Rackspace and VMware enter into strategic partnership to 

Rackspace announces the unlimited availability of Dedicated VMware vCloud®, the most recent addition to the company's Managed Private Cloud portfolio. Dedicated vCloud is a single-tenant, hosted environment that enables enterprises to take the next step in their virtualization journey by offering advanced automation, self-service, hosted catalogues and access to the vCloud API and vCloud web portal. The entire environment is backed by Rackspace’s industry-leading 100% Network Uptime Guarantee and One-Hour Hardware Replacement Guarantee. Critical for enterprises, we deliver Fanatical Support® all the way from the infrastructure to the operating system and application layers.

During 2014, IT budgets and headcount remained flat; however, businesses still expected central IT to help drive growth and innovation. Dedicated vCloud enables IT to offload the “keeping-the-lights-on” activities like backing up VMs, and OS patching to Rackspace. By freeing up in-house IT staff from the maintenance and monitoring of infrastructure, they can be focus on higher-value projects.

Rackspace takes a rather unique approach by offering customers a single-tenant private cloud that includes physical hardware isolation from the firewall to the storage layer. This eliminates issues common to shared infrastructure like the “noisy neighbour” effect and it helps increase security, which is top of mind for everyone these days.

Dedicated vCloud also enhances control. By exposing the vCloud API directly to each customer, Rackspace allows the customer to integrate a third-party orchestration tool and introduce policy-based governance. Hosted catalogues and self-service are available via the vCloud stack. This helps central IT deliver services to business units more efficiently and quickly. It also maintains the governance that comes with offering only IT-approved images and vApps, meters compute usage, and controls VM size options and lease times.

Finally, this offering helps some enterprises protect existing investments in VMware vCloud Director® that they use on-premise. A lot of companies have already purchased compatible commercial-off-the-shelf software and tooled for the vCloud API. Dedicated vCloud allows them to extend their on-premise environments into a Rackspace data centre using public and private catalogues to synchronize images and vApps among their hybrid cloud environments. Since VMware sunset the enterprise edition of vCloud Director, the API and future functionality live on in the service provider edition. Enterprises can continue building on their vCloud investment by leveraging the new vCloud Director 5.6 in Rackspace’s Dedicated vCloud offering.

“As one of VMware's largest vCloud Air™ Network service providers and the leader in managed cloud, we are pleased to expand our strategic partnership with Rackspace to help accelerate enterprise customer’s adoption of the hybrid cloud,” said Bill Fathers, executive vice president and general manager, Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. “Rackspace offers enterprises a fully managed private cloud powered by VMware vCloud leveraging hybrid cloud services and backed by Fanatical Support®. By offloading infrastructure management to Rackspace, customers can now focus their resources on growing their core business.”