Rackspace unveils 'Fanatical Support' for Microsoft Azure

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, CEO at Rackspace. “We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack.”

Rackspace is building on a 13-year collaboration with Microsoft by offering specialized expertise and its highly-regarded Fanatical Support for Azure. As a five-time Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year, Rackspace has a track record of providing managed cloud services on leading Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Cloud Platform with Hyper-V, System Center 2012 R2 (full suite), System Center Operations Manager 2007, SQL Server (2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2014), Exchange, SharePoint and Office365, which is now generally available in the U.S.

“Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise group. “With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

Rackspace will work with customers to understand their requirements and create solutions that incorporate and maximize the latest Azure technologies. The Fanatical Support for Azure offering includes:

· Microsoft Specialized Expertise: Rackspace is a five-time Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year, with hundreds of Microsoft certified professionals managing thousands of Microsoft servers and workloads, more than 500,000 seats of Microsoft Exchange and more than 85 percent of the world’s hosted SharePoint licenses.

· Managed Support: Managed services and expertise available 24x7x365 from Microsoft certified professionals at Rackspace. This allows customers to offload the management of their environments and focus on their core business.

· Architectural Guidance: Rackspace will help customers architect their applications and optimize databases to run at cloud scale, making use of best practice designs.

· Proactive Monitoring: Rackspace monitors customers’ environments with a mix of monitoring tools to proactively address system issues. Rackspace engineers can then help optimize performance, stability and address security issues.

· Hybrid Ready: Rackspace can help customers build applications that span on premise IT resources, Azure and the Rackspace Private Cloud powered by the Microsoft Cloud Platform, combining the benefits of physically isolated resources and elastic compute.

· Database Support: Rackspace database specialists are available as an on-demand service for SQL Server Instances as well as customers’ SQL databases running on Azure Virtual Machines. These specialists have experience managing over 30,000 SQL Server Instances.

Purchasing Options

Customers will be able to take advantage of Fanatical Support for Azure in two ways:

· Fanatical Support with Azure Bundle (Infrastructure and Support): Customers can purchase Azure infrastructure and support as a bundle from Rackspace, whose experts can help them with architectural and on-boarding guidance.

· Fanatical Support for Azure (Support Only): Customers who already use Azure infrastructure and want support and management expertise can get Rackspace managed services for their infrastructure as a separate cost based on their infrastructure spend.

At launch, the offering will be generally available for U.S. based customers and will expand to International customers through early 2016.