Feeding America frees up IT resources by 45%

How we helped

Technology plays a huge role in keeping the network at Feeding America connected. It was a local relationship in San Antonio that facilitated connecting Rackspace Technology to the national office in Chicago.

Rackspace Technology knew about Feeding America’s mission and approached to see how it could help. “Through one of our critical members, the San Antonio Food Bank, Feeding America’s national office was introduced to Rackspace Technology,” explains Steven Carlberg, Managing Director of Infrastructure and Security at Feeding America.

“That opened the door to a conversation about infrastructure-as-a-service, including how we can leverage it, gain some efficiency, and get out of this hardware maintenance lifecycle and the capital costs.

“As we dug into Rackspace Technology, we learned it had a world-class data center located here in Chicago,” Carlberg said. “It allowed us to tap into best-in-breed technologies, where we could run all our workloads virtualized on VMware which is, by far, the best-in-breed on the server side in virtualization today.

“Rackspace Technology helped us migrate from our traditional, rented data center space to IaaS in the cloud,” Carlberg continued. “Anytime you’re moving a data center, it’s a daunting proposition that takes a lot of planning. Rackspace Technology came in and managed the project for us, helping us with technical expertise on the details and helping us move 350 servers and over a petabyte of storage into the cloud.”

With Feeding America’s managed services, Rackspace Technology hosts hardware, software, servers, storage and other infrastructure components, while handling tasks, including system maintenance, backup and resiliency planning and delivering highly scalable resources that can be adjusted on-demand.

Feeding America’s IT environment takes a wide variety of specialized engineering skills to architect and manage not only the infrastructure but also the many complex applications and tools that run on top of it. With the Rackspace Technology partnership, the Feeding America team can focus on managing core operations, applications and workloads. In contrast, the experts at Rackspace Technology manage the day-to-day support of the backend, hardware and software.

“By going to a managed service model with Rackspace Technology, now I just worry about the workloads and applications to support our mission and our members' mission,” he said. “I could run what I need today, knowing that I can rapidly scale up or scale down to fit our needs and serve up workloads. I just have an operational cost as opposed to a capital expense outlay.

“The expertise that we get from Rackspace helps us in many ways,” said Carlberg. “We get a high level of expertise in storage, servers, VMware, backup and recovery methods. We get services that I can’t build out myself that help us with disaster recovery and business continuity planning. I get 24x7x365 monitoring and alerting on critical systems and functionality. All of this augments our staff tremendously.”

Jim Nelson, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Feeding America explains the importance of a Rackspace Technology managed infrastructure backed by support. “Having Rackspace Technology there to manage the hardware, manage the hosting environment, frees up easily 45% of my time. The relationship has been very beneficial, as I can focus on the things that are important to me without having to also deal with the hardware.”