Hybrid hosting

"We grew up hosting websites, but a lot of lot of our customers have moved beyond simple websites and are doing online applications, SaaS offerings and things like that," he said. "A lot of those customers have a lot of variable traffic, depending on whether it's a product launch … where they're expecting that traffic or -- if it's [a] social media [site] -- where there are unexpected spikes in traffic."

Rackspace wanted to minimize investment in new equipment but didn’t want to spend time on a large-scale re-engineering of its data centers to enable hybrid hosting, Owen said. The service provider sought a redesign that "would have the ability to use the cloud with little or no additional cost," he said.

Hundreds of customers had already been leasing F5's BIG-IP application delivery controllers for load balancing and Cisco Systems' Adaptive Security Appliances (ASAs) for firewalls, Owen said. Working with both vendors, Rackspace was able to reconfigure the devices to support secure and efficient hybrid hosting and launch a new service, Cloud Connect.

Instead of being slaved to a VPN, the networks connect at LAN speeds -- many of them at 10 Gbps -- with minimal latency, he said.

Using APIs, Rackspace's engineers built an automation engine for the devices so that customers could turn resources up or down immediately from a Web portal, Owen said.

"It's moving beyond [creating] a bridge of those two networks," Owen said. "That connection is essentially filtered, so we automatically apply security rules that allow [those] cloud servers to only talk to their hosting environment.… [Customers] don't need to pick up the phone and call support to let us know they've added servers."

Rackspace isn't making money directly off of Cloud Connect. Customers who lease BIG-IPs and ASAs today use the service for free, and the provider doesn't want to "sell an F5 [device] to a customer just to do Cloud Connect if they don't need a load balancer," Owen said.

In addition to lowering overhead and gaining a competitive edge, hybrid hosting makes cloud and hosting products appealing to customers who previously used one or the other, he said.

"Not only is it more expensive for the customer to keep dedicated server capacity online that they're not using, but that stuff is more expensive to implement because it's custom … [and] more expensive for us to deploy," Owen said.

Moreover, he added, "if [customers] have a cloud database and aren't getting the performance they'd like, we can move it to a dedicated machine and connect that to the cloud environment."