Rackspace Strengthens Enterprise Services for EMEA Customers With Launch of Critical Sites for Extreme Mission-Critical Deployments
Rackspace, the service leader in the cloud, today announces the European launch of its Critical Sites service. Designed to serve customers whose online presence is ‘extremely mission-critical’, Critical Sites delivers enterprise-level web hosting solutions and customer-facing applications and web services.
The Critical Sites offering drills into the application layer to deliver mission-critical support for clients’ most important websites and applications. Critical Sites customers receive access to a suite of performance management tools built to gain real-time visibility of the end user experience. The tools are designed to increase peak application performance and availability so that the customer’s infrastructure functions at the optimal level to support the business.
One of the initial Rackspace clients to utilize the Critical Sites service is BlackLine Systems, a provider of enterprise-class financial ‘close process’ applications delivered through an On Demand SaaS platform. Founded in 2001, BlackLine provides applications that automate the entire financial close process to help improve financial controls for companies.
“BlackLine is responsible for confidential financial data for some of the largest companies in the world,” said Mario Spanicciati, executive vice president of operations, BlackLine. “The Rackspace Critical Sites Service helps BlackLine deliver a reliable, high performance application to our global client base. The Critical Sites service has successfully extended our team’s capabilities and helped us to ensure that our SLAs are met.”
Critical Sites differs from Rackspace’s existing services in several ways. A team of web-scale engineers delivers service designed to give deep insights into application performance with scheduled analysis reviews for applications, infrastructure and architectures. In addition, Critical Sites provides customers with a sophisticated set of tools for advanced application and website monitoring and simulated load testing. This mission critical service also features a separate service level agreement (SLA), which includes a five-minute notification of events guarantee and a 100% Production Platform uptime guarantee.
“We are witnessing a revolution in how businesses choose to buy and consume IT. Where in the past, organisations ran their own entire IT operation; increasingly they are choosing to buy IT as a service from firms like Rackspace,” said Rackspace SVP David Kelly. “Today, customers like Mazda and Hawaiian Airlines are asking us to help with their most critical IT infrastructures – including those sites and applications that they have traditionally regarded as too precious to outsource. To address that need, we have created our Critical Sites service offering mission-critical, enterprise-grade hosting.”
The Critical Sites service has been available to US-based customers since October last year and we’ve welcomed customers including Mazda, Blackline Systems and Hawaiian Airlines who all rely on Critical Sites to keep their mission critical sites up and running. Demand for the Critical Sites service continues to grow, reflecting the importance of having great tools and engineers available to help deliver a superior user experience to customers.
With over 10 years of experience managing mission-critical websites and applications backed by Rackspace’s renowned Fanatical Support(R), the new European Critical Sites service is specifically designed for customers focused on optimising end-user experience and online transactions; the need to avoid site/application issues related to break & fix times; and also companies that need to decrease customer resources required for developing and maintaining their website or application.
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud hosting platform. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support (R) to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. In 2010, Rackspace was recognised by the Sunday Times Best Places to Work and Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the sixth year in a row. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk
