Rackspace introduces data center colocation services

The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.

The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.

It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.

‘Lift and shift’ to the cloud

The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.

The thing is, moving to the cloud is a complex, multistep process because on-premises apps don’t automatically translate to the cloud. Often there needs to be considerable rearchitecting of the app to work in the cloud. Colocation provides organizations with a “lift and shift” option, since the companies are moving their hardware out of their on-premises data centers and into Rackspace’s. So, apps can run unchanged.

Along with the financial implications, businesses are also adopting colocation solutions to achieve geographic diversity — to spread out their data centers among multiple locations.

“Rackspace is the only colocation provider that can offer customers a world-class colocation solution today, while also serving as the sole partner they will need in the long-term to migrate to and manage their public cloud, private cloud, managed hosting or bare metal platforms,” said Henry Tran, general manager of managed hosting at Rackspace, in a statement.        

This isn’t Rackspace’s first foray into colocation. In April, the company announced a partnership with Switch, offering its services in Switch data centers around the U.S.

Rackspace is primarily focused on being a managed cloud provider, helping clients set up and manage their cloud infrastructure. It proclaims vendor neutrality and supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Six of the colocation services are available in the U.S.: Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, northern New Jersey, northern Virginia, and San Jose, California. Internationally, it is in Hong Kong, London, Moscow, and Sydney.