Managing Private Clouds

It seems every organization sets its sights on ‘the cloud’. The question is, do they know why? To answer that question, we spoke with Kaushik Balasubramanian, senior director of product development at Rackspace.

Kaushik says that businesses are looking to get out of the data-center business and the associated rising costs of managing their own infrastructure. Many of these businesses are looking for someone else to manage their workloads. For most of these customers, the cloud is a clear way to offload these IT responsibilities, so they can focus on their core business.

However, not all workloads are easily portable to the public cloud due to restrictions around compliance, security, economics, expense of migration or the cost of re-architecting the workloads. Rackspace has found that businesses facing these hurdles are choosing the private cloud as their preferred location to host their workloads.

Rackspace offers a full portfolio of managed private cloud offerings on top of the leading technologies, including VMware. This multi-cloud management includes the expertise to operate clouds at scale for customers with industry-leading uptime and Rackspace’s Fanatical Support. So, what does that mean for customers?

According to Kaushik, private cloud as a service, in the case of Rackspace’s Private Cloud powered by VMware, means maximizing a business’ VMware investment, helping them build, operate and manage their environment so they can focus on running their business.

And being VMware Cloud Verified guarantees a consistent architecture to enable seamless workload mobility and support for every endpoint in the organization, whether hosted at Rackspace, in a colocation facility or on customers’ premises. This ensures that workloads run in the best-fit location. Rackspace’s Fanatical Support for VMware Cloud on AWS also allows the company to support customers’ VMware workloads on Amazon’s cloud.

A consistent cloud architecture as indicated by the VMware Cloud Verified badge signals to Rackspace and VMware customers that Rackspace is providing the complete VMware Cloud Infrastructure as a service to customers, ensuring they can experience the same level of performance and security provided as a service by Rackspace as they may experience in their own data center.

What does the program mean to Rackspace?

“First, the branding and differentiation are important to Rackspace, as this is a premier designation that very few providers have,” says Kaushik. “Not only can we leverage over a decade of experience hosting VMware’s various technology solutions, we now have a consistent architecture to deploy our private clouds and managed services regardless of where the workloads will perform best. We can focus our attention on the workload and that brings the customer real value,” he added.

Kaushik offered some advice for organizations new to incorporating a private cloud in their infrastructure. “First, define what you want to gain from moving the cloud, then find a partner – not a vendor – who understands your business goals and can collaborate with you on that journey. They should help you evaluate all the options and make it predictable, and you should negotiate the level of control and choice you want, as well as the roles you want the service provider to play when you move to the cloud.”

“These should all be in sync with what the business is already doing in their own data center. If you are global, look for a provider like Rackspace that has a global, multi-cloud footprint and capabilities. Understand that your business does not have to be married to a single type of cloud. Multi-cloud partners such as Rackspace can help your business determine the best mix of public and private infrastructure and which workloads are appropriate for each. Finally, if you’re interested in VMware technologies, make sure your partner of choice is VMware Cloud Verified.”

Read more about the VMware-Rackspace partnership.