Public cloud services and managed hosting provider Rackspace US Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, has formed a strategic channel relationship with public cloud platform leader Amazon Web Services aimed at streamlining the migration experience for businesses moving workloads onto AWS infrastructure. Customers who are looking to migrate to AWS often lack the internal resources and expertise needed to move workloads rapidly and effectively. AWS and Rackspace plan to alleviate this potential barrier to cloud adoption by combining their respective expertise.
The strategic relationship between AWS and Rackspace 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 catalogue that is the best fit for the customers’ workloads.
- Migration Service Delivery†– Rackspace engineers can leverage AWS Professional Services support from a shared work space at Rackspace headquarters to help customers efficiently migrate or provision new applications on AWS. This approach provides 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 and click,” self-service interface within the Rackspace Control Panel, new Rackspace 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 for Amazon Web Services, in a press statement. “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.”
Rackspace is a qualified APN Premier member and audited AWS Managed Service Partner. It officially introduced its alliance relationship with AWS in October 2015.
“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, in prepared remarks. “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.”
Rackspace has been providing Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure since 2015 also. At Microsoft’s Inspire partner conference in Washington DC, the company voiced expectations that the new emphasis by Microsoft on co-selling Azure services with partners will drivre more business to that offier.
