Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier is to retire after eight years heading up the open cloud provider, with co-founder Graham Weston stepping back into the breach on an interim basis.

Weston, who was chief exec from 1999 to 2006, said in a blog post that “what we build from here, we will build on the shoulders of a giant.”

In a conference call with analysts, Napier noted that “now is as good a time as any” for him to step aside, citing confidence with development of OpenStack and progress of hybrid cloud as the key reasons.

“While there’s still work to do, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made, the increased capability of our hybrid cloud offering in the way that it qualifies just to compete for much larger opportunities,” Napier said in prepared remarks as reported by Seeking Alpha.

“The transition has been challenging and has taken …

TwinStrata on Tuesday announced the general availability of the latest release of its CloudArray software. Customers using the new release gain broader file access capabilities, file sharing across sites, secure bulk ingestion and easy cloud-to-cloud migration.
“Our customers are demanding greater sophistication and control over their cloud storage environments, said Nicos Vekiarides, founder and CEO of TwinStrata. “Just getting them to the cloud is no longer enough – users want to store more data with reduced administration and more robust functionality than their on-premises storage systems.”

read more

Want VM agility with near bare metal performance? How about [milli]second provision/stop/start/restart times? Looking to achieve greater VM density on your hardware assets, or provision applications without worry of dependency hell? Look no further than next-gen virtualization with Linux Containers.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Boden Russell, an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Global Technology Services, will provide a Linux Container technology overview including underpinnings, throttling, monitoring, tooling/commoditization, images, security, use cases, pros/cons and why containers are poised as “the next VM” in our modern cloud era. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of the Linux Container landscape in today’s industry and an appreciation for their realization.

read more

The cloud’s main story so far has been one of horizontal providers, such as salesforce.com, Microsoft and Amazon, offering one-size-fits-all solutions. While these providers had some success in the financial services sector, their products weren’t specialized enough to address the needs of asset managers or bankers.
The advent of vertical SaaS providers was the topic of my latest article, Will 2014 be the Year of Vertical Clouds, written for Wired. Even though they’re a young market today, expect to see a larger number of these vertical cloud providers getting scale and attention, in 2014.
“In the days before the cloud, on-premise software providers that focused on selling into a vertical market were considered second-class citizens to the ‘big guns’ selling into the broader horizontal marketplace. However, with the advent of the SaaS model, the tables have turned,” according to Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital.

read more

Rackspace® Hosting on Tuesday announced that Lanham Napier retired from the company as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Graham Weston, Rackspace’s co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Napier plans to invest in and advise other entrepreneurial companies following a decision to step away from public company executive leadership. He will remain a consultant to Rackspace for the next several months to ensure a smooth transition.

“It has been a privilege to be part of Rackspace for the past fourteen years,” said Mr. Napier. “I have enjoyed working with Rackers and our customers to bring Fanatical Support® to the fast-growing market of cloud computing. My decision to step down as CEO was a difficult one, but it’s the right choice for me and for the company. With the board and management team aligned around our 2014 strategy and financial plan, I believe now is a natural transition point to select a new leader for the next exciting phase of Rackspace’s growth. I look forward to following Rackspace’s success as I return to my entrepreneurial roots – to build new things and invest in disruptive ideas.

read more

Rackspace® Hosting on Tuesday announced that Lanham Napier retired from the company as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Graham Weston, Rackspace’s co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Napier plans to invest in and advise other entrepreneurial companies following a decision to step away from public company executive leadership. He will remain a consultant to Rackspace for the next several months to ensure a smooth transition.

“It has been a privilege to be part of Rackspace for the past fourteen years,” said Mr. Napier. “I have enjoyed working with Rackers and our customers to bring Fanatical Support® to the fast-growing market of cloud computing. My decision to step down as CEO was a difficult one, but it’s the right choice for me and for the company. With the board and management team aligned around our 2014 strategy and financial plan, I believe now is a natural transition point to select a new leader for the next exciting phase of Rackspace’s growth. I look forward to following Rackspace’s success as I return to my entrepreneurial roots – to build new things and invest in disruptive ideas.

read more

By adopting Racemi’s migration software, now Phoenix NAP can on-board customers from just about anything (physical servers, VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Xen) to whatever Phoenix NAP offering makes the most sense for them.
The Racemi server imaging technology quickly clones server workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual or private cloud platforms, reducing the migration process from days to minutes. The Racemi software captures the entire server stack-including operating system, applications, and configuration-and automatically converts it to run on any of the Phoenix NAP products by applying the necessary tools and drivers during the migration process. This ensures existing workloads are migrated in their time-tested configuration, which leads to better reliability and ability to be supported.

read more

Savvy executive leaders are already prepared for the shift to more progressive business technology deployments throughout the enterprise. Open hybrid cloud architectures, big data analytics and mobile applications are high-growth platforms at the center of this shift.

In particular, the emerging mobile applications must be integrated, flexible, and adaptable to constantly changing business conditions. This is the new normal in many fast-paced industries. That being said, are you ready for the mobile data deluge that’s inevitable?

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index global mobile data traffic forecast for 2013 to 2018, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase nearly 11-fold over the next four years and reach an annual run rate of 190 exabytes by 2018.

The projected increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections — such as personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections — which will exceed 10 billion …