Australian Businesses Will Soon Benefit from Dedicated vCloud

Angus Dorney

Rackspace will begin offering its Private Cloud powered by VMware vCloud® in the fourth quarter of 2015 in Australia, giving customers complete control of their vCloud environments.

This collaboration comes hot on the heels of Rackspace reinvestment in its Sydney data centres in May, including the development of a second data centre and existing data hall expansion to assist with hosting new offerings such as VMware vCloud®.

Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware vCloud (Dedicated vCloud) is a single-tenant, hosted environment that enables enterprises, portfolio companies, and cloud resellers to take 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.

“Rackspace is one of VMware’s largest managed service providers, and we are pleased to expand our strategic relationship with them to help accelerate adoption of managed cloud in ANZ,” said Dan McLean, director of vCloud Air, ANZ at VMware. “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.”

Continued growth in the ANZ 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.

The entire environment is backed by Rackspace’s industry-leading 100 percent network uptime guarantee and one-hour hardware replacement guarantee. Critical for Australian businesses is the promise of Fanatical Support® all the way from the infrastructure to the operating system and application layers.

Rackspace offers Australian customers a single-tenant private cloud that includes physical hardware isolation from the firewall to the storage layer. This eliminates issues common to shared infrastructure, like the “noisy neighbour” effect, helping to increase security and performance.

Dedicated vCloud also enhances control. By exposing the vCloud API, Rackspace allows customers to integrate a third-party orchestration tool and introduce policy-based governance. Hosted catalogs and self-service are available via the vCloud stack. This helps central IT deliver services to business units more efficiently and quickly. It also maintains the governance that comes with offering only IT-approved images and vApps, meters compute usage, and controls VM size options and lease times.

Finally, this offering helps Australian businesses protect existing investments in VMware vCloud Director® that they use on-premise. Many Australian businesses may have already purchased compatible commercial-off-the-shelf software and tooled for the vCloud API. Dedicated vCloud allows them to extend their on-premise environments into a Rackspace data centre using public and private catalogs to synchronize images and vApps among their hybrid cloud environments. Customers don’t have to retool, reskill, relearn or change any of their existing technology.

Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware vCloud will be available later this year, but we would love to hear from businesses today that are interested in transitioning to this latest service offering. Click here for more information.