San Antonio, Texas - (The Hosting News) - September 28, 2007 - Managed hosting services firm, Rackspace Managed Hosting, will begin offering the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor to its U.S. customer base, featuring energy efficiency, performance and virtualization designed to upgrade the Second-Generation AMD Opteron processors.

Patrick Patla, Director of Product Management, Server/Workstation Division at AMD remarked, ''Rackspace has been a long-time, successful vendor of AMD Opteron processors. Their commitment to continuous performance improvement for their thousands of customers pushes us to deliver industry-leading technology like Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. With innovative power management capabilities, increased performance-per-watt capabilities, and scalable performance, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors will help Rackspace create a scalable, secure and high-performance web environment.''

According to the company, Rackspace will be the first hosting provider to offer Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, which present a native multi-core architecture with all four cores on one piece of silicon, allowing them to communicate more efficiently for improved performance and performance-per-watt. These processors also include power efficiency features like AMD CoolCore technology, designed to turn off portions of the processor logic and memory controller when not in use and reduce processor energy consumption and heat generation. Along with Enhanced AMD PowerNow! technology, the processors' advanced performance-per-watt capabilities help lower the energy consumption of a customer's IT infrastructure while providing optimum application performance.

Nicolas Keller, Director of Platform Products at Rackspace Managed Hosting offered, ''We've found that AMD Opteron processors are an incredibly reliable platform for customers with multi-threaded applications or heavy database usage. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors coincides directly with our GreenSpace initiative of lowering power consumption, which in turn delivers great cost benefits to us that we can ultimately pass on to customers. It is apparent that the processor was designed with virtualization in mind, delivering near native performance on virtualized applications and greatly improving virtualized application performance by allowing virtual machines to manage memory more efficiently.''

Recently, Rackspace conducted a survey revealing that 57 percent of respondents are already using virtualization for internal applications. In addition, 72 percent of respondents are comfortable hosting mission-critical applications in a production environment on a virtualized platform. There is a great demand for leveraging the benefit of virtualization through a third-party hosting company: 71 percent of respondents would host their applications on a virtualized infrastructure with a hosting provider. However, the majority of customers are currently not comfortable utilizing a shared, virtual environment. Only 13 percent of respondents are confidently willing to share a physical server with other hosting customers, a practice common in hosting, with top concerns stemming from performance and security vulnerabilities in shared environments.

Additionally, the Rackspace survey revealed that 42 percent of respondents believe virtualization will have a fundamental impact on information technology. Although 43 percent had no preference between using open source or proprietary virtualization products, the majority of respondents use VMware. The methodology for this research involved sending an email survey to approximately 3,000 Rackspace customers. More than 12 percent of survey recipients responded to the questions.

A recognized global managed hosting firm, Rackspace Managed Hosting is a service organization delivering enterprise-level web infrastructure and managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 10,000 customers across seven data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry's best technologies for each customer need and delivers it as a service via the company's award-winning Fanatical Support. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has grown more than 50 percent a year since the company's inception.

For more information about Rackspace Managed Hosting, please visit: www.rackspace.com.