Expands Private Cloud-as-a-Service portfolio to change the economics of private and multi-cloud, and accelerate enterprise transformation

/EIN News/ -- SAN ANTONIO, June 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rackspace® today announced that it has expanded its private cloud-as-a-service portfolio by collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to launch Rackspace Kubernetes®-as-a-Service (RKaaS) with pay per use infrastructure in a private cloud environment, an industry first. With this offering, enterprises can consume Rackspace Kubernetes¹-as-a-Service with pay as you go economics, elastic infrastructure and simplified IT, in a private cloud environment located in their datacenter, a colocation facility or a datacenter managed by Rackspace.

Rackspace is focused on becoming a trusted partner for organizations undergoing digital transformation by delivering true transformation as a service across applications, data, security and infrastructure. As part of this broader strategy, Rackspace led the industry in creating an innovative portfolio of Private Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) solutions designed to relieve the IT team of its operational burden and enable accelerated innovation, application development and agility.

The Rackspace PCaaS solutions offer enterprises the advantages of both public and private clouds by featuring key benefits such as superior economics including up to 40 percent cost savings for many enterprise workloads. PCaaS also provides an easier migration path to cloud, allowing organizations to maintain many of their existing security and networking tooling, processes and technology. In addition, PCaaS delivers improved data control that enables businesses to store data at the location of their choice to support their data security, data sovereignty and data ownership needs.

“We are setting the pace of innovation in the Private Cloud-as-a-Service market,” said Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president and general manager of Rackspace Private Clouds. “With RKaaS as the foundation, we’ve created a truly differentiated, first of its kind offering with a pay per use economic model. This will allow businesses to more easily transition new workloads into Kubernetes in a private cloud environment to help modernize application development, accelerate time to market and dramatically increase cost savings. This creates greater strategic flexibility within the enterprise and allows them to accelerate their digital transformation.”

Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service with pay per use infrastructure, delivered with HPE, will help enterprises take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes, such as the flexibility to easily move applications across multiple clouds, the ability to scale up to billions of containers and increased productivity managing containerized applications, by delivering:

• Pay-as-you-go Service: Leveraging HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, customers pay for what they use in an on-demand consumption model for infrastructure. This feature enables customers to more closely align resources without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity. This flexible capacity model allows customers to take full advantage of the instant enterprise-level scalability of Kubernetes.
• Agility, Scalability and Strategic Flexibility: Customers maintain the architectural and data control benefits of a private cloud environment, while rapidly scaling their entire private cloud capacity in a public cloud-like manner. And, because this solution is fully open-source using upstream Kubernetes, customers will avoid vendor lock-in.  Finally, customers will have the flexibility to scale their Kubernetes environments at their own pace in nearly any data center in the world, including the customer data center, Rackspace data center or third-party colocation facility.
• Transformed “Day 2” Operations: Rackspace helps ensure the successful transformation to container-based workloads.  In addition to getting customers up and running quickly and easily, Rackspace goes a step further by managing ongoing “Day 2” operations for customers, including updates, zero downtime upgrades, patching and security hardening for Kubernetes, all managed cluster services and the node operating system.  These operations are the lynchpin to realize success with containers and require extensive skill and experience to implement successfully in production.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: From the infrastructure to the cluster itself, including the containers running inside the cluster and additional services required to run the application, Rackspace secures Kubernetes using industry best practices. Rackspace experts validate and vet each component of the service, provide static container scanning and ensure only authorized users can access the environment. Rackspace has the people, processes and technology in place to help customers meet security, compliance and data sovereignty needs.

In addition to the RKaaS with pay per use infrastructure, Rackspace today announced additional enhancements to its PCaaS portfolio with the launch of Rackspace Private Cloud^TM powered by VMware with pay per use.

“We are excited to partner with Rackspace and embed our industry leading HPE GreenLake solution within Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service”, said Ana Pinczuk, SVP & GM of HPE Pointnext.  “Our joint solution integrates HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity to deliver better economics and new platform choices for enterprises that are accelerating digital transformation with modern, container-based applications. Available through both HPE and Rackspace, this offering gives customers an optimal path to a multi-cloud future.”

During this week’s HPE Discover event, Rackspace was also recognized as HPE’s 2018 Global Service Provider Partner of the Year.

Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service with pay per use infrastructure, delivered with HPE will be available in all regions in June 2018.  For more information on this solution, please visit here.

About Rackspace
Rackspace is modernizing IT in today’s multi-cloud world. By delivering IT as a service, we help customers of all industries, sizes, and locations realize the power of digital transformation without the complexity and expense of managing it on their own. Our comprehensive portfolio of managed services across applications, data, security and infrastructure on the world’s leading public and private cloud platforms enables us to provide unbiased expertise. Rackspace has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, Glassdoor and others as one of the best places to work. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

Media Contact:
Brandon Brunson            
210.312.1357
brandon.brunson@rackspace.com

¹ Kubernetes® is a registered trademark of The Linux Foundation in the United States and other countries, and is used pursuant to a license from The Linux Foundation.