Rackspace Colocation: A Launch Pad for Digital Transformation

When seeking a roommate, what do you look for? Someone who parties with felons and has a fondness for starting fires in the living room? How about someone who’d pay their rent on time, but would stay holed up in their room? Ideally, you probably want someone who’s reliable and shows potential to become a good friend. When looking for a colocation data center, shouldn’t you have the same mindset? After all, “colocation” in French translates to “shared apartment.” Why not go with a colo provider that not only ensures your systems won’t go down, but also can enrich your business? Last spring, we put out a call for roommates by launching Rackspace Colocation. Read on to learn why deploying your gear in Rackspace data centers, alongside Rackspace platforms, presents the ideal living situation for your IT.

A launching pad

Rackspace Colocation doesn’t just provide a place for your servers to live. It doubly serves as a launch pad for digital transformation. If or when you feel like mixing things up, Rackspace’s professional services team will help introduce elasticity and scalability to your environment by borrowing on-demand resources from Rackspace’s managed services and cloud solutions, which are just a cross connect away.

A thriving ecosystem

Also only a cross connect away is RackConnect Global, which delivers direct, private and cost effective connections to every major hyperscale cloud provider plus third party colocation facilities. Not only can we connect your colocated gear to the public cloud, we can also help you identify which of your applications are best-suited for the cloud — and assist with the migration. Additionally, Rackspace is the only colocation provider that can provide ongoing management for workloads deployed with all of the top four public cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud.

A helping (smart) hand

Incumbent colocation providers typically maintain a lean, real-estate centric model. They have very few people onsite at any given time. Often when customers are in need physical support and submit a remote (or smart) hands ticket, they wait days before even getting a response to their request. Since Rackspace has dozens of people on site delivering complex managed solutions in our data centers at any given time, we have the ability to offer a one-hour response and 24-hour execution SLA around our Smart Hands service.

Built and operated to last

We have many value-added features, but in the end of the day, none them matter if there are any interruptions to power or connectivity. All of our data centers have N+1 or better redundancy across all critical electrical and mechanical systems. Our data center team adheres to lean six sigma operating methodology to ensure human error (which is responsible for most data center outages) does not pose a threat. We are completely confident in our resiliency and wrapped a 100 percent power SLA (with temperature and humidity always within ASHRAE TC 9.9 standards) around our colocation solution. While operating as a carrier-neutral data center with an average of eight providers per facility across our fleet of 12 colocation data centers, we also offer a managed blend of four Tier 1 carriers. This network, which also serves as the backbone for Rackspace’s industry-leading managed and cloud platforms, automatically routes traffic to optimal carrier real-time and provides redundancy you can’t achieve by sourcing from a single carrier alone. Check out the video, above, to see why Rackspace is the ideal colocation roommate.