Rackspace has joined the rush to align around the upcoming Microsoft Azure Stack.
The managed cloud company announced Fanatical Support for the Microsoft Azure Stack, which is designed to help make the hybrid cloud offering accessible to organisations of all sizes, regardless of expertise.
Basically, the support is designed to take away some of the pain points of managing and operating the upcoming cloud system from Microsoft by providing year round support.
The Azure Stack is designed to provide a consistent experience across Azure and Azure Stack, as a hybrid cloud environment, that includes API’s, service architecture and portal.
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Fanatical Support for the Microsoft Azure Stack will include full-stack support, end-to-end centralised support across hardware, networking and platform components, including virtual machines and other gear running inside the stack and public Azure.
Rackspace also integrates a customer’s existing Azure Active Directory with their Azure Stack cloud in order to help ensure security.
Ramakant Pandrangi, VP & GM of Microsoft Clouds at Rackspace said: “Through Fanatical Support for Azure Stack, Rackspace will make the solution accessible to organisations of all sizes.”
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“As a long-time Microsoft partner, Rackspace has gained significant hybrid cloud expertise through managing Microsoft private cloud and Azure public cloud for more than two years. 
“We’ve been working closely with Microsoft since the first Technical Preview of Azure Stack to ensure Rackspace is the go-to provider for support for customers at any stage in their adoption of the platform, regardless of hybrid cloud skills or expertise – from testing with a single-node proof of concept, to deploying a production-ready Azure Stack cloud backed by Rackspace expertise and Fanatical Support. We are excited to be an at-launch partner for Azure Stack and look forward to our continued collaboration with Microsoft in the future.”
The two companies have also worked together to provide a test environment that will give businesses a place to test non-production workloads in a hosted single node Azure Stack Development Kit.
The proof of concept is available on a month-to-month contract and is deployed on Rackspace Rapid Deployment hardware.
