Rackspace, a global provider of managed cloud hosting solutions with a broad portfolio of technologies available including AWS Cloud, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and VMware, has announced an enhanced strategic, channel relationship with cloud provider Amazon Web Services to streamline the experience for customers moving to AWS Cloud.
“We are excited about the opportunity to work even more closely with AWS to enable companies to take full advantage of AWS services,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, vice president and general manager of Rackspace Fanatical Support for AWS business. “As an AWS Managed Services Partner, Rackspace now offers customers a wide range of services including migrations, architecture and cloud automation professional services, in addition to ongoing managed services. We are proud to back all of these capabilities with Rackspace’s industry-leading Fanatical Support.”
The strategic relationship between Rackspace and AWS consists of three key components:
- Solution and Migration Advisory Services – Customers now have access to AWS-specific technical resources from Rackspace to help plan the migration of their applications and data. Rackspace can assess current workloads including server types and configurations, network topology, evaluate security, governance and compliance requirements, and design the systems architecture from the AWS Cloud catalogue that would be the best fit for the customers’ workloads.
- Migration Service Delivery – Rackspace engineers can leverage AWS Professional Services from a shared workspace inside of Rackspace headquarters that would enable Rackspace to efficiently migrate or provision new applications on AWS. This approach would provide customers with the ability to leverage deep solutions expertise and ongoing operational support from Rackspace throughout the migration process for a wide array of workloads.
- Rackspace Advanced Migration Tooling – Delivered as a ‘point & click’, self-service interface within the Rackspace Control Panel, this software uses automation to enable customers to “easily” move various workloads to AWS. The interface and recommendation engine will also display optimal locations, instance sizing, and cost comparisons for the customer environments to be migrated.
“We have worked closely with Rackspace over the last several years and have been very impressed by their dedication to invest in the capabilities required to become one of the next-generation leaders in the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program,” said Terry Wise, global vice president of channels and alliances, Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Rackspace is a solid example of an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner we’d recommend to customers who are moving to AWS and we are thrilled to align more closely with them to create value for our customers.”
Six Flags, one of the world’s largest theme park companies, is a long-time Rackspace customer that is leveraging the combined migration advisory, engineering, and managed service delivery capabilities provided by Rackspace and AWS.
“As a 10 year Rackspace customer interested in moving to AWS Cloud, we were excited to learn we could still leverage the Rackspace Fanatical Support we were used to throughout our entire cloud journey, including our move to AWS Cloud,” said Sean Andersen, corporate director of interactive at Six Flags Entertainment Corporation. “Rackspace and AWS have worked together with our internal team to help us plan and execute the successful migration of key workloads to AWS, and the alignment we have been able to maintain due to their close partnership has been invaluable.”
