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Rackspace starts renting its rack space

Cloudy concern commences colocation capers

Rackspace has entered the colocation business and invited world+dog to put its kit in the company’s data centres.

The company’s pitching its service as a fine way for organisations to get used to cloud-style operations and says it’s a fine place to make such a foray because its data centres were built to host actual clouds and have lovely fat network links to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and even Alibaba’s cloud. Throw in the fact that Rackspace also supports all the major clouds and the company is spruiking itself as the ideal hand-holder for the cloud-curious.

Other than that this looks like a vanilla co-location offering - Rackspace has promised swift and sensible support for your kit, security, resilience and the usual your mess for less proposition, albeit in unusually well-specced bit barns.

The company hasn’t said it needs new data centres to support the colo product, which to your correspondent’s mind is the most interesting bit of the new offering because Rackspace increasingly sells support, not hosting. The Register therefore imagines that Rackspace has rather a lot of – erm – rack space to fill, in part thanks to its 2017 acquisition of 29 data centres from Datapipe.

Rackspace’s announcement of the new product quoted analyst research to the effect that the colocation market will grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate until the year 2020. Perhaps that surge will help Rackspace fill its bit barns and win more services business. The company needs something: its founding plan to run an OpenStack cloud foundered, it went private and now offers itself as a managed services operation, a field in which it faces plenty of competition. ®

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