-Rackspace® Hosting has bolstered its Cloud hosting capabilities with two new products to better serve the Enterprise market. Cloud Connect offers customers a seamless integration of The Rackspace Cloud and dedicated hosting. The new Critical Sites service level provides advanced monitoring for customers who rely on their websites and applications as mission critical components of their business. With these products and others, Rackspace gives businesses the power to choose compute platforms and service offerings to best meet their unique IT needs.
“Businesses of all sizes and budgets now have access to Enterprise-class infrastructure, backed by our industry-leading Fanatical Support”
“Businesses of all sizes and budgets now have access to Enterprise-class infrastructure, backed by our industry-leading Fanatical Support,” said John Engates, chief technology officer for Rackspace. “The recent additions to our portfolio, including Cloud Connect and Critical Sites, make logical business sense for those looking for best-in-class hosted solutions as alternatives to expensive and inefficient on-premise IT infrastructure.”
Cloud Connect
Cloud Connect reinforces the strength of Rackspace’s broad portfolio of services by allowing customers to combine the scalability and cost benefits of The Rackspace Cloud with the added security and configurability of dedicated managed hosting. Cloud Connect, which was released from beta at the beginning of November, is the first service to seamlessly link cloud computing and traditional hosting, together with enhanced user control and security. As an extension of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support®, Cloud Connect customers will interact with a single account team and will not be charged for bandwidth within the Cloud Connect infrastructure.
Rackspace customer Major League Gaming (MLG), which operates one of the largest online professional video game leagues in the world supporting million of players worldwide, has already taken advantage of Cloud Connect to meet its technology needs. MLG is the dominant media property exclusively targeting the approximately 40 million consumers in North America who have a passion for playing video games as a competitive social activity.
“As a growing company with millions of users, we have significant scaling requirements that are being addressed very successfully with Rackspace’s Hybrid Hosting approach,” stated Brian Corrigan, CTO, Major League Gaming. “We wanted the best of both worlds – dedicated physical hardware for our performance-intensive applications as well as the on-demand scalability provided by The Rackspace Cloud to drive our high-traffic live events. This combination allows us to continually tailor our environment to deliver the best experience for our gamers. As the largest online professional video game league in the world, we face the same challenges as many traditional enterprises who are looking to maximize their online investments while at the same time gaining greater architectural flexibility.”
Critical Sites
Rackspace has also unveiled Critical Sites, an extension of Fanatical Support® into the application layer designed to deliver mission-critical support for clients’ most important websites and applications. Critical Sites is specifically designed for clients who are dependent upon an online presence to drive customer acquisition/retention, revenue generation, customer service, and the building of brand equity. This new service level offers the technical expertise and enterprise tools to help maximize infrastructure performance, proactively identify issues before they affect the end user experience and quickly address any problems that do occur. A dedicated team of Web Scale Engineers will work with customers through all environment lifecycle stages to ensure mission-critical sites and applications have optimal performance and uptime.
Every Critical Sites customer receives access to a suite of Advanced Performance Management tools to gain real-time visibility of the end user experience. The tools are designed to increase peak application performance and availability, and ensure that the infrastructure functions at the optimal level to support the business. In recognition of the importance of mission-critical websites and applications to its customers, Critical Sites is backed by an advanced SLA with available double payout on select SLA terms.
With the addition of Cloud Connect and Critical Sites, Rackspace is able to meet the evolving needs of its growing customer base. As the home of Fanatical Support®, Rackspace continually and successfully strives to expand its portfolio of product offerings to bring its customers a world-class service experience.
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support(R) to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com
