Rackspace goes for service specialisation

The `as a Service’ tag is now, of course, widely used for a variety of applications areas, but Rackspace is in danger of creating the longest one so far – though to be fair it is by no means an official, branded title from the company. It is Implementation Delivery, and Configuration Services as a Service.

This sums up the new move by the company to extend one of its key differentiators, its people-oriented Fanatical Support services, into the world of DevOps.

The new service is being headed up in the EMEA region by Toby Owen, the company’s Head of Technical Strategy in EMEA, and the plan is to focus support, advice and consultancy services on applications areas.

The two Owen is targeting at the outset are ecommerce and Big Data applications.

“We are getting back to our support roots,” Owen said. “We are aware that we probably cannot in the end compete with the likes of Amazon and Google on price alone, but we are well aware that Fanatical Support gives us an advantage in the marketplace as users really need to know what they are doing to work with Amazon or Google. And DevOps is becoming an important area for many users, and one where good support can bring them a real advantage.”

The ecommerce support service is being based around the company’s existing support for the popular ecommerce system, Magento, where the Rackspace support team will be helping businesses establish their ecommerce environments by supporting implementation, delivery and configuration of Magento environments.

The Big Data developments are being based on the company’s recent acquisition of ObjectRocket, a company that specialises in the fast provisioning, scaling and administration of Mongo databases. Rackspace itself claims to be the only vendor offering high availability Mongo Non-SQL databases.

The company will also be offering support and advice to enterprise users looking to build up services based on Hadoop. According to Owen, Rackspace will be working with HortonWorks  in this applications area.

It is likely that Rackspace will follow these two market sectors with dedicated support services in other applications areas. Owen is also starting to look at potential with applications development experience in a number of market sectors, in order to build out the range of offerings available.

In a related announcement, Rackspace has also introduced a new service offering API-driven bare-metal servers that can be spun up as quickly as VMs, and which provide the agility of multi-tenant environments with the performance of single-tenant.

Known as OnMetal Cloud Servers they are built with Open Compute Project spec’d hardware and powered by OpenStack. The servers come in three different sets of specifications, each custom designed and built for workloads commonly associated with large web scale applications.

There is a compute-optimised configuration  offering 20 threads and 32GB RAM. This can be used to power large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.

The memory-optimised configuration  offers 24 threads and 512GB RAM and can be used to power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.

The I/O-optimised configuration provides 40 threads , 128GB RAM, and 3.2TB PCIe flash drive that can be used to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications.

The target market is those users that suffer `noisy neighbour’ syndrome that can sometimes occur in multi-tenant environments. This can degrade network latency, disk I/O and compute processing power, which can create unpredictable application performance.  With OnMetal Cloud Servers, Rackspace is tapping into its expertise in scaling applications to offer a solution that helps to eliminate the pain points typically associated with the current, predominant model.