Rackspace and VMware strategically partner in the private Cloud space
Managed Cloud computing company, Rackspace has announced that it will begin offering its private Cloud powered by VMware vCloud in the fourth quarter of 2015 in Australia.
This collaboration follows Rackspace‘s reinvestment in its Sydney datacentres in May, including the development of a second datacentre and existing data hall expansion to assist with hosting new offerings such as VMware vCloud.
Rackspace private Cloud, powered by a dedicated VMware vCloud, is a single-tenant, hosted environment that aims to enable enterprises, portfolio companies, and Cloud resellers with the next step in their virtualisation journey by offering advanced automation, self-service, hosted catalogs and access to the vCloud API and vCloud Web portal.
By exposing the vCloud API, it claimed Rackspace allows customers to integrate a third-party orchestration tool and introduce policy-based governance. The offering also helps Australian businesses protect existing investments in VMware vCloud Director that they use on-premise.
VMware A/NZ director of vCloud Air, Dan McLean, said Rackspace is one of the company‘s largest managed service providers, it is pleased to expand its strategic relationship with Rackspace to help accelerate adoption of managed Cloud in A/NZ.
“Businesses who use Rackspace to handle infrastructure management free up valuable internal resources, which can then be redeployed into driving innovation and growth for their core business,” he said.
Rackspace A/NZ director and general manager, Angus Dorney, said continued growth in the A/NZ market has triggered the expansion and increase in the scope of services for mission critical applications capable of scaling to help meet the demands of customer workloads.
“IT has changed significantly over the last few years from a reactive, ‘keep-the-lights-on’ part of the business, to one that drives growth and innovation.
“Dedicated vCloud enables IT to offload maintenance and monitoring activities like backing up VMs, disaster recovery and OS patching to Rackspace, allowing in-house IT staff to focus on ways to deliver innovative products to the business,“ he added.
Rackspace global chief technology officer, John Engates, said managed Cloud is the overarching strategy for the company.
“What we’re seeing in this era of disruption is every company is really thinking about disrupting or being disrupted by the Cloud. They want to take advantage of the same tools, technologies, architectures and pace of innovation that start-ups born in the Cloud have,” he stated.
“We think managed Cloud is the right strategy at the right time, because the next wave of Cloud adopters aren’t those born in the Cloud computing space – they’re the bigger enterprises and the companies that want to build those Cloud connections into their products.”
Rackspace also announced it will soon be launching a Cloud Information Sharing Centre, sponsored by the Cloud Security Alliance. Rackspace chief security officer, Brian Kelly, will serve as co-chair for that group.
Kelly mentioned security is a key part of the move to the Cloud. He indicated that businesses that claim they can prevent security threats don’t understand the game.
“I would much rather set proper expectations that we need to prepare ourselves for attacks. We need to substitute the term prevent with deter and have a layered defensive strategy. It also means we need to invest disproportionally in our ability to detect and respond.
“People say security is one of the top three reasons they’re not moving to the Cloud but what I think is that they don’t mean security but uncertainty. There’s no visibility into what’s happening so they don’t know what else to call it but security,” he added.
