Having only last week introduced a survey that showed a strong trend amongst cloud users to move to hybrid cloud architectures, Rackspace Hosting has taken the next obvious step in what might at first appear to be the opposite direction. It has introduced a new offering as part of its Managed Virtualisation service, the Dedicated VMware vCenter Server.
This has been specifically designed to provide managed support for single-tenant VMware vCenter Servers, which are widely used by enterprises for on-premise systems. The Dedicated Server will allow enterprise customers to migrate their existing VMware legacy workloads out of their on-premise datacentres and into a Rackspace datacentre. Once there, they will be able to use their existing tools to maintain the operational control they require.
The hosted VMware environment will look and feel like an extension of the customer’s own datacentre by leveraging the same vCenter APIs utilised by their existing tools. Specifically, customers maintain control and management capabilities through the use of dedicated vCenter Servers, APIs, compatible third-party tools, and their existing service catalogues, orchestration platforms and portals.
The objective is pretty straight forward. As part of any hybrid cloud environment is the on-going need to run some applications and services on dedicated bare metal. This can be for reasons of meeting performance requirements, the unsuitability of the specific applications for running in a multi-tenanted environment, or concerns about security or performance – even if those concerns are in fact unfounded.
But, by having the previously on-premise applications hosted in the same datacentre as the cloud services the enterprise is already using, planning to use, or only as yet looking towards with skepticism, it can not only save money on Opex, but be well-positioned to exploit hybrid cloud capabilities.
With Rackspace’s significant expertise in cloud and managed hosting, a 100 percent network uptime guarantee, and its self-styled Fanatical Support services, the company claims that enterprise customers will be able to trust their hybrid cloud infrastructure, backed by an extensive service level agreement. The company hosts one of the largest VMware environments and operates the largest OpenStack-based cloud.
In addition, the company provides a full portfolio of hybrid hosting services including bare-metal Dedicated Servers, servers virtualised by VMware, and both Public and Private Cloud services powered by OpenStack. This gives customers the flexibility and choice to optimise their application portfolio, by providing a best-fit infrastructure approach to each application.
“Rackspace has taken another step toward addressing a diverse array of customer needs by expanding its service portfolio with Dedicated VMware vCenter Server,” said Melanie Posey, Research VP at IDC. “This new offering adds depth to the current managed virtualisation lineup, enabling customers to augment their on-site VMware deployments with Rackspace-managed private VMware environments in Rackspace datacentres. Rackspace runs one of the largest VMware environments, in addition to operating the largest OpenStack-based cloud, giving the infrastructure support expertise to help its customers on their journey to the hybrid cloud."
