Rackspace has today announced a managed services offering called Managed Cloud which aims to give flexibility on managed services but with DIY-styled pricing.

The new Managed Cloud service offers two options: Managed Infrastructure, which offers what seems to be a standard 24×7 access to engineering support plus other features including architectural, security and launch guidance, and Managed Operations, which is essentially Rackspace managing the account 24×7.

Speaking to CloudTech, Rackspace VP technology and products Nigel Beighton said Managed Infrastructure was more of a “reactive” service as opposed to Managed Operations. “Effectively we’re rationalising across the board for all of our products,” he said.

The move towards this product has evidently come from a rise in hybrid cloud, the more pervasive nature of cloud computing yet with a greater variety of customers and options available to those customers. Last year Rackspace released a survey detailing how hybrid cloud was seen as the future for three in five enterprises.

And, with a relatively turbulent time for the firm – moving co-founder Graham Weston back as CEO after the retirement of Lanham Napier, rumours abound of becoming a private company – it makes sense that this latest offering plays into Rackspace’s main strength, managed cloud hosting.

Rackspace offers a fully managed service but often gets lumped in the same category as an Amazon Web Services, an Azure or a Google, leading to what may be considered unfair comparisons.

Beighton refused to agree with it being a ‘bugbear’ when CloudTech put it to him, instead artfully calling it “a good marketing challenge.”

“I must admit I’m forever explaining the difference to people and, do you know what, I think I still will be going forward, just because you’ve got some very strong players in the market,” he explains.

Pricing is a key element in Rackspace’s strategy, least of all being obfuscatory in its cost structure when compared to unmanaged IaaS providers.

“One of the key elements on the pricing is ‘we could have been opaque’ – hide the raw infrastructure costs within the support charge,” Beighton says. “If we did that we just felt that wasn’t being transparent, one of our core values to our customer base.

As a result, when a Racker gets a bill, they get it in triplicate: a service charge; the infrastructure cost; and automatically applied discounts based on their total spend. And this is where the comparisons with Google, in particular, come in.

 “We’ve adopted very much the same model as Google in terms of discounting,” Beighton says. “It’s not so much people asking for it, it’s about automatically applying it so they know where they stand.

“That comparison with Google, and Azure, and AWS, will always be there, and it’s why we are transparent on the pricing side of it because there will be part of what we do always compared with what they do.”

Rackspace is quick to note that not every company would be ripe for this Managed Cloud offering. Beighton argues there are three types of customer for this model; startups who are out of their early development phase; SMB to low end enterprise who don’t want to build new skills; and companies who want the agility and cost savings of cloud.

Yet for those who do buy in to the Rackspace product, it’s a big commitment. Similar to the likes of Salesforce and others, Rackspace customers – or Rackers – are seen as fans, who get ‘fanatical support’ from their provider.

Beighton argues this is a good thing for the company. “We’re a human business,” he says. “We’re not about the infrastructure, we’re about the people.”

Managed Infrastructure comes in at £0.0035 per GB/hr RAM with £35 per month minimum, while Managed Operations costs £0.0150 with a £350 per month minimum spend.

You can find out more about the product here.

Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced a strengthening commitment to cloud computing with a 200 billion yen (approx £1.2bn) investment over the next two financial years.

In a move that will remind CloudTech readers of competitors IBM and HP, Fujitsu is putting its eggs in one basket to “achieve its growth strategy” – in other words, bringing new offerings to market, growing its customer base and deepening deployments.

“Fujitsu has a vision of a human-centric intelligent society, one where social and business innovation is driven by the intelligent use of information and communication technologies,” Cameron McNaught, Fujitsu executive vice president, solutions, global delivery said.

“We see cloud as the natural platform for delivering these new types of applications, which is reflected in both the increase we are seeing in cloud adoption and how it is becoming a standard part of IT service delivery models for many CIOs today,” he added.

The company also announced the general rollout of RunMyProcess, Fujitsu’s PaaS offering, to tens of thousands of customers globally, as well as greater options available to customers on its private cloud infrastructure.

In the gaggle of analyst reports published over the past month concerning the state of the IaaS market, Fujitsu got a mixed hearing. Horses for Sources placed the Japanese firm as one of the top 10 vendors for business processes, yet Fujitsu was squarely placed as a niche player by Gartner, who praised the company’s heritage but noted the gap between the haves and the have-nots in IaaS was increasing, not narrowing.

One analyst house which sees potential in Fujitsu, however, is Frost & Sullivan. ICT director of consulting Alexander Michael said: “Fujitsu has established itself in the global cloud computing market with its diverse portfolio and attractive cloud offerings, in spite of the high competition.”

IBM announced a billion dollar expansion in March, as well as a rebranding to a cloud-first company, while HP did similarly in May.

What do you make of this move?

Satya Nadella’s tenure as Microsoft CEO officially began in February, but with the release of his first company-wide memo emphasising a mobile-first, cloud-first ethos, the new boss has certainly got his feet under the table.

The email to all employees, which can be seen on the Microsoft website, doubles down on the vision of Nadella, who previously headed up enterprise and cloud before taking the chief exec’s job. Nadella informed employees that the age of devices and services has been replaced by the “productivity and platform” era.

“We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world,” he wrote. “Computing is ubiquitous and experiences span devices and exhibit ambient intelligence.

“We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

He continued: “The combination of many devices and cloud services used for generating and consuming data creates a unique opportunity for us. Our passion is to enable people to thrive in this mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

Mentioning cloud specifically as “the largest opportunity” for the company, he added: “The combination of Azure and Windows Server makes us the only company with a public, private and hybrid cloud platform that can power modern business.

“We will transform the return on IT investment by enabling enterprises to combine their existing data centres and our public cloud into one cohesive infrastructure backplane.”

Nadella’s already set down his marker that productivity is the way forward for Microsoft, with the release of Office for iPad an obvious gain, as well as making a conscious move away from previous CEO Ballmer’s walled garden approach.

In the memo, Nadella takes the opportunity to further define productivity, saying it “goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides.”

“We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks,” he wrote. “We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organisations, as well as individuals, by putting them at the centre of their computing experiences.”

He continued: “We will relentlessly focus on and build great digital work and life experiences with specific focus on dual use.

“Our cloud OS infrastructure, device OS and first-party hardware will all build around this core focus and enable broad ecosystems.”

It’s not all good news, though. Nadella wrote coyly about the “engineering and organisation changes” the senior leadership team believes are needed, and according to SFGate, “people familiar with the CEO’s thinking” see this as layoffs, in other words.

Microsoft certainly won’t be the first cloudy-thinking company to trim down its staff, yet it’s interesting to note how Nadella believes his company has not been moving fast enough.

“Every team across Microsoft must find ways to simplify and move faster, more efficiently,” he warned. “Culture change means we will do things differently. Often people think that means everyone other than them. In reality, it means all of us taking a new approach and working together to make Microsoft better.”

It’s as you would expect from a Microsoft memo; lots of corporate chest thumping interspersed with interesting titbits. Yet it’s fascinating to note the way Nadella is changing things.

What’s your view?

Picture credit: Le Web

Cloud-integrated storage provider TwinStrata has been acquired by cloudy giant EMC as part of a shift of its VMAX product to more agile enterprise storage.

The full product name is VMAX³ Family, which claims to be a hugely powerful system compared to the previous iterations. VMAX³ offers up to three times faster performance and half the total cost of ownership when stood next to the previous generation product.

According to EMC, the new portfolio aims to offer greater simplicity and agility while continuing to provide solid performance.

“The simplicity of VMAX³ is a game changer as it gives us the ability to take control back into the data centre and deliver cloud services [to] our clients,” said Jesse Braasch, VP infrastructure at EMC customer Evolution1.

TwinStrata CEO and co-founder Nicos Vekiarides penned a letter to customers saying that the company’s commitment to its current goals “remains stronger than ever” after the EMC buyout.

“We will continue to enable customers to extend on-premise storage into one or many public or private cloud providers,” he wrote. “Infact, our customers will still get everything they know and love about TwinStrata…just as part of a wider, market-leading cloud portfolio and global brand behind it.”

Mark Peters, of the Enterprise Strategy Group, said the VMAX³ “does not disappoint” in both style or substance.

“It is a purpose-built platform that uses heavy doses of both raw horsepower and advanced, innovative functionality to deliver and manage predictable service levels at scale,” he said.

“It is designed to allow IT organisations to enjoy the attractive economics, workload-flexibility and self-service of a cloud approach in combination with the sheer trust, availability and scalability of a traditional data centre.”

Last month CloudTech reported on survey data from TwinStrata which showed more than half the data organisations store is inactive, holding up valuable storage space.

VMAX³ is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2014, with TwinStrata integration to be announced. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

After CRM and business IT provider Autotask suffered a severe outage yesterday, CloudTech caught up with VP engineering Adam Stewart to get the lowdown on what happened, and what happens from here

Exclusive Late on Monday and into part of Tuesday, cloudy IT management software provider Autotask went down for English speaking customers in Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, as CloudTech reported.

The root cause, according to Autotask VP engineering Adam Stewart, was a capacity spike that brought the system down and caused two separate failures. After the first downtime, engineers added more virtual cores, or more ‘CPU horsepower’ to the web tier, only for the system to go down again at approximately 0651 GMT on July 2.

“We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems,” says Stewart, who admitted that he was ‘a bit relieved’. “Basically, we went through all the things you would go through to try and discover what the cause is.”

This included the possibility of a malicious attack – a macabre, if not unexpected development given what happened to Code Spaces last week – as well as looking at various processes in the tier, yet the issue was because of the last change made to the CPU.

Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important

“After about two hours of trying many fruitless theories, we thought – although this is quite counter-intuitive – the last change we made to the system was that we added this other CPU,” Stewart explains. “It shouldn’t because we don’t believe that’s a problem, but let’s try it because it makes sense.

“So we reverted that change and, lo and behold, those servers stabilised almost immediately. We waited 10 minutes and there was no peak, no spike, no anything else, so we gradually went through and reverted the change on all the other servers, and that’s what’s stabilised the issue.

“In hindsight we now know, empirically, that change caused it,” Stewart adds. “We’re not sure why something that we’ve done dozens of times before didn’t actually stick this time.

“It was almost as if the virtualisation software was reporting to the operating system that there were eight cores in each processor, however it was only providing four cores – something like that.”

It’s a slightly worrying admission that the company doesn’t know exactly why this happened, but Stewart assures us that there is contact between Autotask and its virtualisation provider. Additional servers were added last night to expand the capacity and mitigate the risk of further problems – and all seems well for now.

The EMEA service disruption was resolved at 10:25 GMT. We’re working to ensure the issue doesn’t reoccur. Contact Autotask support with q’s.

— Autotask (@Autotask) July 2, 2014

Stewart is keen to point out that Autotask was “constantly” on the phones and on emails to customers during the outage, with some customers taking to Twitter to praise this approach:

Good call from @Autotask; checking how we managed the unexpected system outage yesterday #professional #caring

— Sytec (@Sytec) July 3, 2014

Yet Autotask’s Twitter page throughout Monday evening and Tuesday morning was a ghost town, leading to frustrated comments from customers.

“We were a little more silent there than maybe we should have been,” Stewart admits, adding: “I work out of the New York office – we were in constant contact with our UK office where most of the support was taking place for that.”

Stewart also concedes that yesterday’s downtime puts Autotask “a little bit below” the four nines SLA for the affected zones, yet adds it’s not a contractual stipulation. “It’s just the performance our customers have grown accustomed to, and rightly so,” he explains.

When outages occur, companies are quick to reassure customers it won’t happen again, and to put appropriate policies in place. It’s a similar thing for Autotask, who is collaborating with its virtualisation partner, examining additional testing procedures, as well as setting up a test environment to repeat the problem.

We spent a lot of time analysing what could be causing so much load on these systems

It’s all good development practice, yet prevention is still better than cure in these instances.

“Autotask is like oxygen for our customers, and uptime is critically important,” Stewart says.

“This is by far the worst outage we’ve had in probably five or six years,” he adds. “Overall, I’d say we still have a great record, but I’m sure in [the media’s] eyes…it’s called into question and we have to earn everybody’s trust again – which we will do.”

Cloud computing has officially hit the mainstream in the UK, according to the latest research published by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

The research, conducted in June 2014, found that more than three quarters (78%) of organisations had “formally” adopted at least one cloud-based service, which indicated a 15% growth since the last research undertaken in September 2013.

Of that number, almost half (45%) use only one cloud service, while 28% use two, 13% use three and 14% use four or more, indicating a fairly solid uptake up the scale.

The most popular of these services are web hosting, email, CRM, data backup and disaster recovery, with video conferencing, collaboration tools, HR apps and data storage seen as in the secondary tier.

The most popular driver of cloud computing is flexibility of delivery model among the private sector (17%), while, perhaps less surprisingly, operational cost savings (21%) drive the growth of cloud in the public sector.

Branding is also seen as an important element of this report. 79% of organisations polled now formally consider cloud as part of their IT strategy, yet a similar number (78%) reported they manage the majority of their IT in house, with the other 22% opting for a managed service provider.

It’s also worth noting, however, that the vast majority (85%) of organisations polled said they also operated part of their systems on-premise, whether it’s servers or data centres.

This means the CIF research falls in line with widespread industry opinion, which profiles the growth of cloud in a hybrid IT environment. Yet CIF chief exec Alex Hilton isn’t stopping there.

“We can also predict that 10% of businesses will likely report a primary cloud-based IT strategy, 10% will remain entirely on-premise and 80% will have a hybrid IT environment,” Hilton said.

“This means that nine out of 10 companies will continue to invest in on-premise IT alongside and integrated with cloud solutions.

“In other words, we are infact seeing the normalisation of cloud in the hybrid IT market,” he added.

The Cloud Industry Forum’s state of the market research first began in 2010 – and the 2014 report has shown UK cloud growth of 61.5% since the initial research.

You can read more here.