Rackspace Uses HPE GreenLake for Pay-As-You-Go Private Cloud

Rackspace teamed up with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to release two private cloud offerings billed as economically and architecturally flexible.

The cloud provider on Wednesday announced updates to its VMware-powered private cloud and Kubernetes private cloud. Both “as-a-service” clouds use HPE’s Greenlake Flex Capacity to create an on-demand consumption model. Rackspace says both are the first of their industry to offer pay-as-you go infrastructure with private cloud.

Rackspace’s Scott Crenshaw

Rackspace worked together with HPE in recent years, but Scott Crenshaw, Rackspace’s executive vice president of private clouds, tells Channel Partners that Wednesday’s announcement will have a special impact on cloud migration.

Crenshaw says businesses are coming down from a “wave of euphoria and naivety” about putting everything in public cloud.

“Sometimes the benefits were good, and sometimes they weren’t, but what companies learned is that it’s not so simple. It turned into a completely different approach being adopted by virtually every company,” Crenshaw said. “They’re evaluating their entire application portfolio workload by workload and asking themselves, ‘What is the optimal long-term platform for this workload?'”

This demand for a increased range and customization of workloads led to Rackspace’s launch of private cloud-as-a-service.

Crenshaw named four main advantages.

One is architecture and data control, and another benefit is strategic flexibility.

“This is one of the big pillars of private cloud strategy,” he said. “We allow customers to get the type of capacity they need where they need it when they need it.”

Crenshaw says customers will benefit from the “superior economics” of private cloud.

“With the newest offering, organizations can now leverage a utility-based managed VMware private cloud available on- and off-premises, allowing for greater flexibility and cost transparency,” said Ajay Patel, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud provider software.

Private cloud also allows for the last differentiation, which is an easier migration to the cloud.

“Because you can pick a legacy app and not have to re-factor it to get it onto the cloud platform. Typically with public cloud, you have to re-factor the application to make it reliable,” Crenshaw said.

Crenshaw says partners will find relevance and income preservation in a business world that is more than ever migrating to cloud.

“This is a way for partners to participate in the revenue streams associated with the move to cloud,” Crenshaw said. “By attracting more workloads, these offerings allow the partners to gain or reserve their strategic relevance to their customers.”

HPE recognized Rackspace as its 2018 Global Service Provider Partner of the Year on Monday.

“This is a partnership I had the pleasure to lead, working closely with senior HPE leaders including Antonio Neri and Ana Pinczuk. Together, our teams created industry firsts, joint offerings which innovate in ways that matter to enterprises,” Crenshaw wrote in a blog post. “There is no more satisfying outcome than to advance the capabilities of our joint customers through this partnership.

Rackspace also won a partner innovation award from VMware last month for integrating public clouds. The companies partnered to launch Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation last year.

Our own Lynn Haber is currently at the HPE Discover conference and has written about updates to the HPE GreenLake portfolio.