San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Managed Hosting already supports more than 4,500 Linux configurations but has launched Red Label in response to demand from larger enterprises for mission-critical application hosted environments.
The launch of Red Label sees Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server added to Rackspace’s hosting portfolio for the first time, and it has also teamed up with the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company to ensure that Red Label stays up and running.
Rackspace is using Novell’s ZENworks Linux Management software to manage and administer the Red Label Linux infrastructure, taking advantage of its capability to manage not only Novell’s SUSE Linux but also Red Hat Inc’s Enterprise Linux distribution.
Tapping Novell to manage our Linux servers gives us the flexibility to deploy what we want, when we want, as well as lowering our costs of management, said Paul Froutan, Rackspace Managed Hosting’s vice president of product development.
Rackspace has a long-standing relationship with Red Hat that was strengthened via a July 2003 commitment to building hosting environments on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Label elevates the company’s commitment to Linux and includes a number of premium services.
These include proactive patching with testing and rollback facilities; multi-layer monitoring of availability, application and database performance, and overall system performance and utilization; and application infrastructure support of software technologies including Oracle Corp and MySQL AB databases, JBoss Inc’s application server, and the Apache Web Server.
The service also offers detailed monthly account reviews for hardware capacity planning and issue resolution, as well as network, device, operating system, and application security services.
The Red Label service is based on Dell Inc server hardware and is designed to be suited for advanced applications running on the J2EE or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) stack, as well businesses migrating from Unix to Linux.
