At the same time, the industry is putting pressure on IT leaders to respond to the changing market and to drive innovation. In all, they’re being forced to be more nimble and to do more with less.

At EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas next week, you’ll hear how joint solutions from Rackspace and EMC are powering this transformation and helping enterprise IT leaders meet these challenges head on through a hybrid mix of cloud and dedicated infrastructure.

Rackspace and EMC^® have a long-standing partnership through which we offer enterprise-grade storage solutions to our growing roster of customers. At EMC World, we’ll detail how we join forces with EMC to provide solutions including Dedicated Hosting, RackConnect^® and Managed Virtualization. We’ll also showcase our disaster-recovery-related solutions and the addition of EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to our Dedicated Storage portfolio.

Rackspace and EMC also share a vision of openness. We’re both dedicated to building services on open technologies – Rackspace is a founder of OpenStack and EMC joined the OpenStack Foundation last year.

As the industry makes the move to the cloud, and specifically clouds built on open technologies, we’re here to help no matter where you are in the journey with solutions that enable you to solve IT challenges.

As an industry service leader, we’re in the unique position to offer customized enterprise IT solutions leveraging the cloud and through our great partnership with EMC. And we back them up with our award-winning brand of customer service, Fanatical Support^®.

Be sure to join us at EMC World next week for an engaging breakout session; and be sure to swing by our booth (No. 527) for games, giveaways and most importantly to learn more about how Rackspace and EMC can help you transform your business into the cloud.

Migrating to the cloud can create new savings, change the way you think about costs and provide scalability benefits. Public cloud providers deploy distributed, shared commodity servers and keep them up to date and supported to provide the best quality at the lowest price. The need to build or run a data center is eliminated, as is the energy invested in upgrading and updating software and hardware. Instead, the cloud vendor handles these chores on your behalf.

From a business perspective, moving to the cloud reduces the total cost of ownership by automating functions and hands-on processes while offering opportunities for significant process improvements. The cloud also reduces the need to recruit and maintain new in-house talent – Rackspace has experts in security, systems administration, virtualization, storage and more, and we offer expertise on-demand by making them available as needed.

Successfully lowering the cost of ownership requires an understanding of your own software architecture, the capabilities of cloud providers and accounting and management changes that could result from switching applications to the cloud. The truth is that cloud-related savings are not just one-time net from offloading procurement and management responsibilities from in-house IT. A shift to cloud computing brings a near-immediate ease of deployment and, in the long run, a better understanding of your IT landscape.

For more on TCO and the cloud, download the white paper “How the Cloud Reshapes TCO Analysis” now.

At face value, “saving money” by moving to the cloud means freeing up internal resources – like time and dollars – that were formerly dedicated to maintaining infrastructure, and instead reallocating them to higher-value activities such as research and development. Cloud providers often deploy low-cost commodity hardware with a layer of software-based management, which allows for many customized configurations. Because of this, moving to the cloud will often increase the return on your technology investment.

To calculate your cloud ROI, you’ll need to consider factors that are relevant to your enterprise application portfolio and specific computing needs:

First, your ROI analysis should take several broad considerations into account, including the cost per unit of computing power; the tradeoff of the amount of labor necessary to redesign applications that need to operate in a cloud environment; and intangibles such as time.

Moving to the cloud also adds new factors into the ROI equation that require thinking beyond the realm of items like capital acquisition, licensing of software and depreciation. For example, users only pay for what they use with a cloud platform, and you can see exactly what the power is costing you through the transparency of a cloud provider’s interface. Another prime cost benefit of the cloud’s economy of scale is the ability to scale up and down quickly, across a number of investments.

Cloud computing can create a significant return on investment, affording energy, licensing and administrative costs, and it frees up capital and personnel to innovate on new ideas quickly. Moving to the cloud is a transformational investment, in every sense of the word – but it’s a move that many of today’s organizations find compelling.

For more on the ROI in the cloud, download the white paper “Understanding Cloud ROI Factors” now.

Subcontracting internal business functions can serve as a catalyst for major growth by reducing the cost of capital expenditures, such as office space, software and hardware. And while it can also help the brightest minds in your organization spend more time innovating and less time maintaining; outsourcing comes with risks.

At Rackspace, we’ve built our culture on mitigating the risks of outsourced IT by providing great customer service, repeatable best practices and software built from the ground-up. Our Fanatical Support, which includes phone or live-chat services 24 hours per day and a one-hour hardware-replacement guarantee, has helped us become the optimal solution in managed cloud hosting. It also can help you put the concerns of outsourcing IT to rest.

Outsourcing has become a more common practice over the years, but there’s still plenty to keep a CIO awake at night. It may be difficult to imagine relinquishing control of your computing infrastructure, which is absolutely critical to everything you do. Outsourcing brings with it a stream of questions without concrete answers: How does the outsourcing provider handle security? How seriously will they take the security of your specific IT infrastructure? How does the outsourcing provider handle problems and can they provide any evidence or references of how they have handled issues in the past?

Security, lack of operating experience, non-responsiveness and inflexibility are only some of the concerns that an outsourced IT vendor should address. At Rackspace, our systems, tools and Fanatical Support have enabled us to offer dependable outsourced IT for more than 13 years. If you’re considering outsourcing, here’s a handy checklist to follow, plus how we at Rackspace address each item:

Rackspace offers a seamless and customized managed hosting experience that reduces the risk of outsourcing IT. We understand that outsourcing IT is a substantial shift in behavior and resource allocation for many of our customers, and we’re here to guide you every step of the way. At Rackspace, that’s our specialty.

For more in IT outsourcing, download the white paper “A Matter Of Trust” now.

In my last article I introduced the concept of hybrid hosting and then laid out three scenarios where hybrid provided value. Hopefully your curiosity was piqued and you are considering a move into a virtualized environment. Gather up your team, it is time to ask some questions.

Questions Worth Asking

Potential cloud outsourcing scenarios are infinite. To pursue this concept further requires internal analysis. Find out what your pain points are, define risk levels and, if possible, get a solid grasp on your true cost of downtime. Knowing how much you lose for every hour of downtime helps you properly scope out your hosting costs. When planning for the introduction of hybrid hosting into your infrastructure, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• How well do you understand your current application environment? Ask for internal utilization reports that provide historical traffic and hardware performance statistics. Data points to gather include peak concurrent users, average and peak bandwidth requirements, storage needs, IOPS requirements, database performance metrics, network segmentation and licensing requirements, among others.
• Do any regulatory or industry requirements need to be adhered to? Isolation is often required for compliance to standards such as PCI or HIPAA. They may also forbid the use of multi-tenant infrastructure.
• Are all of the applications currently running certified or supported by their vendors to run in a virtualized environment? In some cases, software companies will not provide support if their application is installed on a virtualized platform.
• Do you understand your current hardware environment? Server reports can be run to determine historical and average metrics such as processor, memory and disk utilization. Servers running at low utilization are excellent virtualization candidates. It also helps to know the factors that cause spikes in CPU and memory use.
• Has a budget been defined for this project? A hosting provider should work with you to help design a system that optimizes your investment while adhering to your technical and financial needs. Many options are available and scope creep gets expensive quickly if those needs aren’t clearly defined. This is another reason why knowing your cost of downtime is important.

In Conclusion

A hybrid configuration provides the security features, performance and customization of dedicated hardware along with the cost savings, utility and bursting aspects that cloud technology offers. This combination of cloud and dedicated hosting can help businesses of all sizes, with the caveat that while cloud technology may benefit

everyone, it is not meant for everything. Figuring out how to efficiently implement a hybrid platform is based on a number of business-specific factors. Finding a trusted, experienced cloud provider is key to helping you discover how hybrid best fits into your business.

When we talk about hybrid hosting, we talk about the combination of customer-dedicated servers and public cloud infrastructure used in parallel to meet a hosting objective. When used correctly, hybrid hosting can provide the security features, performance and customization of dedicated hardware along and couple it with the cost savings, utility and bursting aspects that cloud technology offers. How best to leverage this technology combination will be dictated by your specific business, industry/regulatory requirements, application capabilities and budget, among other things.

Let’s get started with an introduction to hybrid hosting and three use case examples.

What Is Hybrid Hosting?

Various marketing campaigns have helped increase public awareness of the cloud, but marketing speak has also inadvertently generated confusion and misperceptions about what the cloud is, and what it isn’t. Let’s set the record straight with this glossary:

• Public Cloud Hosting: The hosting of content that resides on a shared/multitenant infrastructure that customers purchase as a service. Customers may have administrative access to complete virtual private servers (also referred to as virtual machines or VMs), or they may control content through a portal and not have actual access to the server operating system. Billing is usually a utility-based, month-to-month commitment with no long-term contractual obligation.
• Dedicated Hosting: Content is hosted on physical servers that are dedicated to the customer. This can range from pure colocation — where customers procure and install the equipment, and support the content — to a fully managed service, where customers lease the equipment and own the content responsibilities, and the service provider installs and supports the network and server hardware. Pricing is usually based on the number of devices and other technologies that are deployed. Contract terms can range from 12 months to 36 months or longer. Customers pay for the hardware that is deployed regardless of how much it is used.
• Private Cloud Hosting: Content hosted on virtualized servers that run on customer-dedicated hypervisors instead of multi-tenant devices. Private cloud is also referred to as “Dedicated Virtualization Hosting” (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, etc.).
• Hybrid Hosting: The combination of dedicated and/or private cloud hosting with public cloud hosting.

Why Consider A Hybrid Solution?

A common perception about virtualization is that moving from physical to virtual servers can lower your hosting costs. In many cases this is correct. There is also the perception that cloud hosting is still an emerging technology that lacks proper security features and therefore is not ready for mission-critical applications. In some cases, this is also correct. However, when properly planned, a hybrid configuration can help lower your costs without increasing your security risk or decreasing application performance. By working with a provider that offers both cloud and dedicated hosting — and the ability to securely connect the two — you can experience the “cure for the common cloud.” After conducting a proper internal analysis, you should be able to identify which of your servers can be virtualized, which need to remain physical and which can be consolidated or eliminated.

Reselling Hybrid Services

Consider the real-world case of an advertising agency taking advantage of a hybrid solution. Before coming to Rackspace, this company supported internal hardware and outsourced parts of its customer-facing infrastructure. It managed multiple contracts with multiple vendors with varying levels of support available, sometimes none at all. As the business grew, the company found teams distracted from focusing on core business objectives. Its clients were requesting project services of varying lengths, so paying for hardware not in use during slow periods was becoming expensive. Because its customers ranged from global brand names to niche players, almost all of them required additional capabilities and security features. Furthermore, sites need be 100 percent available when launching marketing campaigns or new products. A hybrid configuration can enable a customer like this to front online properties with public cloud web servers that can be protected by a dedicated physical firewall and supported by physical database and application clusters. Some projects can run completely on the public cloud while others dictate the need to run on a private cloud.

Large Physical To Virtual Migration/Consolidation

Hybrid configurations are not limited by scale. In the example below, several cabinets worth of servers and storage in a customer data center moved off-site while secure VPN tunneling enables access to internal and external applications. By deploying dedicated hypervisors and the necessary supporting infrastructure (high-speed storage, clustered databases, network security, etc.), much of the internal support burden is removed, internal resources are made available for other uses and operating expenses are lowered (power and cooling, support costs, etc.). Once migrated into our facility, Rackspace provides industry-leading support, network and power SLAs and hardware replacement guarantees, all for a monthly fee with no massive upfront capital expenditure. This example can be expanded to hundreds of servers or more; the benefits are consistent.

Modest Entry Points

Hybrid hosting can help businesses of all sizes, not just those looking for massive consolidation or hardware downsizing. A very basic configuration can move your business into a hybrid cloud. Take, for example, customer-facing public cloud servers connected to a dedicated physical database server. The firewall protects the

cloud servers while facilitating secure network communication between them and the database server. Rackspace provides its RackConnect™ solution for this secure network connection between dedicated and public cloud infrastructure. This combination provides the best of both worlds: public cloud flexibility and utility combined with a more secure dedicated infrastructure and server hardware.

In Conclusion

These three examples barely scratch the surface of the myriad scenarios out there. The main point is that there are plenty of reasons to move into a hybrid hosting configuration, including the benefits of virtualization with the security and performance of dedicated gear. Cloud is getting most of the hype these days, but many businesses still prefer to work with technologies and vendors they are familiar with. Fortunately, the Rackspace product portfolio can help no matter where in the technology adoption spectrum you fall. From dedicated to cloud; proprietary to open source; and dev, test, staging and product, there are options for you.

A Quick Overview of the Rackspace Managed Virtualization Portal
This video offers a basic overview of how to access the Managed Virtualization Console along with a quick look at the features.

How To Order a New VM from the Rackspace Managed Virtualization Portal
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Reviewing Performance Stats in a Rackspace Managed Virtualization Portal
This video discusses how to review the performance statistics for your hypervisor, cluster and VM, and how to resize your VM via the MyRackspace Portal.

Reviewing Options and Tabs in a Rackspace Managed Virtualization Portal
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