Rackspace Launches Asia's First OpenStack Powered Hybrid Cloud

Rackspace Hosting launched Asia’s first hybrid cloud powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, on 30 October. The new public cloud joins Rackspace’s existing portfolio of private cloud and dedicated solutions to complete the Open Cloud Company’s Hybrid Cloud offering to businesses throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

“We are excited to launch Asia’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 of open standards and enables them to enjoy freedom from vendor lock-in as they open new gateways to faster innovation through cloud computing.”

Rackspace identifies India as a robust and upcoming market, seen in their decision to launch the first hybrid cloud in Asia powered by Openstack. The public cloud services market in India is forecast to grow 36 percent in 2013 to total $443 million, up from $326 million in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. Studies done by Deloitte indicate that organisations that can bridge hyper hybrid clouds with their core systems will be at the forefront to elevate business performance with the next wave of digital innovation.

The Rackspace Hybrid Cloud encompasses public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers, working alone or together in any combination in a unified infrastructure, all backed by Fanatical Support. It enables businesses to tailor their architecture to create the best fit for their unique set of applications and workloads.

As a company with a growing customer base, People interactive (I) Pvt. Ltd, an India based company that operates Shaadi.com, an online matchmaking platform chose Rackspace for its extensive cloud expertise. With over 100 matchmaking centers across 87 cities in India and over 20 million users to date, People Interactive places its trust in Rackspace for providing scalable flexibility to match its growing IT infrastructure.

“We are constantly looking for ways to better our customer experience and Rackspace is an ideal partner to help us reach this business objective,” said Ajay Poddar, Associate Vice President Technology of People Interactive. “We have a huge IT staff for the development of the website, but we have never felt the need to keep any system administrators, as Rackspace is an able, effective and trusted partner in handling the infrastructure for us. The use of their Hybrid cloud keeps us competitive and our service charges low.”

The company currently adopts Rackspace’s open source hybrid cloud solution to support its highly fluctuating traffic demand, which boosts from 20,000 concurrent users to more than 60,000 concurrent users on a daily basis. With this predictable traffic pattern, Shaadi.com runs on Rackspace’s hybrid cloud burst mode and back to dedicated machines as per traffic.

“With the launch of the public cloud in Hong Kong, we imagine Rackspace services for the India and APAC market will only get better. We look forward to the positive impact this launch will have on our business and that of other customers in India,” said Poddar.

The Rackspace Cloud comes with industry leading service-level-agreements and 24x7x365 support for all types of businesses and industries.

“Hybrid cloud provides a massive opportunity, as demand for cloud services continues to increase rapidly throughout the Asia-Pacific region,” said Agatha Poon, Research Manager at 451 Research. “As companies expand the range and complexity of workloads running in the cloud, it is critical that they have the service options and support required to engineer their IT infrastructures for optimal performance. Hybrid offerings like Rackspace Hybrid Cloud will find a warm welcome in the Asian business community.”