Rackspace SDDC Solutions Overcomes Business Challenges on the Journey to Modernization

The emergence of public cloud services over the past couple of decades has helped stimulate a huge wave of innovation across all industries. But, at the same time, we have also learned that gaining cloud capabilities is rarely as simple as just lifting and shifting IT operations to a public cloud.

Today, there are many other options for gaining the capabilities required to achieve greater innovation. One option is a software-defined data center (SDDC). Simply stated, an SDDC bridges the gap between private cloud and your data centers, without the pain and cost of maintaining physical infrastructure.

Rackspace SDDC Solutions is a premier private cloud service offering that provides niche solutions to support organizations’ IT modernization strategy and innovation goals. Its three service options allow organizations to run their workloads, including legacy, custom or highly regulated workloads, on platforms that can best help them achieve their desired outcomes.

Advantages of SDDCs

Like public clouds, SDDCs employ virtualization across compute, storage and the network, along with extensive automation to deliver the flexibility, scalability and agility commonly associated with public cloud. However, unlike public clouds, SDDCs include an independent facility that is typically dedicated for the sole use of one customer. Essentially, SDDCs are a private cloud that offers the benefits of public cloud — thereby, providing customers with the best of both worlds.

SDDCs can overcome some of the limitations of public cloud. For example, in companies that work in tightly regulatory industries, their security measures must include isolation, guardrails and controls over IT systems and workloads. This is difficult to achieve in public clouds’ shared tenancy environments.

Also, many long-established businesses still have critical custom software that was architected long before the introduction of cloud computing. Consequently, it cannot be migrated to public cloud without a major, costly refactoring process. This is not a small issue. According to Oracle, the average enterprise has 464 custom applications.

Many organizations think they are stuck in their on-premises or colocation environments or are unable to access cloud benefits due to substantial legacy applications. Or they think they cannot break free from resourcing and operating their own data centers. But these are perfect examples of where SDDC can change the game. It’s able to solve these challenges as well as many others.

Built-in VMware technology

There are few enterprises today that have not introduced virtualization technology into their on-premises or colocation data centers over the past 20 years — most of them opting for VMware® technology. Rackspace SDDC Solutions is built on Dell® Technologies hyperconverged architecture, integrated with VMware’s SDDC stack. This ensures a seamless migration into a managed hosted private cloud — a solution that delivers the cost efficiencies and flexibility to which organizations aspire.

By providing the best of both private and public clouds, Rackspace SDDC Solutions allows organizations to run software workloads without the pain of maintaining physical infrastructure and capital budgets in on-premises data centers. Also, as an agile platform, it provides easy scaling and self-service at an affordable cost, making it an easy step toward an organization’s multicloud strategy.

Think of SDDC as the cloud onramp to your digital transformational journey. It’s an IT-as-a-service platform that abstracts, pools and automates traditional data center services, and provides the software, infrastructure and platforms that allow businesses to speed up their innovation goals and maintain or build on their competitive position in the marketplace.

Rackspace SDDC Solutions service options

Rackspace SDDC Solutions is available as a single or multi-tenant solution in three options:

• Rackspace SDDC Enterprise: A dedicated private cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation. It enables full SDDC capabilities, including VMware virtualized compute, storage, networking and cloud management.
• Rackspace SDDC Business: A streamlined vSphere-based solution with a modular approach that gives organizations the ability to consume a variety of add-ons based on their needs.
• Rackspace SDDC Flex: A multi-tenant solution that provides consumption-based pricing, flexible infrastructure, self-service, automation, DevOps and rapid deployment in a VMware environment. It delivers public-cloud-like benefits without the need to re-architect your legacy workloads.

Supporting these three options is the Rackspace Technology portfolio of professional and managed services, and our extensive self-service options to monitor and manage workloads.

Also, our highly acclaimed Rackspace Elastic Engineering service provides organizations with a flexible, on-demand team of experts who deliver the expertise required to achieve business goals.

Overcome your challenges and achieve your goals

Rackspace SDDC Solutions offers businesses a new range of options to include in their IT modernization strategy. In particular, it offers a way to gain cloud benefits for all workloads — and reduce the technical debt associated with legacy applications.

For organizations that want to gain greater flexibility, scalability and agility to support IT modernization, Rackspace SDDC Solutions offers a straightforward path to heterogenous multicloud operations.

It also offers the ability to migrate custom and legacy workloads out of on-premises or colocation data centers. As a result, scarce internal resources can be refocused on critical tasks. Also, a dedicated SDDC solution can address complex regulatory compliance requirements.

What’s more, public cloud can be easily integrated into the system through RackConnect® Global. This allows you to leverage advanced compute applications, such as AI. Workloads already in public cloud can even be migrated back to Rackspace SDDC Solutions, if needed.

Essentially, Rackspace SDDC Solutions is the service today’s organizations need to overcome every barrier they face on their journey to modernization, optimization and greater innovation.