Rackspace To Offer Managed Cloud Services

Rackspace has launched managed cloud services and improved its service level agreements, saying that customers want a service provider that will manage the cloud for them.

All customers will get the basic “Managed Infrastructure” service, which includes support and advice from actual human cloud engineers, while some can pay more for a “Managed Operations” option in which Rackspace engineers will access the customers’ virtual servers to manage them on their behalf.

There is also a “developer+”option designed to provide a limited amount of managed cloud for a limited time required by development projects.

New customers need managed cloud

“We created the managed hosting sector of the market,” John Engates, global CTO of Rackspace told TechWeek Europe. “Now there’s an opportunity with managed cloud.”

Early adopters of the cloud would “take management on their shoulders,” said Engates, but those coming on board now prefer to have a partner that will take that pain and expense on for them, handling management and alerts and so on.

Rackspace already offered a lot of management, and service, compared with bare-bones services but customers have not been aware of it, said Engates. “We have always included the ability to get support but some customers didn’t see it”.

With support hidden, Rackspace seemed to compare unfavourably with Amazon Web Services or Google, he said but the new structure makes this clearer. To get a similar level of service on AWS, people need to acquire and train in-house experts or user a third party.

The Rackspace Managed Operations service itself comes in two levels, with a “Sysadmin” level offering support including application installs, while a “DevOps Automation” service will apparently match the DevOps trend and perform something Rackspace describes as “managing a cyustomer’s infrastructure as code”.

Rackspace is jockeying to position itself against the other cloud players, and has engaged advisors for a possible sale or merger. However, it is also exploring options to provide different services including offering bare-metal cloud hosts instead of virtual servers.

It’s business is reportedly booming, and the company has announced dedicated data centre space in the UK.

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