What do the CTO of the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office have in common with the CEOs of Eucalyptus, GoGrid, ActiveState, Appcara, OpSource and Nortonworks, the CTOs of Rackspace, SoftLayer and AppZero, the Founder & General Manager of Dell Boomi, the VP of Big Data & Streams at IBM and the Chief Strategy Officer at Pacific Controls? Answer: all are shortly to present breakout sessions as members of the distinguished Speaker Faculty of Cloud Expo New York, ...| By Liz McMillan | Article Rating: |
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| December 9, 2010 08:15 AM EST | Reads: |
5,279 |
F5 Networks on Wednesday announced that Rackspace chose F5 BIG-IP products as the foundation for its innovative Cloud Connect service. Cloud Connect is a hybrid architecture that allows customers to mix dedicated and cloud based hosting platforms for scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. With an F5 BIG-IP solution, Rackspace customers can provision resources, secure and manage network traffic, and balance workloads in real time among the two environments.
"We chose BIG-IP as a cornerstone of Cloud Connect because with it, we can make our customers' dedicated servers and cloud environments communicate seamlessly with each other over a protected, private network," said Toby Owen, Product Manager for Hybrid Hosting Solutions at Rackspace. "This solution does much more than provide a physical connection; it allows customers to take advantage of BIG-IP's intelligent traffic management capabilities between dedicated and cloud servers. Furthermore, BIG-IP has already proven itself as a reliable and cost effective component of our infrastructure."

Rackspace's primary focus is to provide a world-class service experience to its customers through its brand of customer service called Fanatical Support. To better meet its customers' needs, the company wanted to develop a hosting solution that was a mix of its managed and cloud hosting offerings. With Cloud Connect, Rackspace customers gain cloud computing benefits without the burden of rewriting their entire application to adapt to the cloud. Cloud Connect is especially useful for companies that experience seasonal traffic spikes. For example, an e-commerce company can now respond to peak demand periods by "bursting" a predetermined segment of its operations-such as its web catalog-to run in the cloud, while keeping its payment processing on highly secure, dedicated servers, all within a Rackspace data center.
"We are pleased to be part of Rackspace's Cloud Connect service," said Jason Needham, Senior Director, Product Management at F5 Networks. "Rackspace's enterprise customers can receive great benefit from their ability to access cloud based resources safely on demand."
Details
Rackspace offers its customers a full range of BIG-IP devices with Local Traffic Manager (LTM). An initial setup process connects the customer's dedicated servers to its cloud account, enabling BIG-IP products to act as a strategic control point between the environments. As cloud services are provisioned or deprovisioned on demand, BIG-IP products automatically connect to dedicated resources, directing traffic to the appropriate application and web pools based on business requirements.
Rackspace leverages F5's open application programming interface (API) solution, iControl, to automate connections between the dedicated and cloud environments. "Because of iControl, our time to market for this new service capability was less than three months," added Owen. "The F5 technology provides a straightforward, rapid service development environment."
Cloud Connect also enhances security, because the iControl API allows communication between cloud and dedicated environments, and contains features that prevent unauthorized access. User connections, data packets, and application data are routed through the BIG-IP device to and from the cloud environment, and are managed according to specific business policies, helping to ensure, for instance, that confidential data such as credit card information is isolated and protected on dedicated, managed database servers.
For more information on Cloud Connect, please visit the Rackspace website and check out the blog entry on F5's DevCentral site.
Published December 9, 2010 Reads 5,279
Copyright © 2010 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Liz McMillan
Liz is Associate Online Editor at Ulitzer.com, where she covers emerging technologies including Cloud Computing and Virtualization, as well as mergers and acquisitions and "new-media" strategies as described under the Ulitzer Live! umbrella. You can forward your press releases by email lizmcmillan.ulitzer.com.
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The cloud has many benefits, but when it comes to application development, how does the cloud help enterprises and development teams create custom software and applications that end users actually care about? Using real world examples from Adobe, Herff Jones and Navy Federal Credit Union, this session will highlight the advantages cloud computing provides for quickly developing custom software and applications with compelling user experiences.
In their general session at the 10th International ...
Nearly every enterprise is evaluating cloud computing solutions either today or in the near term. Many have already made the leap, and many more are getting close to putting that first toe in the water. But there are key considerations that should be made, questions to be asked, and designs to consider before you can feel secure with your provider.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Gulick, Product Manager, Hosting Product Management at Savvis, will help give you food f...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is t...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI), the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology, is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions for Embedded Systems, E...
SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleMP, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
ScaleMP is the leader in virtualization for high-end computing, providing maximum performance and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The innovative Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple independent systems into a sin...
Come learn real-world examples where cloud and mobile are changing the way business works and the impact they're having on efficiency and productivity.
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Enterprise IT organizations want to deploy a virtualized data center fabric that will provide the foundation for agile private cloud computing. Getting there does not have to be difficult, but it does require a new approach to data center infrastructure design – an approach that is non-disruptive, vendor-agnostic, and very adaptable to changing business requirements.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Bruce Fingles, Chief Information Officer and VP of Product Quality at Xsigo...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
How can businesses harness the power of APIs to reach new customers and markets?
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A brief history of the API
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