Intensive™ Hosting from Rackspace® is a more consultative approach to managed hosting, where Rackspace support staff become an integral part of the customers IT department. The customer has a dedicated team of experts who build a deep relationship with the customer's hosting environment to enable the proactive identification of potential issues which could impact on the application. This includes monitoring, analysing report trends, looking at future opportunities and emerging issues relevant to the hosting environment. Distinguishing support features include:
- Complete accountability for infrastructure uptime via comprehensive and custom monitoring to ensure maximum reliability and performance
- Assignment of a lead technician to proactively consult on the technical requirements of the solution
- Project managed change control to ensure the smooth deployment, scaling and migration as and when needed.
Intensive Hosting is ideal for companies looking to outsource their mission-critical hosting operations to a focused, reliable and experienced hosting provider
Rackspace is fully focused on the delivery of Intensive hosting, which consists of a managed infrastructure layered with ProActive7 - the cornerstone set of managed services that are essential for a reliable platform. The Intensive hosting platform is comprised of seven layers, designed to provide a mission critical infrastructure and all the vital managed services a customer needs. The first four provide the foundation for Managed Hosting:
- Superstructure (network, data centres and systems automation technology);
- Web, Application and Database servers;
- Managed Network devices
- Managed Services.
Intensive Hosting has an additional 3 layers which sit on top of these Managed Hosting layers, which are:
- Application Environment Optimisation Rackspace endeavours to optimise the specific needs of our customer's complex application environment. This is achieved through our engineering team customising security set up, monitoring thresholds, data storage and escalation procedures. Once optimisation is complete, our security team performs an audit across all layers of the application hosting environment. All aspects of the application platform are optimised on an as needed basis as the application scales and/or evolves.
- Application Problem Management Rackspace is responsible for seeing all infrastructure, managed service, database and application related incidents through to resolution. Rackspace actively manages incidents, including a post issue summary and root cause analysis. The customer's Intensive Account Manager (AM) acts as a project manager throughout the process and they have a variety of resources at their disposal.
- Application Scalability and Capacity Planning Rackspace is responsible for keeping a scalability plan based on the customer's business projections to ensure smooth scaling during times of business growth. When producing a plan, we couple our expertise in scaling complex application environments with historical, trended data regarding the customer's server, network and application resources. The plan is reviewed with the customer on a monthly basis and revisions are made as the business growth projection change.
