Rackspace Adds Critical Sites Support For Enterprises

Rackspace Hosting has launched its Critical Sites service in Europe. The offering has been available in the US since last December for customers with Web serving needs for mission critical applications.

This is a departure for Rackspace from its current services because it offers full-time, remote system monitoring. A team of engineers, using tools supplied to the customer, watch over the performance and also offer insights into application performance through scheduled analysis reviews for applications, infrastructure and architectures.

Monitoring Tools For Customer Access

Critical Sites provides customers with a 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 percent Production Platform uptime guarantee.

Lew Moorman (pictured), chief strategy officer for Rackspace, told eWEEK Europe, “The SLA is something we work out with the customer based on their architecture – so if they don’t want to go HA [high availability] everything, they don’t have to go HA everything. We validate their architecture and then we work out an SLA based on the redundancy we can count on and the stability of the application.”

The company claims over ten years of experience managing mission-critical sites and applications but the new European Critical Sites service has more specific targets. The company said it is aiming at customers focused on optimising their end-users’ experience and online transactions; those who need to avoid site or application problems related to “break and fix” times; and companies that wish to decrease customer resources required for developing and maintaining their website or application.

“We want to offer a world class service at – compared with IBM – extremely reasonable rates and the way we do that is by making it a productised service and the way we do that is by specialising,” Moorman said. “We’re a Red Hat [Linux] shop and a Windows shop and we want to keep it really focused on the things we’re really good at.”

That means Critical Sites will not be handling legacy applications but will concentrate on newer Web apps that are replacing these older mission critical applications.

“We’ve architected our cloud to make it easier to do that kind of thing then we put services around it,” he added. “We want the mainstream market to be able to use the cloud and to run their mission [critical] applications on the cloud.”