Rackspace Brings Managed Cloud Services to the UK

Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announces the addition of managed support to its UK cloud service, providing customers with 24x7x365 managed services and competitive Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The new UK offering marries Rackspace’s scalable on-demand Cloud Servers with monitoring and troubleshooting support.

Rackspace has over 4,000 customers using its UK cloud infrastructure as demand for pay-as-you-go computing has been steadily growing. Cloud Servers with managed service level provides IT scalability with the assurance of support from Rackspace’s dedicated support teams offering around-the-clock management and guidance. The service is already available in the US and the UK service will unite these tried and tested support techniques with UK-specific expertise.

Rackspace Managing Director, David Kelly said, “There are many companies that want to gain the benefits of cloud but lack the expertise in-house to manage and monitor it. Rackspace managed services for cloud is aimed at helping these organisations transition to cloud to gain the on-demand availability, flexibility and scalability that cloud promises, but without needing to recruit expensive IT specialists.”

Managed Services for the UK Cloud provides a suite of features including:

• 24x7x365 rapid response to monitoring alerts that are sent to customers and the Rackspace support team. If customers choose, Rackspace can be authorised to troubleshoot problems before customers even know about it.
• Key Operating system and application infrastructure support to the following operating systems: MS Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise 64-bit, Ubuntu 10.4, (Lucid Lynx), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.5 and key applications, including Apache, MySQL, PHP; .Net/IIS; Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition 2008 R2.
• Technical guidance that can help customers plan for future growth and maximise their current cloud environment
• Admin Level Access is provided to Cloud Servers customers so they can maintain full control at all times. In addition, Rackspace will also maintain access so support teams can troubleshoot and resolve issues in real-time
• Anytime, anywhere accessibility provides customers with the ability to reach their support team via phone call, chat, or e-mail, and to submit service tickets. Rackspace will proactively work on issues based on alerts and can also support customers who are trying to resolve their own issues with the built-in management tools. Rackspace also maintains responsibility for network and hardware uptime