Rackspace Teams with Zerto for Expanded DRaaS

As Rackspace celebrates its 20^th year in business, it’s expanding its horizons. The vendor on Tuesday said it has partnered with Zerto to provide disaster-recovery services for customer applications that run on premises.

Rackspace Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for Zerto provides managed services for all aspects of disaster-recovery planning, testing and management, with custom recovery service-level agreements (SLAs). 

Rackspace DRaaS for Zerto is a fully managed disaster-recovery solution for companies interested in replacing or extending traditional disaster-recovery environments as well as for businesses not inclined to managed disaster recovery themselves. 

“This is the first time that Rackspace has expanded its services to help customers with workloads running on premises,” Henry Tran, vice president and general manager of managed hosting and colocation at Rackspace, told Channel Futures. “We’re seeing a strong demand from our customers that they need a multicloud, hybrid cloud solution. There are a number of applications that they want us to host for them in our data centers, a number of applications that they want us to help run on public cloud, but they still have a lot of applications that they have on-prem, and they’re asking us to help them with disaster recovery for their applications running on-prem.” 

Henry Tran

In a similar move, in April, Rackspace launched Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, a private cloud as a service that enables cloud servers and storage to be in most data centers or colocation facilities around the world, Tran pointed out.

As a DRaaS provider, Tran says that Rackspace can both relieve midsize and enterprise customers of disaster-recovery management and help them with multicloud data center transformation activities beyond business continuity and compliance.

The company cites two use cases for the new service: for businesses that don’t have a disaster-recovery environment or the right protection or continuity plan; and, for businesses managing disaster recovery themselves or with a partner, but aren’t getting enough value from the solution or its not performing as they’d like.

The new Rackspace DRaaS for Zerto is built on Zerto’s IT Resilience platform. Zerto announced the platform, which converges backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility solutions into a single solution, in May, at ZertoCon. Zerto’s continuous data-protection technology sits at the core of the IT Resilience platform.

Some key features of Rackspace DRaaS for Zerto include:

• Support for on-premises, multi-cloud and colocation workloads: The new service leverages the Zerto IT Resilience Platform to replicate production applications to the cloud and professional services to design and execute disaster-recovery plans.
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs): SLAs provide guarantees for recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) based on established procedures for every environment.
• Automated recovery and continuous backup: DRaaS for Zerto delivers continuous backup and automated recovery to ensure that data is safe and can be recovered quickly and painlessly. 
• Advanced customization and scalability: Customers can choose RTO, RPO and testing procedures that meet their unique business needs. 
• Enhanced security and compliance: Rackspace data centers exceed compliance standards for GDPR, PCI DSS, FISMA, FedRAMP, HITRUST CSF, ISO, SOC 1/2/3 and more with enterprise-grade security across more than 30 global data centers, the company said.

“The big part of this service is the managed component,” said Becky Trevino, senior director, product marketing at Rackspace. “Zerto offers a great standalone, do it yourself product but to bring in the management component; that’s huge for customers right now as they embark on digital transformation and disaster recovery being one of those first workloads that enterprises are looking to move off premises.”

Becky Trevino

Rackspace has an early access program in place for the new service. It is looking for U.S.-based customers and MSPs to sign up and test it. Rackspace expects general availability for DRaaS for Zerto in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2019. The company will announce additional rollout dates soon.