Dayspring Technologies

Chi-Ming & I attended the Rackspace Roadshow on Thursday, April 17th. This was chance for Rackspace to present their technology roadmap for the next year or so. Rackspace’s main business is providing managed hosting. A client would specify a build of a server which they would build or purchase, configure and install in one of their facilities. The would then manage everything up from the facility up to the operating system–applying patches etc. What you install on the server is for you to configure or managed. We have a few current clients that use Rackspace.

Rackspace sees the demand for hosting services moving away from managed hosting to a higher level of service where Rackspace would take manage the core software and application layers. Not only would they maintain the core OS e.g. Windows/Linux but they would be responsible for the software such as Apache, PHP, ASP. They see mail as something that could be completely taken over all the way through the application layer. Driving lower cost is something their customers always want too.

They introduced a couple of new products which address these new trends. Mailtrust is a Rackspace company which offers third party mail hosting. You pay by the mailbox or they would even host an Exchange Server for you. Again, this would be managed by them from the hosting facility, server hardware, to the software application. Mosso is their cloud computing package. It runs like Amazon EC2 however, they give you higher level of integration. It is backed by the Rackspace hosting infrastructure. For $100 you get a 50GB of SAN storage, 500GB of bandwidth and 300 million requests per month including email.

You can specify which technologies you want to run. You can choose from a laundry list: PHP, Ruby, Perl, MySQL, Python, .NET 2,3 & 3.5, ASP, MS SQL 2005, IIS7. Any combination of these technologies can run simultaneously. The strength of Mosso is the ability to scale quickly. You can configure it to use more CPU, memory, bandwidth as your demand grows. Because of its virtual design, one should expect to see minimal downtime. A downside to Mosso is if your webapp requires a configuration that deviates too much from their standard application stack, it may not run in the Mosso cloud. They compared Mosso to Amazon EC2 which offers components for cloud computing but requires a developer to integrate the pieces together. Google App Engine on the other is a well defined applications environment (Python) but limited technology suite.

The spent of bit of time talking about Virtualization which seems to be all the rage in IT circles. They talked about the benefits (reduced server count, ability to run legacy OS and apps) and the downsides (virtual host sprawl, performance limitation for certain applications e.g. busy DB). Rackspace is now starting to offer a Virtual Private Server hosting service but their main business is still dedicated hosting.

There was final presentation on Rackspace Labs which is a group that looks at the 10 years into future of IT. Some facts they presented:

• 70% of IT budgets are spent on maintenance
• 1.2% of the US energy expenditure was for running servers. Google excluded.
• During 2000-2005 the number of servers doubled

The Future of IT:

• services based
• centralized datacenters
• distributed computing
• scalable
• simple, reliable, fast
• cheap

One of the innovations that came of the Rackspace Labs was their Mosso cloud hosting environment.

Chi-Ming has had good experiences with Rackspace space tech support and found them competent and responsive. They would be a vendor to consider as we think about offering Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP hosting in the future.

Tags: amazon ec2, cloud, mosso, rackspace

This entry was posted by Shane C. on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Solutions, Web Applications, Website Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.