Rackspace gives Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure

Rackspace has launched Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure on Monday, a managed cloud solution that provides customers with application and infrastructure guidance for Azure cloud environments.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Microsoft’s focus on cloud computing – after its recent failed purchase of Finish multinational communications and information technology company Nokia – is showing proof of smart business, according to analysts who point to findings that chief information officers are already using or are planning to use Microsoft’s cloud.

Rackspace is building on a 13-year collaboration with Microsoft by offering specialized expertise and its highly-regarded Fanatical Support for Azure. “With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud”.

Rackspace will work with customers in order to incorporate Azure technologies and provide managed services for every hour and day of the year.

Jason Sauers, founder and director of connected systems at Phidiax, a Denver-based Microsoft partner, said Azure Site Recovery allows VMware and physical workloads to depend on Azure for disaster recovery scenarios. The company has hundreds of employees trained as Microsoft Certified Professionals.

“With AWS, you are often constrained in taking advantage of a consistent and complete hybrid cloud solution”, said Mike Schutz, general manager of Cloud Platform Marketing at Microsoft. These specialists have experience managing over 30,000 SQL Server Instances.

VMware customers can now replicate their virtual machines and workloads to Azure and recover them from the Microsoft cloud, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Enterprise Client and Mobility team, said in a blog post Thursday. Now, this service is essentially integrated into Azure Site Recovery. In doing so, Microsoft is striving to turn Azure into the primary cloud environment for enterprises, noted eWEEK. The offerings will be available first in the United States, with plans for an global rollout “through early 2016”.