Rackspace Adds Virtualisation to IT Hosting Portfolio in EMEA

London – September 11, 2008 – Rackspace® Hosting the world’s leader in hosting, today announces enterprise-class support of dedicated virtualised servers as part of its ongoing virtualisation initiative in EMEA. The virtualisation platform, built on VMware’s third-generation virtualisation software suite, maximises hardware investment with better utilisation of servers through virtual machines.

The virtualisation platform will enable businesses that experience high growth or fluctuations in capacity to quickly meet these demands, by making scaling easier through rapid Virtual Machine provisioning. The service also provides easy access to a stable and secure virtualised environment and is supported by Rackspace’s brand of customer service, Fanatical Support®.

Brian Thomson, MD Rackspace EMEA said: "We work closely with our customers on the type of products they need to help their business work more efficiently, and are excited to announce a virtualisation platform that will provide greater flexibility to meet performance and capacity needs. Customers who were looking to adopt virtualisation told us that security was a concern so we have developed our virtual servers to provide protection against unanticipated traffic spikes and security breaches. This enables customers to gain all the benefits of virtualisation while reducing the associated risks.”

The virtualisation platform will be based on dedicated physical hardware for each customer and include the option of hybrid virtual and physical hosted environments. It will support mission-critical production systems and provide benefits including server consolidation, data protection and on-demand provisioning.

Adrian Palmer-Geaves CEO of Knowledge Solutions, who are already using Rackspace’s virtualisation service said: “Rackspace’s virtualisation platform enables Knowledge Solutions to deliver a seamless, scalable and secure hosting solution to our customers, particularly when they experience fluctuating traffic volumes.  We have worked closely with Rackspace for a number of years and the virtual platform allows us to offer solutions that are closely aligned to our customers’ business needs, in a competitive and responsive fashion”

Rackspace’s US operation launched a virtualisation offering earlier this year and has a number of virtual machines under management globally, using the virtualisation infrastructure for internal IT operations as well as in its cloud hosting division, Mosso® and email hosting division, Mailtrust™. Virtualisation is a highly-complex technology, but Rackspace’s team of VMware Certified Engineers provides customers with the technical expertise needed to design and leverage a virtualised system.

Thomson added: "Virtualisation is still an evolving technology, and we believe this is just the beginning for Rackspace. Our RackLabs research and development department continues to work with partners such as VMware, Microsoft and XenSource to make generational leaps in the virtualisation hosting arena.  We expect future releases of Rackspace Virtualisation Hosting to include enhanced disaster recovery, storage and scaling capabilities." 

For more information on Rackspace’s virtualisation offering, please visit: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/virtualisation