Rackspace rolls out new cloud services

BANGALORE, INDIA: Rackspace, the managed cloud company, has announced a new managed service model for delivering public cloud services that gives businesses and developers the help they need to design, manage, scale and grow their cloud operations.

In addition, Rackspace announced "developer +," a new programme for developers that offers essential services needed to build scalable applications. The programme enables developers to sample Rackspace Managed Cloud services and Fanatical Support.

Graham Weston, Rackspace co-founder and CEO, said: "The cloud market is evolving. More customers are looking for a trusted partner with specialised expertise to help manage their cloud. Rackspace is ideally positioned to lead this Managed Cloud segment of the market. Our new service levels will help businesses tap the power of the cloud without the pain of recruiting experts in dozens of complex technologies. We are the partner that will be with them every step of the way to make their cloud strategy successful."

Rackspace has rolled out two managed service levels: Managed Infrastructure and Managed Operations. Both service levels feature expertise at lower total cost than companies managing cloud operations on their own. Highlights include:

Managed Infrastructure- This new service level offers a package of benefits for customers. Customers will receive Rackspace's Fanatical Support.

Managed Operations- This service level provides customers with Fanatical Support and all the services included at the Managed Infrastructure level, and additional proactive features such as a dedicated account manager, 24x7 availability monitoring and response, and management of common operating systems and application stacks.

Rackspace offers two approaches to deliver its Managed Operations service level to customers:

· In one approach, Rackspace logs into the customer's servers to manage and, when necessary, help fix them.

· The other approach leverages Rackspace DevOps Automation Service, which manages a customer's infrastructure as code, to help it achieve faster deployments and streamlined operations.

In addition, monitoring and enabling customers to have real-time visibility into their infrastructure is an essential part of the Rackspace Managed Cloud strategy. Customers on both Managed Cloud service levels will now receive Rackspace Cloud Monitoring at no charge. For Managed Operations customers, cloud engineers will also watch the customer's monitors and respond 24x7 to alerts.

Rackspace's service levels provide additional value and offer a service level agreement that is not available with other providers.

This programme, now only in limited availability for some Managed Operations customers, provides a 10x accelerated SLA credit during these planned events.

Managed Infrastructure offers a service level rate of $0.005 per GB/hr RAM, with a $50 per month minimum, plus standard infrastructure rates.

Managed Operations offers a service level rate of $0.020 per GB/hr RAM, with a $500 per month minimum, plus standard infrastructure rates.