SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 3 – Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, today announced new features and enhanced service offerings for open cloud platform customers.

For more than ten years, Rackspace has served customers who are looking for a partner to help them reduce the complexities of building, deploying, optimizing, maintaining and troubleshooting complex web applications to serve their business needs. Rackspace is now offering that same Fanatical Support to customers across its entire portfolio, including the company's new open cloud platform, through Managed and Critical Application Services.

"Providing the highest level of service in the industry is central to our values as a company," said Rackspace President Lew Moorman. "Cloud computing customers tell us they want good pricing and exceptional service, and offering one without the other simply won't cut it in today's environment."

Critical Application Services allows companies to focus on their core business while Rackspace keeps their vital applications running smoothly. To provide this service level, Rackspace uses a unique combination of web-scale engineers, on-going consultation, and performance monitoring. Every environment is tailored to the customer's specific business needs. Critical Application Services (Advanced) is backed by Fanatical Support, and by Rackspace's 100 percent Production Platform Uptime Guarantee.

"Rackspace's reliability gives Acquity Group the freedom to focus on creating great apps and onboarding customers without worrying about infrastructure," said Kevin Ellenwood, Vice President of Shared Services at Acquity Group, a leading e-commerce and digital marketing company. "It's unacceptable for us to have any type of outage, and quite frankly, our support team at Rackspace has the same attitude. That's why we're here."

Rackspace's Managed Cloud Services are now available for seven new products launched over the past several weeks as part of the open cloud platform. It offers customers access to a team that can help them plan, deploy, and run websites or applications on the Rackspace open cloud.

These services include help for tasks such as capacity planning, scaling architecture, configuration, patching, monitoring, security guidance, database tuning and optimization, troubleshooting for infrastructure and certain operating systems, database engines and application platforms.

Managed Cloud Services support the entire Rackspace Open Cloud including:

• Cloud Servers and Cloud Databases, powered by OpenStack;
• Cloud Files and Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack;
• Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Backup
• Cloud Load Balancers, Cloud DNS and Cloud Networks.

"Managed Cloud really allows us to focus specifically on our app, and not all the IT stuff around it. Not that we can't do it, but I have code to write," said Chris Le, Lead Developer, Seer Interactive, an industry leader in SEO, SEM, and analytics.

Rackspace's open cloud platform is designed to offer a better, faster and more valuable cloud experience, built on an open platform. In addition, there can be a cost benefit for customers, who might take months to find the right IT personnel and make a large investment in salaries to get access to the skills that Rackspace offers at a fraction of the cost.

Rackspace open cloud gives customers true choice and control without the fear of being locked-in to the closed, proprietary technologies of any one vendor. "We believe customers ought to be able to move anytime they see another provider offering better features, service or value," said Moorman.

For more information on Managed Cloud Services, visit: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/managed_cloud

For more information on Critical Application Services, visit: http://www.rackspace.com/enterprise_hosting/critical_applications/

About Rackspace

Rackspace Hosting is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 197,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. The company offers choice, flexibility and freedom from vendor lock in. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and is featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting." Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world.

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Source: Rackspace