Reduce Costs of VMware Cloud on AWS for Storage-Heavy Workloads

While VMware Cloud on AWS delivers unique hybrid capabilities to the market, limited native storage options have limited its usefulness for organizations with storage-heavy workloads.

Since storage is directly tied to hosts, the only way to scale storage is to add hosts — and that can increased costs by 35 percent or more for high capacity workloads. These workloads just need additional storage, not additional compute or memory. But up until now, that’s meant paying for additional hosts.

No longer.

Rackspace and NetApp have teamed up to deliver the first fully managed, globally available, cloud-attached storage solution that integrates natively as a datastore with VMware Cloud on AWS. This means you can deploy additional datastores in VMC on AWS that scale independently from compute, potentially saving big bucks. As your applications scale, you can manage compute and storage separately, just as if it were in your own data center — and that means you only pay for what you need.

Rackspace was one of the first VMware managed service providers to launch a Managed VMware Cloud on AWS offering, and this new solution continues that leadership around hybrid cloud solutions.

Leveraging NetApp’s Cloud Volumes and fully managed by Rackspace, the solution allows customers to attach external NFS storage as native datastores into Rackspace Managed VMware Cloud on AWS, without adding hosts — or unnecessary costs.

"A hyperconverged infrastructure is great because you get storage, CPU and memory all per block," Rackspace Strategic Alliances Manager for VMware Donald Schubot told ZDNet at vForum in Sydney, Australia.

"But the challenge we've seen customers run into is that they may only need five blocks for CPU and memory, but have a lot of storage needs, and need 10 blocks to meet the storage requirement. That ends up really tipping the financial scale by having to buy all that extra compute and memory, while all they need to do is increments on the storage," he said.

Customer savings and flexibility

With Rackspace Managed NetApp Cloud Services for VMC on AWS, we’ve seen customer savings of up to 40 percent.

We also understand that companies’ performance and storage needs change, often seasonally. To avoid getting locked into a solution that doesn’t scale with those changing needs, we offer three all-flash storage performance tiers— standard, premium and extreme. The all-flash design allows you to easily find the right performance and price to fit the workload and adjust tiers, non-disruptively, on demand as the nature of the application changes.

Of course, with high capacity workloads running externally, performance degradation as your dataset grows can be a concern. Not so with Managed Cloud Volumes Service for VMC on AWS. Performance for each cloud volume scales with the amount of allocated capacity. And with persistent, high-performance all-flash storage capable of more than 450K IOPS, it’s the highest performing cloud-attached storage solution that integrates natively with VMC on AWS.

Managed NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for VMC on AWS is ideal for a variety of use cases, including:

• Low cost disaster recovery – utilize a VMC on AWS Pilot Light architecture with a minimum host footprint that can be expanded on a DR event.
• Storage heavy workloads – additional storage without additional compute and memory, the managed service will provide a more cost-effective way to add storage to VMC on AWS without adding additional host.
• Cloud migrations – a highly available and enormously scalable platform to develop and maintain a file storage solution in the cloud, users can easily migrate existing applications to AWS.

The solution will be priced per TB per month with a minimum one-month contract.

Reduce risk with global and high availability

Secure, on-demand available access to your data wherever you do business can give you the competitive edge.

At the time of launch, this is the only globally available externally attached storage service with native access to VMC on AWS available in all eight AWS regions covering all geographies. The managed offering is available in data centers with close proximity to AWS data centers in Oregon, Virginia, California, London, Ireland, Frankfurt, Sydney and Tokyo.

A high availability architecture (designed for four nines of availability and nine nines of durability) and high bandwidth, low latency connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS as well as AES 256-bit data encryption at rest by default, makes this an ideal solution to help meet compliance needs, data center consolidation/migrations and low-cost disaster recovery.

Making the complex simple

It is part of Rackspace’s DNA to ensure every customer receives a Fanatical Experience across our entire portfolio of managed services. That’s why this fully managed service includes:

• Architecture guidance for sizing performance tier and configuration.
• Provisioning Managed Cloud Volume Services storage on behalf of the customer and attaching as datastore to desired Managed VMC on AWS SDDC.
• Managing Cloud Volume Services for VMC on AWS configurations, such as allocated storage and performance tier requests.
• Monitoring, supporting, and troubleshooting of Managed Cloud Volume Services for VMC on AWS datastores, and escalating issues on behalf of the customer to NetApp and/or VMware support as needed.
• 24x7x365 customer support.
• Rackspace industry-leading response time SLAs, combined with NetApp’s industry leading guaranteed SLAs for its Cloud Volume Services storage based on performance, availability and durability.

Rackspace differentiation for VMware Cloud on AWS

Rackspace accelerates the value customers are able to achieve from VMC on AWS as part of our hybrid-cloud portfolio. Our certified architects and engineers streamline and simplify building, migrating, operating and optimizing VMC on AWS with their deep cross-platform expertise. We provide a consolidated billing and flexible payment options, a single source for 24x7x365 support with dedicated account teams, and access to proactive monitoring and troubleshooting across multiple clouds, eliminating the need to manage AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS accounts directly.

Join Rackspace EMEA CTO Lee James and VMware Leader Tim Hearn in an on demand webinar to learn how to make the most of what the next-generation cloud has to offer, while maximizing your existing VMware and AWS investments.