hybrid cloud

Alan Perkins recently joined Rackspace as Director of Product and Technology, Asia Pacific. In this two-part series, he discusses why he joined Rackspace. In Part I, he highlighted the company and its values.

Is capacity planning dead? Will one platform satisfy all future IT initiatives? How much does downtime truly cost your company?

The IT industry continues to evolve. Cloud startups, innovative technologies and new business models are disrupting traditional IT and business economics alike. At CA World 2013 in Las Vegas last month, we had the opportunity to share industry insight from our cloud customers and highlight our approach to helping customers with their journeys to the cloud. Our key themes, Hybrid Cloud, DevOps, Service Oriented Architectures and emerging technologies like OpenStack, map directly to CA Technologies’ global strategy.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately from customers who are frustrated by the limitations of one-size-fits all clouds, whether they’re based on public cloud or private cloud or bare metal servers. These customers want each of their workloads to run where it runs best and most cost-effectively. And that’s what we at Rackspace work to deliver to them, through our hybrid cloud.

Many CIOs still look cautiously toward the cloud – and rightly so. For large enterprises, making the move to cloud can be quite an undertaking and involve decision-makers from across the organization. The move also may require completely rethinking the way IT is provisioned. Despite the effort involved, it’s hard to ignore the payoff and long-term benefits of cloud. In the article 5 Reasons Cloud Computing is Enterprise Ready, we explore the top reasons CIOs need to consider cloud in their long-term IT strategy. Here are few intriguing stats from the article:

When I heard that Rackspace has been recognized as a market leader in Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, North America for the second consecutive year, I was reminded of Frank Sinatra crooning “love is lovelier the second time around.” It’s a great honor once; but twice is even nicer.

Academic and scientific research often involves the construction of mathematical and numerical models to solve scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these complex and intensive computational models have been implemented on super computers or high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.  These models are difficult to setup and operate, and can create a painful experience for researchers who often have to wait in a long line to use their university’s super computing infrastructure, whether it’s for a few hours or a few days.

What is a hybrid solution?

We often say that the cloud is for everyone, but not for everything. Between social networks, mobile apps and entertainment, we all use some type of cloud-based service. However, SaaS operators who are anxious to move off of legacy hardware and on to the cloud may find that due to regulatory or industry constraints, parts of their architecture must remain in a dedicated environment. For example, a finance-related service could run its website front end, file storage and test/dev in the cloud, but due to federal regulations, it could be unable to move sensitive customer databases or shopping cart functions to the public cloud. This is a hurdle that prevents many businesses from adopting any type of cloud asset.

In every conversation I have with enterprise cloud customers they use the words public, private and hybrid to describe the projects or phases of projects they’re considering. It’s fantastic that people are finally thinking about how they will use the different types of resources available. But this mindset of “many clouds” in your enterprise is flawed. I’m not the first person by a long shot to say this, but it bears repeating because most enterprises aren’t listening.