Rackspace Adds Private Cloud Hosting To Its Cloud Services

Rackspace Hosting this week unveiled its Private Cloud offering to provide customers the opportunity to build a hosted private computing cloud without sharing the equipment with other companies.

Under its Private Cloud, Rackspace will provide an IT infrastructure that is completely dedicated to a single customer and host it in one of the company's nine data centers worldwide, said John Engates, Rackspace CTO.

"It's not shared by anyone else," Engates said.

Cloud computing is a way to dynamically combine and scale server, storage, networking and other resources outside of a company's own traditional data center for such purposes as remote data storage or running Software-as-a-Service.

A company can build an internal or private cloud, which allows those resources to be available for its own purposes, or can use external or public clouds, which are available over the Internet.

Customer interest in private clouds is growing, but the expense of building one can be high, Engates said.

"VMware, EMC and Cisco are all singing the message that companies should build private clouds in their data centers," he said. "But instead of forcing our customers to build their own private clouds, we are helping them. We'll build it and manage it. Customers can tap into our expertise to get all the benefits of a private cloud but with the added benefit of management."

Rackspace's Private Cloud is a single-tenant architecture that offers customers maximum control and security of their hosted IT infrastructure, Engates said. It is fully scalable and flexible, and supports SAS (Statement on Auditing Standards) 70 compliance, he said.

The service, which includes virtual servers configured using VMware, comes in three primary configurations that differ in the amount of processing power, memory, SAN storage and bandwidth.

For a configuration of 10 or more servers, Rackspace estimates customers can save as much as 35 percent of the cost of deploying the infrastructure, with further savings expected from the ability to quickly provision, deploy and remove virtualized servers.

Rackspace is primarily targeting midrange customers with the new service, Engates said.

"Really small companies are happy with a dedicated server, or with a public cloud," he said. "The largest companies already can build their own private clouds. Our target really is midrange companies who are looking to expand but their data centers are full, or who are looking for help to expand."

Private Cloud is the latest in a range of hosting services offered by Rackspace.

The company also offers Cloud Servers, an on-demand virtual server service similar to Amazon's EC2; Cloud Files, an online storage service similar to Amazon's S3 service; and Cloud Sites, an online Web site hosting service.