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San Antonio is known for its TexMex and margaritas, yet something that many people overlook is our technology scene. This is quickly changing.

Mashable published an infographic by Acuity Group that shows San Antonio as one of the strongest markets for technology hiring in 2012. The Alamo City is turning into a tech hotbed; not only is Rackspace’s Corporate Headquarters located here, but San Antonio is also home to TechStars Cloud (a startup incubator) along with Geekdom (a collaborative workspace for Entrepreneurs, Technologists, Developers and Makers).

Better yet, Rackspace was recently ranked on Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to work for and number three on that list for job growth. If you are looking for a new job in technology, stop by the Racker Talent website to look at job postings and to find out more about Rackers and our culture. Additionally, if you have any questions about San Antonio, feel free to post them here.

While you can surely “Remember the Alamo!” don’t forget that San Antonio is one of the strongest markets for technology hiring in the coming year.

The game industry today offers plenty of development engines to choose from. Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows all devices to plug into the same game server in real time. Almost 69 million Americans will be playing social games in 2012, according to analysis firm eMarketer. Within the Rackspace Startup Program there are several companies that cater to social games, the new buzz word in the industry, but it’s limited to device specific social play. To Digital Harmony Games, that’s not social at all. That’s just online play with social features, stuck in its own device.

“Games are rapidly moving into the mobile space, delivering content directly to the consumer.  While multiplayer games are just hitting the surface, mobile games should be platform agnostic, allowing a player to connect to any mobile device despite the carrier, distributor, or the platform,” says Keren Kang, Co-founder and COO, on why she and Jeff Lujan, CEO and Co-founder, launched Digital Harmony Games as part of the Austin Technology Incubator’s Landing Pad Program. “We’re a developer of B2B real time, cross-platform connective technology ‘Harmony Tech’ with over 50 years of collective experience in the industry and the social games to exploit that technology.”

“The mobile, tablet and browser space (gaming or not) is headed in the cross-platform connective era. Today this is available in a limited, turn-based capacity, reliant on a user waiting for another user to respond. In this way, the turn-based connectivity restricts socializing to a ‘wait-for-a-reply’ type of experience rather than real time voice or keyboard chatting. To us, that’s not social. That’s just a text message,” explains Keren. “We are developing a middleware network solution that enables any and all developers the ability to connect all smart phone, tablet, and browser platforms into the same environment.”

Digital Harmony Games chose to use Rackspace Managed Cloud to build its infrastructure. “Jeff and I have been using Rackspace since our last company, which developed massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG’s).  The service, location, and cost are the best around. The pros: location, customer service, Cloud capabilities, exchange server, uptime, CDN Connect-ability.  The cons: email spam, but that gets filtered in the quarantine,” says Kang. “We’re complete nerds that want to make cool things. Rackspace Managed Cloud allows us to focus on our passions. We’re developing two games simultaneously, have become an official partner with leading US distributer TapJoy, in negotiations for publishing our games with several top tier publishers, and looking to raise our full series A funding.”

Digital Harmony’s patent pending ‘Harmony Tech’ paired with their cross-platform designed games, is set to revolutionize the social games space while adding value to all industries that utilize mobile, browser and tablet devices. Congratulations to Digital Harmony Games and its pursuit to revolutionize the social games space.

The Rackspace Startup Program strives to add value to a startups dream by offering Managed Cloud to allow entrepreneurs to focus on development of the product and let Rackspace manage their Cloud. Contact the Space Cowboys today to find out how Rackspace Managed Cloud can help make your startup dream a reality.

Recently, the General Services Administration (GSA) solicited bids to take care of their massive email system. They embarked on a process many businesses are familiar with – finding the right fit of features, security, and cost to support their users. The GSA selected hosted email to serve remote offices, streamline administration, and reduce future investments. Though you may not have the same concerns as a government agency, choosing the right business email system to accommodate users, fit the budget, and scale with growth is critical. We’ll help you narrow it down to the most important criteria consider when choosing an email system.

Industry Standards: Because a coffee shop isn’t bound by the same industry or government regulation as a law firm, industry standards are a major factor in your choice. This drives security and deployment options as HIPAA, FINRA, and other industry-specific regulations directly address email administration and availability.

Support Resources: Tomorrow you find that all of the invoice emails are bouncing, what would you do? If your IT staff lacks the experience or bandwidth to manage the complexities of an email system, like spam/virus control, storage, and troubleshooting, you could be down for days. With some hosted or free email options, support limitations may hamper your ability to quickly resolve issues.

Financial Investment: With competing business priorities, sinking thousands into hardware and software isn’t always practical. As attractive as an on-site email deployment with dedicated staff looks, typically, the cost outweighs the benefit when dollars could be better spent on marketing or product development to grow the business.

Business Use: An outage in an office that uses email infrequently has a different impact than in an office relying on system-generated emails from a website or accounting system to process orders. Understand the relationship between email and other systems to determine how critical email is to business operations.

Office Structure: If your business utilizes remote employees or employees that move between locations, your email needs to accommodate access. How messages are synced to other devices and locations governs how quickly users can access messages and respond to information.

Mobile Use: Even if you don’t officially support employees’ smartphones and tablets, that doesn’t mean they aren’t using them as a convenient way to stay in touch with the office. Know the difference between offering access to a mobile browser to check email and having a synced mobile email app with calendar, contact list, and folder access.

Once you’ve reviewed these criteria, you’ll be ready to decide between the convenience of a hosted email solution, an investment in an on-site solution, or a hybrid of the two. If you decide, like the GSA, to host your email, check out our planning tools to help you make the switch or contact us to discuss your options.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Alexander Negrash, Marketing Manager at CloudBerry Lab, a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner.  CloudBerry Lab provides file manager and backup utility in order to help Rackspace users leverage the cloud storage (Cloud Files).

CloudBerry Explorer freeware is an FTP-like file manager that allows you to connect to any number of Rackspace accounts directly and manage containers and files. With CloudBerry Explorer, Rackspace Cloud Files become an extension to your local storage. You are no longer limited to the classic data storage on your local drive(s). With CloudBerry Explorer, you can move files to Cloud Files just as easily as managing them on your local drive(s). You can browse, create, and delete files as well as synchronize folders on your PC and cloud storage and more.

We are constantly developing the program and we will add features such as URLs generation (file sharing) and Capacity Reports (storage space tracker) . Besides we will also add object metadata and ACL editor.

For those who don’t need advanced file management with CloudBerry Explorer freeware, we are about to release CloudBerry Drive. This application is designed to expose Cloud Files storage as a local disk. With such approach files on the cloud can be managed the way as if they were stored locally. Sign up to get the first release of CloudBerry Drive.

Another way to leverage Cloud Files is to use it as online backup storage . We are also about to update our online backup product to support Rackspace. CloudBerry Backup comes with a solid set of features such as real-time backup and block level updates and helps automated data backup to Rackspace Cloud Files. CloudBerry Backup allows having a full control over the backup process. In addition to that backup data can be encrypted and compressed before sending to the cloud. Combination of a standalone program and Cloud Files storage will provide the true security to Rackspace users.

So there are two ways Rackspace users can leverage Cloud Files with CloudBerry Lab tools: (1) file management with CloudBerry Explorer and CloudBerry Drive (coming soon) and (2) automated online backup to Cloud Files with CloudBerry Backup (Cloud Files support will also arrive shortly).

CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU.  How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find.  If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

The interesting thing about disruption is that when it occur there are both opportunities and threats – opportunities for those who are prepared to stand on he edge of whatever the disruption is, and threats for those unable or unwilling to adapt. As I posted the other day, Cloud Computing is fundamentally changing the shape of the IT job. It’s undeniably disruptive to the IT industry, but this disruption extends beyond simply a threat/opportunity vector for IT, it effects more general roles as well.

Wanted Analytics, a real time business intelligence company, recently posted some statistics round the hiring for cloud computing skills. They found that recruiters, over a 90 day period, posted over 10000 online job ads that included a requirement for cloud computing skills – that’s 61% more than he same period a year ago. The graph below shows this growth.

The interesting thing here though is that these aren’t all in technical roles – there’s  bunch of marketing and sales roles, along with customer service and even cargo and freight agent positions that are all demanding a competency in cloud. It’s kind of analogous to typewriters. It used to be that only people who were looking for jobs in a typing pool needed to know how to type. Nowadays pretty much everyone needs some typing skills as a core competency for their role – so to with cloud skills. That’s our reason for creating the CloudU program, and even more so the CloudU certificate – they’re an attempt to give people an entry level introduction to Cloud Computing, something to whet their appetite and to give them a grounding.

Life is about ongoing skill-building. I’m a big fan of lifelong learning and the great thing about the disruption coming from cloud computing is that it means there is a real impetus to build skills in this particular area, and those skills in turn will make people more valuable to current and prospective employers. Feedback from course participants (and we’ve now had nearly 1500 people sign up for the certificate and going on 300 graduate) is that what we’re doing is on the right track. As recent graduate Melissa Huebener says;

Cloud is the future of technology. This Certification serves a springboard for continuing education in this area. It supplies a wonderful indication to employers that I am willing to learn, change and grow in my career as technology advances forward.

We’re also getting great feedback from other educators. Steve Mallard from the Tennessee Technology Center wrote an unsolicited email thanking us for the program and said that;

CloudU is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn about Cloud Computing.   As an instructor of information technology, the certificate provides a great learning tool for the planning, deployment and  logistics behind cloud computing.

And without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, someone also pointed out to us recently that we’ve been named one of the top 10 Cloud certifications in the industry – that’s pretty awesome praise!

Top 10 Cloud Computing Certifications

View more presentations from Glen Roberts

CloudU is an exciting development and one that I’m really proud to be involved with – we’d love to have you join in the discussion!

Typically, system breaches that make news are massive attacks netting volumes of data from big name companies. However, research suggests that attacks on small-to-medium sized businesses are rising. Why? Because smaller organizations are ripe with security holes that make it easier for the bad guys to get in and wreak havoc on system operations, steal client lists, even access sensitive data like credit card and social security numbers. Not in the cloud. In the cloud, you’re better protected from malicious threats with multi-layered protection and IT security specialists whose only focus is maintaining and monitoring the fidelity of systems. The Cloud Avengers are all too familiar with the scourge of hackers. Watch as they bring a strong line of defense to shut down hackers before they infiltrate the system and let our IT pro get back to lunch.

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Stay tuned tomorrow to find out what Cloud Avengers do to sinister service contracts. Check out more adventures from Cloud Avengers below:

Cloud Avengers Save the Day with Cloud Files
Cloud Avengers Knock Out System Crashes
Cloud Avengers Annihilate Software Bugs
Cloud Avengers Free the Server Room
Website Traffic Cleared by Cloud Avengers
Cloud Avengers Think Small for Data Storage

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Many times we know a small business in need of recommendations and business help. Business owners almost always ask, “Am I the most efficient and profitable company I can be?” Perhaps they are a one or two employee shop and often wonder, “What tools  can I use to help determine these cost-saving opportunities?” As businesses grow and mature, these are often questions we see in the Rackspace Startup Program and we love sharing how one startup can truly help another.

If you own a small business and are looking to grow, Profitably may be the startup with just the solution for you! Founded in 2010 by Adam Neary, Francis Hwang, and Chad Pugh, Profitably now boats 6 employees and has been able to raise both seed and Series A funding while calling General Assembly in NYC home.

Think of a web application that is able to read your QuickBooks data, analyze that information and then make business recommendations for improvement. The application provides prioritized next steps and recommendations, all while offering the small business owner the real time analytics to implement that assessment and put those recommendations into action.

The beauty of Profitably is the manner in which this 18-month old company boasts the tools necessary to help your business decrease expenditures and increase profits. Francis Hwang, CTO, attributes it to Rackspace Cloud hosting and the staging and production environments on which Profitably is built. Hwang shares, “Rackspace helps us iterate quickly and deliver customer value more quickly, so it’s great!”

Think of the possibilities, as a small business, are you switching vendors or suppliers? Perhaps you are negotiating new contracts and need to recognize areas of excess. Profitably can make your small business the most successful it’s ever been.  And it when it comes to success, there is no better place for startups to begin than with the Rackspace Startup Program.

Partnering with Rackspace brings startups and small businesses the Cloud Computing resources and service needed to grow.  Want to find out how your startup can become part of the Rackspace Startup Program?  Contact us today.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Fred van den Bosch at Librato, Inc., a Rackspace Cloud Tools Partner. Librato is the creator of Metrics, a time series data platform that provides uniform monitoring and alerting for your operation.

Would you consider building your own Database Management System? Probably not. While talking with our Silverline customers, the majority of which are SaaS or PaaS providers, we concluded that the same should apply for the management of time-series data. This is what we heard over and over:

● They want to “measure everything” in their operation that can alert them of unusual events and help them find and fix the root cause of problems. Many of the use a continuous deployment methodology, which makes it even more important for them to detect and fix problems as early as possible

● In order to measure everything, they need to deploy multiple tools, each with their own repository, user interface, event handling, and installation requirements. On top of that, they need to monitor metrics that are specific to their environment and need to build custom tools for collecting, storing, visualizing and acting on that data. All of this adds to their workload, but –more importantly – makes it difficult to correlate data from different sources and do root cause analysis.

A time-series data management platform would allow the developers of monitoring tools to use their expertise to monitor all important data, while providing DevOps and operations teams with a uniform environment for storage, visualization, correlation and alerting.

That’s why we built Metrics, a time series data management platform, delivered as a service, and built from the ground up with an “API first” approach. That’s distinctly different from monitoring services that provide you with a “canned” solution for monitoring a specific set of metrics, sometimes with the option to add some custom metrics.

The Metrics platform uncouples the metrics collection from the storage, analysis and alerting, giving DevOps and operations staff the freedom to choose any combination of open source, commercial or custom collection tools and allowing application developers to instrument their applications in the most optimal fashion.

Metrics also allows you to programmatically create user accounts and transparently add users to the Metrics platform. This means that if you’re an IaaS, SaaS or PaaS provider and want to provide your users with the ability to monitor their use of your service, you can use Metrics to do so by integrating it at whatever level best fits your needs: data repository, instruments for your own dashboards, or complete dashboards.

To further ease the adoption of Metrics, we’re building a community and ecosystem with tools and applications that customers can use to monitor and manage their cloud and data center infrastructures. In other (non IT) markets we’ll work with partners who use Metrics as a platform for solutions they provide to their customers.

If this sounds appealing, give Metrics a try; we have an unlimited, 30 day free trial.

You’re watching the big game; your favorite player shoots the ball, and…nothing. That’s what happened to University of Connecticut women’s basketball fans last year when Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network’s (CPBN) servers buckled under unexpectedly heavy traffic while broadcasting an intense, live game online. Because alumni and fans depend on the feed to watch games from all over the world, CPBN quickly contacted Rackspace to put technology in place to prevent a repeat of that experience. Rackspace combined Cloud Servers and Cloud Load Balancers with Scalr’s auto-scaling platform and CapCal’s Web Performance Testing from Grid Robotics to provide instant scaling for peak periods and performance testing to better understand and plan traffic.

Why Rackspace?
“With ten games under our belt so far this season, we are providing superior service to our viewers with sub-second response times. We anticipate at most a one-second response time even during peak loads for most viewers.”
-Derrick Ellis, Director of Online and New Media at Connecticut Public Broadcasting

Read the entire Connecticut Public Broadcasting case study now.

The increase in user-generated content, regulatory requirements, digital entertainment, social media, and mobile usage demands more storage resources to manage growing volumes of data. The hardware and systems needed to stay ahead of that growth can be confusing and costly. Taking advantage of the elastic nature and utility pricing model of cloud computing helps businesses drive down storage costs and avoid huge investments. Today, Cloud Avengers save a business drowning under a deluge of data by utilizing cloud storage.

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Next time, Cloud Avengers take on malicious hackers. Check out more adventures from Cloud Avengers below:

Cloud Avengers Save the Day with Cloud Files
Cloud Avengers Knock Out System Crashes
Cloud Avengers Annihilate Software Bugs
Cloud Avengers Free the Server Room
Website Traffic Cleared by Cloud Avengers

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The coming year will likely see unprecedented growth in cloud computing, especially as people become more comfortable with the interaction of the interfaces and security becomes more stable.

One of the things that drive people to the cloud is scalability. The ability to scale up or down at a moment’s notice is one of the cloud’s greatest benefits. Scaling is vital for anyone who expects usage to increase – say a major product launch that will bring thousands of new visitors to a site. Scalability in the cloud allows users to expand or contract when they need to.

Vertical Scaling

Vertical scaling is the easiest. Essentially it resizes your server with click of the button and no change to code. The downside is that vertical scaling is limited by the fact that you can only get as big as the size of one server. If that larger size server still can’t absorb the traffic that is hitting your site, you are stuck.

I like to think of vertical scaling like a blowfish and web traffic like an aquatic predator such as a shark.  If the predator is a smaller shark, the blowfish could inflate and scare the little shark away.  However, if the shark is the size of a Great White, there is no amount of puffing up that the blowfish can do to prevent the shark from overtaking him.

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling affords the ability to scale “wider” to deal with the traffic. Essentially you could run your application on multiple servers, with the ability to add more servers that can help handle the traffic.

Keeping with the aquatic analogy, horizontal scaling would be like a little fish, such as a sardine, coming together to form a school of fish that can synchronize their movements to thwart the shark. If a shark were to attack this group, he might get a couple of them but there is no way for him to get all of the fish.

When customers hear of the differences between vertical and horizontal scaling, most of them reply, “I want to scale horizontally for sure. I want that big cluster of servers to handle the traffic.”

However, you must note that horizontal scaling can’t be done on a moment’s notice. Horizontal scaling requires some advance planning – you have to prep for it. You have to make sure that all your code is in line, that your resources are available and that your architecture can handle this type of scale. You essentially have to break down your code into different functions that scale on their own, such as webheads and databases.

Our Managed Cloud Rackers can be a strong partner to help you code to scale. While we support many of the core technologies when it comes to web hosting, our level of expertise does not extend into customized applications.

To ensure that you are coding your application to scale instead of coding to fail, you should consider the following four points:

1) Have a load balancer in front your configuration

That is the most important, easiest and beneficial thing a customer can do. Even if you are going to host a single server, host it behind a load balancer. The reason is that the support team can move the server around or add a server without ever having to change the DNS.

2) Split out different layers of your configuration

Make sure that you have the different layers of your configuration split apart so that you can “turn up” what is needed. Think of an equalizer on a stereo – it gives you the ability to turn up the treble or tone down the bass independently of each other. You want to have this same ability on your config, to be able to increase the webheads or the database independently of each other.

3) Develop for horizontal scaling from the beginning

As you develop your application or software, have the conversation with your development team to let them know that you want to scale horizontally.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and your application will be ready to go if you plan to scale horizontally from the onset.

4) Give your Rackspace Managed Cloud team a call

While not experts on your particular application, we are experts in most of the web technologies and infrastructure and can help provide insight on what has worked in the past. If we can understand the function of your site, we can understand what type of traffic you might encounter and can make suggestions on how to handle it.

If you consider these points as you begin creating an application for the cloud, you will be able to code to scale instead of coding to fail.

Joseph Palumbo leads the Managed Cloud Account Managers team at Rackspace. Read his previous post Using the Cloud to Troubleshoot the Cloud for more Managed Cloud information.

Can your website handle a sudden spike in activity? When LoveBook Online, an online retailer of custom books, made their first national television appearance, their site wasn’t ready to handle the ensuing traffic and crashed. When their second national television appearance rolled around, they had Managed Cloud and Cloud Files on their side and traffic flowed smoothly. (Click here to read the LoveBook Online case study.) Today, the Cloud Avengers help a marketing team discover the cloud to handle activity spikes and enable the team to launch campaigns faster without worrying about potential traffic jams.

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Come back tomorrow to see how the Cloud Avengers bring a small solution to a big data storage problem. Check out more adventures from Cloud Avengers below:

Cloud Avengers Save the Day with Cloud Files
Cloud Avengers Knock Out System Crashes
Cloud Avengers Annihilate Software Bugs
Cloud Avengers Free the Server Room
Cloud Avengers Rescue Broken Website Images

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You just aired a commercial during the Big Game and are about to get blitzed with traffic to your website. John and Jerry give you play-by-play analysis on how to make sure your web config scores a touchdown. For more in depth information, be sure to check out our previous post that details the importance of a (1) Static Home Page, (2) Team of Web Nodes, (3) Database Replication, (4) Caching Your Content and (5) Load Balancing Your Config.

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Whether you’re getting ready for the Big Game or another large scale event, be sure the give us a call. Check out our Cloud Servers with a Managed Service Level and ‘try before you buy’ between now and March 30th. If you don’t love the service, cancel within 25 days and never pay.

CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU.  How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find.  If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

It seems to me that we’re slowly getting to a point where organizations are no longer doubting the suitability of the Cloud for them, but rather having to make some big decisions about which Cloud vendor to use.

One of the things we’ve talked about a lot over the time we’ve been running the CloudU series is how Cloud Computing tends to democratize technology, meaning that organizations can get a level of IT that they simply wouldn’t have been able to achieve previously.

There’s  flip side to this democratization however in that this high level of accessibility also means that it’s very easy for organizations to set themselves up as vendors – sometimes without the necessary level of professionalism that would be optimal.

More and more than organization are having to perform a thorough due diligence and really assess the quality of prospective vendors. In a previous CloudU report we wrote in depth about what organizations need to think about when planning a move to the Cloud. But recently over on BoxFreeIT, Loryan Smith raised the issue once again. In the piece Loryan rightly pointed out that;

anyone can run an email and file server from their garage and call it a cloud service. The problem is that Bob’s Garage Cloud Co. doesn’t have all the key technical and business components in place to provide organizations with a business-class service.

So here’s a very quick checklist of things that organizations should be aware of or think about when moving to the Cloud;

• Have a process for deciding which applications or workloads are candidates for Cloud
• Think about service requirements in terms of security, compliance and performance
• Consider issues around migrating existing workloads
• Think about the economic factors – what to do about existing sunk costs
• Accurately think about the potential demand curve to assess the economic impacts of a move to the Cloud
• Consider issues relating to vendor lock-in
• Make sure any prospective vendor is sufficiently flexible to meet your needs
• Think about the changing scope of needs within your IT department
• Consider the management challenges that the move might introduce – things like dealing with objections and employee retraining

While we believe that Cloud is the way of the future for IT, we are adamant that organizations need to think long and hard about what the move to the Cloud and how that move occurs – one valuable resource for discussing the challenges and opportunities is he CloudU LinkedIn group, we’d love to see you over there!

Those tasked with managing a business’s website know that even when something small looks amiss on the site, you’ll hear about it in triplicate from everyone – the CEO all the way down to the janitor. Reduce the risk of hearing about site anomalies, like broken images, slow load times, and shopping cart hiccups, with cloud-based services to host your entire site or to offload  elements, like file hosting or load balancing. By moving pieces of your website operation to the cloud, you can decrease strain on your local hardware resources and access on-demand compute power to cover campaigns or traffic spikes. Follow Karen as she gets a break from broken images on her company’s website from the Cloud Avengers.

Click image below for larger version.

Tomorrow, the Cloud Avengers avert a traffic disaster and save a life. Check out more adventures from Cloud Avengers below:

Cloud Avengers Save the Day with Cloud Files
Cloud Avengers Knock Out System Crashes
Cloud Avengers Annihilate Software Bugs
Cloud Avengers Free the Server Room

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Last year, over 188 billion emails circulated compared to 60 million Facebook updates and 1.4 million tweets. Email and social media are great for staying in touch with friends and family. Businesses are even using some of these same free social platforms and consumer-level email services to ramp up quickly and cheaply. But, are they really the best choice for primary business communication? Ask yourself these questions:

Who You Gonna Call?
Free email offers no accountability if your emails aren’t delivered or if you can’t send a message at 2AM. That leaves your business at the mercy of a provider who isn’t financially or legally accountable for outages or breaches. If you have an issue that you need help with, you could find yourself browsing volumes of support documents online with no access to live help.

Can You Fight the Law?
Not properly classifying and archiving messages could result in huge fines from legal disputes or regulatory agencies. Some free email services permanently delete messages after as little as 30 days. If you need that message a year later to support a court case, you’ll be out of luck – and possibly paying fines.

How Big Can You Get?
According to The Radicati Group, the number of email users is estimated to rise to 1.9 billion by 2013. Each new user requires not only enough space to store current emails, but also storage and retrieval for archived messages.  This is an area that free email isn’t designed to accommodate.

Whose Business Is It? 

Differentiating your business with a branded email domain gives your business credibility and reinforces your brand. Using free services give off an impression that your business is unstable and serves as a red flag for potential clients. Furthermore, consumer-level email services have a reputation for ending up in the spam box making it harder to communicate with clients.

If you’re using or considering free email for your business, investigate hosted email options that meet the requirements of business email and keep you from making huge investments in business-grade email infrastructure and support. For options, compare Rackspace Hosted Email services.

What will you do when your server needs outgrow your server room? Before you start knocking out walls to make more room, the Cloud Avengers are here to help you make the move to cloud. By transferring functions like website hosting, business email, and file storage to the cloud, you save space, cut power consumption, and mitigate risk in the event of an on-site disaster. And most importantly, fewer servers means less on-site hardware to manage, so you can get back to strategic, high-value IT initiatives instead of keeping the servers humming.

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Stay tuned next week! On Monday, Cloud Avengers give Karen a break from broken site images.

View previous Cloud Avengers adventures:
Cloud Avengers Save the Day with Cloud Files
Cloud Avengers Knock Out System Crashes
Cloud Avengers Annihilate Software Bugs

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Check out the video for the Cloud Playbook to get you ready for the Big Game!

The Cloud was built to provide an environment that can dynamically scale to accommodate an influx of traffic. There is one scenario that pushes the Cloud to the limit – the Super Bowl. The Wall Street Journal has reported that businesses are paying a record $3.5 million for a 30 second spot. To continue the conversation online after their commercial airs, it is imperative for companies to prepare for the onslaught of traffic to their site.

Hart Hoover, a Rackspace support technician and Cloud aficionado, visited with me on how to make your config perform like a fine tuned offense (instead of fumbling the opportunity).

Here are six things you can do to ensure your site stays up after the commercial airs.

Have a Static Home Page

After viewers have laughed at your hysterical commercial of an inflatable shark floating through the office, they will want to visit your website for more content. You must make sure that your landing page is up and loads faster than a Chicago Bears blitz.

“The majority of customers will visit your first page, so you want your home page to be static and served out of caching, or even better over a CDN (Content Delivery Network),” Hoover says. Businesses can place that front front page in Cloud Files and serve it over the Akamai CDN.

Having your landing page hosted on Akamai’s CDN will enable it to be accessed in a geographical location that is closer to the end user. For example, if your content is on Rackspace Cloud Files object storage, when a user in London requests content that is located in Chicago, they will actually get it served up from a computer in London. “This means your site will load a lot faster because the data doesn’t have to traverse the globe to get to the user. By virtue of this, you can see a difference in load times in addition to taking load off of your web server,” Hoover explains.

Team of Web Nodes

Keeping your home page up and available for your users is on the beginning; you now have to prepare for consumers as  they look to further interact with your brand (after all, those inflatable sharks are so darn funny!) and dig deeper into your website. Visitors will begin moving from your static home page, to making calls on your database, which will in turn serve up that content via web severs.

“You want to have as many web nodes as possible. If you think you are going to need 20 web servers, put 50 up. While it depends on your application, we typically recommend that customers have more smaller, modular nodes than big, beefy web nodes,” Hoover advises. “It is better to over provision than to under provision.  If the traffic is not as massive as you thought, you can spin down servers quickly and pay only for what you use.”

Businesses no longer have to have a yearly contract on a robust config that they only need for several hours. “At the start of the game you can deploy a bunch of web servers and then wait for the initial crest of traffic to die down at which time you can start killing off nodes,” Hoover says. “Remember, it’s easier to board up your windows before the hurricane comes instead of boarding them up in the sidewise rain and 100 mph winds.”

Database Replication

The purpose of your Super Bowl commercial is most likely to drive brand awareness, which consequently means that the visitors will be consuming content on your website rather than creating content. This translates to more “read” requests on your database as opposed to “write” requests. Page loads and pulling in posts are all reads from the database.

Employing a replication strategy for your database will help with these type of requests. “You will want to have a big master database server and tons of slave database servers. You will only write to one place (the master) and those writes will get replicated out (to the slaves). On the other hand, your reads can happen on any node in your database cluster.”

Due to the fact that there is only one master database server, businesses should strongly consider monitoring that server. “If a master server goes down because it is too busy, you will want to take a slave database server and promote it to become a master server very quickly.”

RightScale is an infrastructure management tool that can help automate this slave-to-master promotion process for a business. Consider the loss of Indianapolis Colts star QB Peyton Manning this season as an analogy as to why you want an automated slave-to-master database promotion process.  Without having a server that can step up and take the place of the superstar master server, you can end up with terrible results (an abysmal 2-14 season in the case of the Colts).

Another tool to consider is Xeround, a Cloud Database solution that takes out the worry of scaling your database. Xeround will scale your database automatically and have your database replicated in a couple of places.

Furthermore, businesses can call the Rackspace Managed Databases team to visit with our Database Administrators. These Rackers can provide you with expertise on setting up your master and slave config in addition to optimizing your database.

This is an example of a Rackspace Cloud config for the Super Bowl

Cache Your Content

To help with the load time of your website, you want to make sure that you cache any static content that is not on the CDN. This will prevent the website calling the same content over and over, which will ultimately result in faster load times for your website.

“You can also cache database queries for reads in a query cache or use Memcached, a distributed memory object caching system. This will serve the request from memory, which will be faster and will allow your database server to be processing things that are new and important,” offers Hoover. “If you have 100,000 people hitting your website and they are all going to see the same thing, you want that served quickly. You do not want to have to go to your database every time because it will take a long time.”

Load Balance Your Config

Successful football teams often have a balanced offense that attacks the left, center and middle of the football field. Similarly, you want to make sure that you balance the traffic throughout your web nodes. Setting up Cloud Load Balancers to route traffic is critical to ensuring your site survives the crushing traffic. Placing a load balancer above your web nodes allows you to point to one IP and distribute the traffic amongst the servers. Additionally, our Cloud Load Balancers have automatic failover and are redundant.

Hoover suggests that you have load balancers at ever layer of your config.  “You can load balance web servers, caching nodes and all the database nodes that are slaves.”

Practice Before the Big Game

The Super Bowl is almost as important to companies advertising in the game as it is to the players on the field. Therefore, it is important for you to practice by testing your config before kickoff.

Load tests are one way of verifying your config by simulating web traffic and the behavior users on your site. Apica and CapCal are two Rackspace Cloud Tool partners who specialize in helping companies do this. “Load testing is important because it gives you time to tweak your config. You can figure out if something goes horribly wrong in your application before the real life cusomers come in,” Hoover says.

Hoover suggests running multiple load tests to ensure that any fixes made did not cause harm elsewhere in your config.  You want all the bugs to be worked out prior to going live. Having a monitoring solution, such as New Relic or Cloudkick, will you show you detailed graphs of your config during the load test so you can see if there are particular queries that are taking a long time to execute and which servers are the bottlenecks in your config.

Since the nature of hosting a site for a large-scale event requires servers for a very short period of time, it is worth testing both spinning up (deploying) servers to your config as well as spinning down (removing) them after the traffic has subsided.

“You will want to understand how long it takes to add a web server to your configuration,” Hoover points out. “You may have thought that those 50 web servers were enough to handle the traffic, but now you need 10 more. What does that look like? How long does it take? Do I need to plug that into any access lists for my database?” These questions can only be answered after you test your config.

Conversely, you will want to perform testing to remove the nodes from the rotation. This will give you confidence that that you can spin down servers, once the traffic has subsided, without breaking your config .

Let Us Help Call the Plays

Whether your business is preparing for the Super Bowl or another large-scale event, be sure to reach out to Rackspace and let us know what you are preparing for. Our Rackers have experience with building these configs and can help advise you on the best way to serve up massive amounts of traffic in short amounts of time. Rackspace provides 24/7 Fanatical Support and we will even be there to assist you during the big game.

Hart’s predictions for the last few weeks of football is that the Giants will upset the 49ers and the Patriots will defeat the Ravens, and he ultimately sees the Patriots winning it all this year. Follow @hhoover on Twitter for all of Hart’s tweets.

With the Cloud, many developers and companies can now afford to have a true test and development configuration to ensure that their code deployments will work properly in the production environment.  Setting up these types of environments is valuable because not only can the development team determine if their code works, they also can discover the associated downtime with deploying it.  But did you know that you can use the Cloud in a similar manner to help diagnose a problem that your configuration might be facing?

I am one of those people who sit on the other side of the phone when customers call for help. I’ll get customers who call in with problems with their server and some of the issues that I see are pretty complex problems.

In the past, our only option for troubleshooting was to log into the live production server to diagnose the issue. What’s cool is that today we can create a cloned production environment in the Cloud to troubleshoot the more complex problems. This is similar to a test/dev environment a company could set up within the Cloud where businesses can play around with a website in a behind-the-scenes, safe place without having to interrupt the live production site.

By cloning out the problem configuration, error and all, our Rackers can work out the problem without fear of damaging the live environment. If they do something incorrectly or restart the wrong service, the mistakes aren’t happening on the production box. This ability to clone the server gives tech support a lot more freedom to correct the problem.

Once tech support is able to troubleshoot the problem in the cloned server, they can go back to the customers and let them know the process involved in fixing the actual server and – most importantly – let the customers know how much downtime will be involved. Armed with so much detailed information, customers can then determine when to have the problem fixed so it fits in their schedule.

The efficiencies of using the Cloud from the support staff perspective are priceless. Our support staff has the freedom to take a complicated problem and duplicate it. If we need to use multiple people, we can create multiple copies of the server. In addition to helping our customers have a scalable, cost effective hosting solution, the Cloud also creates opportunities from the support side to provide a better customer experience when troubles arise.

Joseph Palumbo leads the Managed Cloud Account Managers team at Rackspace.

The Rackspace Startup Program is fortunate in the fact that we get to help entrepreneurs make their dreams come true daily. We have a wealth of world class accelerators as strategic partners who provide us with the cream of the crop startups for our program. It’s exciting to us when a world class accelerator comes to our home town to set up shop. San Antonio, TechStars Cloud is here with eleven companies making their dreams come true.

TechStars Cloud is a vertical startup accelerator and the first thematic accelerator in the TechStars program focusing entirely on Cloud Computing, Cloud infrastructure and Open Source companies. “We’ve taken eleven companies and we’re providing them with funding and mentorship and an intense three month boot camp experience to get them as far as we possibly can and deliver them out into the world with awesome new Cloud products,” explains Jason Seats, Managing Director of TechStars Cloud. “My expectations for this group of companies are very high. I see a lot of interesting things being worked on and a lot of great ideas. I think we are going to see great things from this group of people.”

The inaugural TechStars Cloud program will run from January to April 2012 within Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio. Geekdom is a new kind of collaborative workspace where entrepreneurs, technologists, developers, makers and creatives help each other build businesses and other cool things together right here in San Antonio.

“It is a real honor for me to give back and mentor startups for TechStars Cloud. I believe this is great opportunity for Cloud Computing and San Antonio. It’s an awesome proving ground that mentorship is the new classroom for technology and education throughout Texas and the United States,” says Nick Longo, Director of Geekdom and Strategic Initiatives with Rackspace Hosting.

“Mentorship – that’s what this program is all about. We have these mentors come in and volunteer freely of their time just to help these companies get started and it’s fantastic. The diversity of opinion that gets shared is having people that ‘have been there, done that’ come and really help these guys figure out what they’re doing. It’s great,” continues Jason Seats. “We break the program structure into three phases. The first phase is really a ‘get to know you’ phase. This is the time when mentors and companies meet each other and feel each other out. The second phase is really about ‘rolling up your sleeves’ and getting to work. The last third of the program is a big ramp up for our ‘final goodbye’ in getting them ready for what’s coming next after they’re done and make sure their companies have long and successful lives.”

Nicole Glaros, Managing Director of TechStars Boulder, is here in San Antonio as well to assist Jason Seats with the inaugural TechStars Cloud. “We love these companies! We’re really working with them to get them to the next level. I’m here because I want to be here in San Antonio, I love these companies and I’m looking forward to working with Jason.”

The Rackspace Startup Program loves working with the TechStars Cloud team and the companies within as well. Our hats are off to the eleven companies that comprise the inaugural TechStars Cloud program for 2012 right here in the Alamo City.

Is your company involved in an accelerator program in 2012? Would you like to know more about managing your new business venture and letting Rackspace manage your Cloud? Contact the Space Cowboys today.