"Hot on the heels of a Cisco report projecting the rapid rise of cloud traffic in the coming years, some of the biggest data center companiesare making significant moves in the cloud services arena. From Rackspace to PEER 1 Hosting and SoftLayer, the cloud is clearly on the minds of top industry players as they work to provide premium services to the enterprise.
Rackspace Takes on the Hybrid Cloud
Rackspace Hosting announced on October 22 the launch of its OpenStack-powered hybrid cloud in Hong Kong, the first of its kind in the region. Rackspace has already established a strong presence across the globe, developing a reputation as a leader in the cloud computing and cloud hosting services industry, serving more than 161,000 enterprise customers. The company’s latest release is a public cloud offering meant to complement its strong portfolio of cloud services that it offers to Asia-Pacific-region businesses.
The hybrid cloud offering is comprised of both private and public clouds as well as dedicated servers, which are all integrated into a unified infrastructure. Rackspace also provides businesses with its Fanatical Support service, which can help with any troubleshooting for issues that may crop up. With this new launch, Hong Kong area organizations will be able to craft unique solutions that meet their specific IT workloads and applications needs.
“We are excited to launch the region’s first hybrid cloud powered by OpenStack,” said Ajit Melarkode, managing director of Rackspace Asia Pacific. “OpenStack already gives thousands of our customers access to the power to open standards and enables them to enjoy freedom from vendor lock-in as they open new gateways to faster innovation through cloud computing.”
PEER 1 Hosting Helps Businesses Leverage the Cloud
As one of the leading hosting providers in the world with a solid presence in Europe and North America, PEER 1 Hosting has made numerous notable moves to assist companies in leveraging the power of the cloud to grow their business. The organization recently made a series of announcements, including an October 23 statement that it had successfully renewed its SSAE 16, CSAE 3416 and ISAE 3402 certifications for its data centers. This highlights PEER 1 Hosting’s dedication to ensuring compliance for all customers taking advantage of its cloud services offerings. Since security and compliance complications are often cited as reasoning for reticence in cloud adoption, this is a major step forward to help quell enterprise concerns.
“At PEER 1 Hosting, we are committed to delivering superior information system infrastructure so customers can focus on their core business and eliminate the need for their companies to be subjected to the costs associated with multiple audits,” said Ted Smith, senior vice president at PEER 1 Hosting.
PEER 1 Hosting also demonstrated its dedication to helping organizations leverage the cloud through other initiatives, such as the company’s October 15 webinar, “Gaining a Competitive Advantage with the Cloud.” The webinar was geared at businesses of all sizes and covered topics such as industry views on cloud adoption, various cloud computing models available today, the IT challenges that surface when migrating to a hosted solution and a business-class cloud framework.
SoftLayer Introduces Analytics to Cloud Environments
A provider of data centers throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, IBM company SoftLayer recently made an announcement that is aimed to help businesses integrate analytics in the cloud to gain numerous advantages. According to the press release issued on October 28, SoftLayer teamed up with enterprise analytics leader Cloudera to introduce turnkey big data solutions on bare metal servers.
As companies increasingly require more robust computing resources to support their IT workloads and continue a trajectory toward business growth, SoftLayer’s partnership with Cloudera will enable those organizations to better manage their data and make smarter business decisions through the use of analytics in the cloud.
“Running big data applications on bare metal servers gives users both the raw performance and consistency they need to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time,” said Marc Jones, vice president of product innovation for SoftLayer. “The ability to provision a large scale Hadoop cluster in just a few hours sets this offering apart with speed and agility. We’re pushing the envelope of what’s possible on the cloud by giving enterprises the power and flexibility they need to tackle the toughest workloads.”"
