All of Rackspace’s customers will be hybrid cloud customers in the future, said Gerardo Dada, the company’s product marketing leader.
San Antonio-based Rackspace, which calls itself the Open Cloud company and co-founded with NASA the Open Stack operating system, has seen its cloud computing business skyrocket in the past few years.
The cloud lets customers operate a “network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”
Rackspace faces competition in the hybrid cloud market from Amazon Web Services, the number one leader, and other players such as Microsoft, HP Cloud and IBM’s SoftLayer.
Right now, customers can choose from public, private and hybrid clouds.
But a study just published this week from Gartner, a research firm, predicts that most big businesses will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017.
“Virtualization reduced capital expenses, and standards and automation reduce operational expenses,” Thomas Bittman, vice president and analyst at Gartner, said in a news release. “However, taking the next step of adding usage metrics, self-service offerings and automated provisioning requires investment in technologies without a significant reduction in operational cost. With this in mind, the driving factor for going that next step should primarily be agility.”
Most companies are already using hybrid to an extent, Dada said. They already recognize they’re different types of cloud environments, he said.
“The question is not when hybrid but how,” he said.
Hybrid clouds, the combination of publicly and privately hosted servers and dedicated servers working together, can increase efficiency and save money, Dada said.
For example, many companies do not need exchange servers to host their own email, he said.
“They’re never going to be as good as a specialist,” Dada said.
Companies need to ask themselves what are the right technology applications to be publicly hosted and privately hosted, Dada said. There is not a single answer.
Rackspace recently started hosting Hubspot, a marketing service for small to medium-sized businesses, on a hybrid cloud from a private cloud setting. The company has realized a four times increase in efficiency with the public cloud at half the cost, Dada said.
“Chief Information Officers like public cloud servers because they are built around the “compute as a utility” model, where costs are generally low and users pay by the hour,” according to Rackspace. “But using public infrastructure means you may need to share resources with other tenants and you may lose some of the performance benefits that the private and hybrid clouds offer.”
There’s been so much buzz about the public cloud, Dada said.
“The cloud is powerful and transformational but it has its place,” he said.
The hybrid cloud offers more security than a pure public cloud, Dada said. And it gives companies a path to grow and expand in the future, he said.
Tag: hybrid cloud
Rackspace announced Tuesday that it has landed Schlitterbahn Waterparks and Resorts as a new customer for its hybrid cloud hosting services.
Schlitterbahn, based in New Braunfels, has water parks in Texas and Kansas City. The company needed a computing infrastructure that allowed it to scale its operations during times of peak demand.
Rackspace already counted Six Flags as an amusement park customer.
“We love having local customers,” said John Engates, Rackspace’s Chief Technology Officer. “It makes us very proud.”
Rackspace was able to give Schlitterbahn a hybrid cloud that allows the company the flexibility to roll servers up or down, according to spikes in year-round activity.
“We chose Rackspace for the flexibility,” said Pat Symchych with Schlitterbahn. Its website gets three million visits during the season and a few hundred during the off-season. They moved to Rackspace after its site crashed on July 4th.
“Rackspace support is unbelievable,” Symchych said. “They are better than any other tech firm I’ve worked with or that I’ve had to work with. It doesn’t matter what time of day or who I talk to they get it done.”
Schlitterbahn is one of Rackspace’s newest enterprise customers. Another, Spencer’s with 700 stores in 48 states and a popular SpiritHalloween.com site, is already seeing heavy traffic for Halloween. CERN, Emerson Electric, Fidelity, Mazda and Sony Playstation were recently announced as customers as well.
“This idea of the hybrid cloud is something we’re seeing a lot more companies take advantage of,” Engates said. “We hear a lot about the move to the public cloud. But we think they’re a lot of companies that mix form factors in this hybrid cloud…We continue to add other products into that mix. Giving customers the right fit with the right infrastructure.”