would happen. And I know we made the right decision, even if it was a hard one to make.

From the same report:

A truck driver because of a medical condition drove into a power transformer in Dallas, Texas, this evening, causing it to explode. That explosion caused a major power disruption, and the power company in response cut power, which ultimately and took down Rackspace, our hosting company’s Dallas/Fort Worth based data center. Rackspace is based in San Antonio. This is the second time in less than a week that they have had power issues. It was later reported that the truck driver made an illegal pass, that caused him to jump the embankment crashing into the generators located outside the data center.

Acquisitions

On October 22nd 2008 Rackspace announced that it was purchasing cloud storage provider JungleDisk and VPS provider SliceHost

Worldwide/EMEA

The company has clients worldwide, and an EMEA (Europe, Middle-East & Africa) division; which includes offices and data centres in the USA, United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong.

Rackspace is registered in the UK as Rackspace Ltd., and employs around 400 people, at two offices (in Uxbridge, Middlesex) and three data centres (in and around London) as of 2008. The company opened a fourth UK data centre in Slough, Berkshire in the second quarter of 2008. Rackspace UK has appeared in The Sunday Times best companies awards 2007, and was in the top 50 UK workplaces as seen in the Financial Times.

A few well-known large organisations using Rackspaces UK hosting services include OnSpeed, Confused.com, The Army, Vue, Renault and online publication The Register.

Rackspace Benelux in Amsterdam opened its offices in October 2007. It has won several high-profile customers such as LogicaCMG, Exact Software and CapGemini.

See also

• Mosso (cloud computing) - Rackspace Cloud Hosting

References

External links

• Rackspace Website
• Rackspace Hosting EMEA
• Careers
• Mosso
• MailTrust