Dedicated Web Hosting Firm, Rackspace Survey, Spotlights Server Virtualization

San Antonio, Texas - (The Hosting News) - August 15, 2007 - Virtualization is poised to support mission-critical applications, according to a recent customer survey conducted by managed hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting, revealing that 57 percent of respondents are already using virtualization for internal applications.

In addition, 72 percent of respondents are comfortable hosting mission-critical applications in a production environment on a virtualized platform. There is a great demand for leveraging the benefit of virtualization through a third-party hosting company: 71 percent of respondents would host their applications on a virtualized infrastructure with a hosting provider. However, the majority of customers are currently not comfortable utilizing a shared, virtual environment. Only 13 percent of respondents are confidently willing to share a physical server with other hosting customers, a practice common in hosting, with top concerns stemming from performance and security vulnerabilities in shared environments.

Nicolas Keller, Director of Platform Products at Rackspace Managed Hosting offered, ''Virtualization is making significant traction in the market; however, it is still a maturing technology. This is where Rackspace can fill in the gap by applying Fanatical Support to a solution that people are comfortable with and that will provide peace of mind in areas like performance and security. The first phase of virtualization has focused on cost savings from server consolidation, but the next phase will be about infrastructure management to improve flexibility and scalability. Hosting providers and utility players, like Rackspace, that manage tens-of-thousands of customer servers, need to deliver a virtualization platform that provides fast provisioning and infrastructure agility for our customers.''

Rackspace plans to unveil a virtualization offering, which is currently in the beta process, to address the management of large-scale implementations. It will address the needs and concerns that have been revealed through this customer survey.

Mr. Keller continued, ''We've been researching virtualization for a while now and wanted to make sure that our customers are ready, that the market is ready and most importantly that our offering is Fanatical Support-ready. We are working thoroughly to ensure the management, high availability, performance and security pieces of our virtualization offering are in line for a successful launch by the end of this year.''

Additionally, the Rackspace survey revealed that 42 percent of respondents believe virtualization will have a fundamental impact on information technology. Although 43 percent had no preference between using open source or proprietary virtualization products, the majority of respondents use VMware. The methodology for this research involved sending an email survey to approximately 3,000 Rackspace customers. More than 12 percent of survey recipients responded to the questions.

A recognized global managed hosting firm, Rackspace Managed Hosting is a service organization delivering enterprise-level web infrastructure and managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 10,000 customers across seven data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry's best technologies for each customer need and delivers it as a service via the company's award-winning Fanatical Support. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has grown more than 50 percent a year since the company's inception.

To learn more about the survey report, please visit: www.rackspace.com/downloads/surveys/virtualizationsurvey.pdf.

For more information about Rackspace Managed Hosting, please visit: www.rackspace.com.

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