September 13, 2004 - Rackspace Managed Hosting ( www.rackspace.com ), the fastest-growing managed hosting provider, today announced that it has signed a multi-year agreement with EMI Music North America (EMI). EMI, the world's largest pure music company, has chosen Rackspace's Intensive HostingT division to support many of its North American Web sites including Blue Note, Capitol Records and Virgin Records.

"In our search for a managed service provider we evaluated many leading industry players. Rackspace offered us the highly specialized skills and resources in a cost-effective program that was needed to manage our web infrastructure," said Jim Russo, senior director, Network Services, EMI Music North America.

As more music fans turn to online resources to learn about popular artists and listen to their music, EMI wanted to consolidate its infrastructure from multiple data centers to a single service provider to guarantee reliability and performance.

"Managed hosting is our primary focus and enables us to exceed our customers' expectations time and time again," said Glenn Reinus, senior vice president of worldwide sales, Rackspace Managed Hosting. "We go well beyond traditional managed hosting by providing a highly-tailored service for enterprises running mission-critical applications."

Rackspace's Intensive Hosting provides EMI with a fully-managed hosting solution built upon Dell PowerEdge servers running Microsoft Windows complete with multiple firewalls, load balancers and a Dell/EMC storage area network. EMI's North American Web presence will be supported by Intensive Hosting's ProActive7T - the essentials required to ensure the most secure and reliable Web operations in the industry.

Additionally, through Rackspace's close partnership with Dell, EMI has engaged Dell Professional Services to provide Web site application analysis and consolidation support, migration planning, and assessment for EMI's implementation of Microsoft.NET Web services architecture.

EMI Music is the world's largest pure music company, operating in 50 countries around the world. Its record labels include Angel, Blue Note, Capitol, EMI, EMI Classics, Manhattan, Mute, Parlophone and Virgin.

Rackspace Managed HostingT is the fastest growing managed hosting specialist offering the world"s only Self-Healing NetworkT, delivering 100 percent network availability.