Rackspace announced the launch of Rackspace Colocation, a new service that allows customers to deploy their own hardware in Rackspace data centers. Leveraging resilient critical infrastructure, network, and on-ground support services, Rackspace is focused on delivering true transformation as a service across applications, data, security, and infrastructure. The new†Rackspace Colocation†offering enables organizations to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO), while improving scalability, strengthening disaster recovery capabilities, reducing application latency and helping IT meet stringent security and compliance requirements.
According to 451 Research, the colocation market will grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020. Enterprises are using colocation to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their TCO as they seek to optimize their IT portfolio across public and private clouds. Beyond the financial implications, businesses are also adopting colocation solutions to achieve geographic diversity, forge strategic low latency connections with cloud services providers, augment†disaster recovery strategies†and to ensure their workloads are running in facilities that meet specific security and compliance mandates.
“Enterprises need a colocation provider that can also be a trusted cloud adviser as they embark on their cloud journey,” said Henry Tran, general manager of managed hosting at Rackspace. “Rackspace is the only colocation provider that can offer customers a world-class colocation solution today, while also serving as the sole partner they will need in the long-term to migrate to and manage their public cloud, private cloud, managed hosting or bare metal platforms.”
Colocation serves as a bridge to managed hosting and the cloud for organizations with existing investments in on-premises hardware. These organizations find significant value in employing colocation solutions to solve specific business needs without incurring the expense of decommissioning their own infrastructure. Rather than refactoring applications to operate in a new environment today, customers can simply “lift and shift” their mission-critical applications running on existing hardware into Rackspace data centers. While customer-owned infrastructure realizes its full book value off-premises, Rackspace professionals will develop and execute a longer-term digital transformation strategy.
Rackspace is uniquely positioned to provide solutions and services beyond traditional colocation, as customers are able to combine their colocation hardware with Rackspace managed services such as Managed Backup, shared storage arrays and other services.†With hundreds of highly qualified technical experts, Rackspace is also able to deliver an unmatched level of support and a Fanatical Experience for colocation customers.
Rackspace Colocation provides enterprises with several key features including:
- Improved Capacity Planning –†Simplified pricing allows customers to reserve the power their devices require by the kilowatt.
- Seamless Cross Connects†–†Customers can seamlessly scale into the public cloud, private cloud, managed hosting, third-party data center or Rackspace hosted environment with flexible connectivity solutions.
- “Smart Hands” Service Guarantee†–†Rackspace delivers a hands-on hardware service, which guarantees a response to a customer’s request within an hour and to complete the work within 24 hours.
- Enhanced Security and Reliability –†Rackspace offers a portfolio of secure, reliable data centers, which are all concurrently maintainable with at least N+1 redundancy across critical electrical and mechanical systems. These facilities also feature multiple security protocol, making Rackspace data centers among the most advanced in the industry.
- Robust Public Cloud Ecosystem –†Rackspace not only establishes direct connections between colocation customers and AWS, Azure, Google, and Alibaba clouds via RackConnect, it can also facilitate the migration of workloads to those platforms and help manage them.
Rackspace Colocation is a carrier-neutral offering with an average of 8 carriers per colocation data center. With this offering, customers can leverage Rackspace’s global data center footprint with locations in Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Northern New Jersey, Northern Virginia, San Jose, Hong Kong, London, Moscow, and Sydney.
