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Rackspace announces five hybrid cloud enhancements
Thu, 29th Aug 2019
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Rackspace is unleashing five new enhancements to its hybrid cloud portfolio to provide more access to the tools enterprises need to manage applications on hybrid architectures.

Portfolio enhancements 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.

According to Rackspace EVP and GM of solutions and services, Vikas Gurungunti, the world is amid a major hybrid cloud movement. More than $1 trillion is being spent on cloud and associated IT services.

“Our new set of advanced hybrid cloud services, backed by our industry leading service blocks framework, provide customers the expertise necessary to help navigate through their hybrid cloud journeys, from determining their cloud objectives through transforming and securing their application environments using containers and cloud-native technologies.

The company says customers will be able to use the expanded portfolio to offload the complexity of deploying, integrating and managing applications with the services they need to empower their hybrid cloud strategies.

Rackspace says the new services also further customers' ability to benefit from public cloud's scalability and flexibility.

The hybrid cloud portfolio is also managed through AIOps technology. This technology proactively monitors and manages the platform in the background to identify potential technical challenges. It also 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.

Rackspace outlines its new offerings:

Managed VMware Cloud on AWS: Customers are now able to leverage VMware HCX and Managed Guest OS Services for their VMware Cloud 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 modernise 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 customers 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 organisation, 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.