Quote: "we have well over 1500 AMD-based servers that have been up and running 24 hours a day for over two years with no downtime"
"Internet Pioneer Rackspace Racking Up New E-commerce Clients Who Prefer Servers Powered By AMD Athlon™ Processors "
Dot.coms may come and dot.coms may go, but the growth of the Internet, like a rising tide, seems unstoppable. More Web sites are launched every day, and every day more companies gamble their future on the viability of e-commerce.
One company devoting its full resources to this trend is Rackspace, which not only offers turnkey web hosting, but also offers it in the blink of an eye.
"A customer might contact us," said Patrick Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, "and say 'I need a 4-server cluster, I need a firewall for security, and I need it quickly.' Our answer is that we'll have it up by the end of the day.
Such responsiveness has led to rapid growth in the company's brief, 2-year history. Rackspace now owns and operates more than 3,000 servers, and expects to increase that total to 5,000 by the end of the year. Condon estimates that 80% of their servers use AMD processors. "We use a lot of 1 GHz AMD Athlon™ processors. We found they are incredibly reliable," he said. "In fact, we have well over 1500 AMD-based servers that have been up and running 24 hours a day for over two years with no downtime whatsoever."
Condon, vice president of business development for Rackspace, reflected upon the origins of the company. "Our group was developing complex Web sites, mostly for e-commerce. But there's more to it than designing, developing and launching new Web sites. Keeping the sites up and running can be fairly demanding. Increasingly, we were asked to manage the infrastructure behind the Web sites we developed."
For Condon and his colleagues, it was easy to figure out that others would have similar needs. "We decided to put up a Web site called rackspace.com," said Condon. "We were targeting other Web sites developers, explaining that we'd run the infrastructure for the Web sites they developed. Almost immediately, we started getting hits." In January 1999, a new business model was launched.
The company's founders recognized they were plunging into an extremely capital-intensive business. To maximize scarce dollars and flexibility, and to minimize turn-around time, Rackspace chose to build its servers. "The truth is, servers sometimes have problems. By building our own, we know them inside out. Plus, by standardizing on parts, we have a constant inventory of what we need. If a server fails, we'll fix it in 30 minutes," Condon said.
As they looked at available components, Condon and his colleagues were focused on getting the best price-to-performance ratios possible. That led them to AMD Athlon processors.
For Rackspace, customers come in two varieties: smaller clients requiring a single server, and larger clients requiring multiple servers. The larger Rackspace clients use up to 30 or 40 servers for a single Web site. Many of those customers are in fact Web site designers. Others are e-businesses. "We understand companies that have their roots on the Internet," said Condon. "They need 100% uptime. That's what we provide. We have live support people here to answer the phone 24 hours a day, and to fix any problem that may arise."
Of course customers have a choice of processors when Rackspace custom-builds the servers for their Web sites. "They do frequently ask for our advice. If customers need a lot of horsepower, we recommend AMD Athlon processors."
The trend toward AMD is as strong as the growth of Rackspace itself. "People have become much more receptive to the AMD brand. Megahertz to megahertz, I believe the AMD chips are actually faster for most of the applications our customers will be running on their servers," said Condon.
Listening to Condon talk about his clients, it is clear that reliability isn't the only key measure of performance. "There are always applications on the server that need more horsepower," Condon explained. "An extra 500 MHz makes a big difference when you're running very large data bases. The bottom line is that a 20%SW performance increase is worth the additional cost--as long as the performance boost is real world and not some abstract benchmark. I think that's what's drawn them to the AMD Athlon processors."
Rackspace, based in San Antonio, Texas, recently opened a second office and data center in London, England. It's yet another concrete step toward their larger goal of becoming the largest managed hosting company in the world. "We relieve one of the biggest headaches on the Internet. We're experts in that niche. It's all we do," said Condon.
If it's a niche that covers the globe and removes one of the main headaches associated with e-commerce, AMD is happy to a partner with Rackspace.
"Our chip line has grown along with AMD's. We offer their latest and greatest," said Condon. Keep up the great work, Rackspace. Our design engineers want you to know that the best is yet to come.
Earlier posted by Milo on the mod thread.
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