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Rackspace Adds Hybrid Cloud Capabilities to 'Unlock the Best of Both Worlds'
The cloud computing vendor aims to help end users meet business goals, and channel partners are key to the efforts.
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VMWARE VMWORLD — More vendors are debuting hybrid cloud platforms as the combination of public and private clouds becomes all the rage among enterprises.
This week, Rackspace joined the ranks of providers enhancing their hybrid cloud capabilities “to meet customers where they are” in their journeys away from legacy infrastructure, as Ramakant Pandrangi, vice president of product management, private cloud, told Channel Futures.
“We’re focused on helping customers meet business goals,” Pandrangi said.
To that end, Rackspace said this week at VMworld that it has added the following services to help organizations – often through indirect partners such as managed service providers and system integrators – bring together disparate systems:
Managed VMware Cloud on AWS – Organizations now may use VMware HCX and Managed Guest OS Services for their VMware Cloud on AWS workloads, with managed external storage coming soon. This new product gives end users a hybrid interconnect, enabling application migration and mobility between VMware-based private clouds and VMware Cloud on AWS. It also offers increased storage scalability; users don’t have to buy additional hosts, and they have access to Rackspace technical support for operating systems on their VMs. Partners may offer this service too.
Advanced Kubernetes and container services – Rackspace now provides professional and managed services to incorporate container architectures into cloud strategies. Channel partners may provision these services alongside Rackspace as well.
Advanced cloud-native support – Rackspace infrastructure engineers will work with the end user’s in-house IT team (and with channel partners) as organizations adopt cloud-native capabilities.
Rackspace Managed Security (RMS) Service Blocks – The portfolio now includes Proactive Detection and Response and Compliance Assistance services to VMware private cloud users. Meanwhile, Rackspace is expanding RMS Service Blocks for Managed Public Cloud customers to support native security tools on all the leading public clouds, starting with AWS. The functionality will be part of the Rackspace Managed Security portfolio and will provide one portal for viewing activity. Service Blocks give end users short-term help in specific areas of digital transformation. Partners may team up with Rackspace here as well.
Integration and API Management Assessment – This product evaluates the state of application and data integration across the entire organization, including hybrid IT deployments. Rackspace then provides integration recommendations and partners can be part of the process.
Rackspace built its hybrid cloud portfolio on AIOps technology, which monitors and manages the platform in the background to identify potential technical challenges. The new product also oversees the volumes of tickets sent each day, and groups alerts to allow for faster incident resolution.
Again, MSPs, integrators and other partner types can team up with Rackspace to provide each of these services.
“We enable partners to work with us to deliver that for customer and we do it across a wide range of platforms,” Pandrangi said.
The hybrid cloud opportunity is ripe.
According to Forrester Research, in a report commissioned by Intel, 58% of infrastructure decision-makers in North America and Europe are using public cloud and have a hybrid strategy in place. Another 42% will migrate traditional business apps to cloud platforms.
Earlier this year, Gartner’s Santhosh Rao, senior director analyst, dubbed hybrid IT as “the standard in 2019.”
“Hybrid architectures will become the footprints that enable organizations to extend beyond their data centers and into cloud services across multiple platforms,” Rao said.
Indeed, Forrester recently found that 74% of enterprises now describe their strategies as hybrid.
Rackspace is taking aim at the opportunity.
“A hybrid strategy allows customers to unlock the best of both worlds,” Pandrangi said.
Vikas Gurugunti, executive vice president and general manager of solutions and services at Rackspace, agreed.
“We are in the midst of a significant hybrid cloud movement with over $1 trillion of spend allocated toward cloud and associated IT services,” Gurugunti said.
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