imgres-2Rackspace 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.”