Rackspace Hybrid Cloud Expands Regions, Counters Amazon Web Services

Rackspace (RAX), a Top 100 Cloud Services Provider for 2013, has expanded its Rackspace Hybrid Cloud to the Northern Virginia (IAD) region, bringing the total global region count to five: Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, London and Sydney. In some ways, Rackspace is pushing into Amazon Web Services (AMZN) regions — perhaps trying to pull Amazon customers onto the Rackspace platform.

According to a Rackspace blog post, the hybrid cloud computing company isn’t slowing down. In fact, Rackspace said it’s currently building out another region, but wouldn’t state the location.

The company said all Rackspace infrastructure cloud products will be available in this new region, as well as any of the company’s global products. Additionally, customers in Rackspace’s IAD2 and IAD3 data centers can also leverage the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud through RackConnect, which aims to connect dedicated environments to the cloud.

Customers now have the option to provision cloud resources in the Northern Virginia region through the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel; using Python, Java, Ruby, .Net, node.js and PHP SDKs; directly via REST APIs; or with any OpenStack or third-party tools or applications that leverage those APIs, the company said.

Rackspace said pricing for its cloud products across all U.S. regions is the same for consistency. The company also noted that the new location has a close physical proximity to Amazon (AMZN)’s U.S. East region, providing an easier way to move data between the clouds. (We’re assuming from Amazon to Rackspace…)

In other hybrid cloud computing news, Savvis and VMware (VMW) at VMworld 2013 expanded their cloud partnership. Savvis leverage instances of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service in its North American data centers throughout the rest of 2013 and into 2014.