Rackspace expands Hybrid Cloud portfolio

Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio enables enterprises to leverage a wide range of technical enhancements, from IT security to software development. These new industry leading hybrid cloud capabilities provide access to a broad set of advanced services to facilitate modernized, consistent deployment and management of applications on hybrid architectures. Enhancements to the portfolio include managed guest OS and external storage for VMware on AWS; advanced Kubernetes and container enablement services; advanced cloud native support leveraging reliability engineering; managed security services; and application and data integration.

By delivering a fully integrated portfolio of hybrid cloud services, Rackspace allows customers to offload the complexity of deploying, integrating and managing applications with the services they need to empower their hybrid cloud strategies. These new services further customers’ ability to benefit from the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud.

“We are in the midst of a significant hybrid cloud movement with over $1 trillion of spend allocated toward cloud and associated IT services,” said Lee James, Chief Technology Officer, EMEA at Rackspace.

“Our new set of advanced hybrid cloud services, moves the discussion into a wider IT community from software developers to chief information security officers. The foundation of our hybrid cloud capability is our AIOps platform which accelerates the value of the cloud to customers, ensuring their environments are running smoothly with near-zero downtime.”​

The hybrid cloud portfolio is underpinned by leading-edge AIOps technology, proactively monitoring and managing the platform in the background to identify potential technical challenges. It manages the volumes of tickets that are sent daily, grouping the alerts to enable Rackspace teams to work cohesively on a single situation and resolve incidents faster.  

New offerings include:

• Managed VMware Cloud on AWS – Customers are now able to leverage VMware HCX and Managed Guest OS Services for their VMware Cloud^TM on AWS workloads, with availability of Managed External Storage coming soon. With these capabilities, Rackspace is able to offer customers a hybrid-interconnect to enable fast, simple and secure application migration and mobility between VMware-based private clouds and VMware Cloud on AWS, increased storage scalability without the need to purchase additional hosts, and access to Fanatical Support for operating systems on customer VMs.
• Advanced Kubernetes and container services – Rackspace now provides professional and managed services to help customers incorporate container architectures into their cloud strategies. These capabilities provide customers with the tools and expertise they need to modernize their applications on agile, cost-effective container-based infrastructures.

• Advanced cloud-native support – With the new Cloud Reliability Engineering Service Block, a Rackspace infrastructure engineering team will work with the customer’s in-house IT team to provide expert support through close collaboration on infrastructure projects to help enable transformation and the adoption of cloud-native capabilities.

• Rackspace Managed Security (RMS) Service Blocks – The portfolio has been expanded to provide Proactive Detection and Response and Compliance Assistance services to customers on VMware private clouds. Additionally, RMS Service Blocks for Managed Public Cloud customers are being expanded to provide support for native security tools on all the leading public clouds, beginning with AWS. The functionality will be integrated into the Rackspace Managed Security portfolio and will provide customers with a single pane of glass view into their security landscape.
• Integration and API Management Assessment – With this new assessment, Rackspace evaluates the current state of application and data integration across the entire organization, including hybrid IT deployments. Rackspace provides integration recommendations that accelerate business goals and strategies, enabling businesses to create new business models, accelerate products and services, and deliver superior customer experiences.

Through this broad set of hybrid cloud capabilities, Rackspace customer Delmar International, Inc. was able to integrate a global network of disparate systems on an upgraded infrastructure designed to run efficient, high-performing applications.