Global hosting company Rackspace
has performed a volte-face on its virtualization position, and will be hosting
virtual servers after all. It controversially said in August 2007 that virtualization
was not yet ready for the big time and wouldn't save money.

Its recently announced virtualization initiative has started with a dedicated
virtualized server offering. The company said: "Virtualization is the newest
service offering signalling Rackspace's shift to IT hosting, transforming traditional
IT functions into consumable services via the web. As more enterprises transition
from purchasing in-house computing assets to leveraging service providers, Rackspace
now offers a suite of hosted IT services that are more reliable and provide
better value, including virtualization, hosted mail, custom application support,
back-end IT and storage."

This contrasts with Rackspace's statement six months ago that 87 percent of
its customers said they would not share a server with other hosting customers.
This prompted Rackspace to suggest that hosting providers offering virtual servers
could be barking up the wrong tree, that virtualization was not yet ready for
the big time, and was unlikely to save its users money. Now the company says
that a recent customer survey found that 51 percent were not willing to share
a physical server with other virtualization hosting customers, and only 13 percent
were certain they were willing to share a physical server with other customers.

"Our product development approach focuses first and foremost on Fanatical
Support readiness," said CTO John Engates. "We also ask 'Is the technology
ready to use in a production environment?' We believe that our new virtualization
offering now meets these requirements and pushes the envelope, giving customers
a virtualized environment ready for mission-critical applications, supported
by our wealth of experience, expertise and Fanatical Support."

The company reckoned that it already nearly 300 virtual machines under its
management, using the virtualization infrastructure for internal IT operations
as well as providing infrastructure for its spin-offs, Mosso cloud computing
and Mailtrust hosted email. The company's also offering a server consolidation
service.

Rackspace will use VMware's
Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3), whose benefits Rackspace described as "flexibility
and scalability, as well as simplified infrastructure management with new data
protection options and on-demand provisioning".

The offering will be based on dedicated physical hardware for each customer
and will include the option of hybrid virtual and physical hosted environments.

Rackspace's Engates added, "Virtualization is still an evolving technology,
and we believe this is just the beginning for Rackspace. Our RackLabs research
and development department plans to continue to work with partners like VMware,
Microsoft
and XenSource
to make generational leaps in the virtualization hosting arena. We expect future
releases of Rackspace Virtualization Hosting to include enhanced disaster recovery,
storage and scaling capabilities."

» posted by abennett

Techworld.com

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