ClearDATA vs. Rackspace Fabric vs. VMware Cloud Director

ClearDATA recognized their challenges and made efforts to resolve them. However, they learned DR was not their forte. Instead, they turned their focus towards cloud application and data hosting. Considering the relationships built, I would try their services again, especially with some of our applications needing to be moved into a legacy format.

Incentivized

I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.

Incentivized

If you have a lot of customers that all need to have a separate place to work in, without the possibility of getting in each other way, and you want to safe yourself a lot of work. Than I strongly recommend you Cloud director. Ofcourse, only if you have a VMware environment as your working environment. If you just have a small group of customers and you can easily handle the work that's coming from it, then it is overkill to add cloud director to your environment. In a later station, you can always introduce cloud director (so tis never to late if you still want to use it)

Incentivized

• Leadership is very attentive, working hard to forge interpersonal relationships

Incentivized

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

Incentivized

• Building virtual racks
• Managing the customers' network and security
• Simplicity but the completeness of IaaS solution
• Integration with major software providers

Incentivized

• Support was a challenge. Often tickets would sit until escalated.
• Clear expectations on both sides caused communication challenges.
• Data stored in the cloud was over 7 days old, and if there was a need to restore the data, business continuity would be greatly affected.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

Incentivized

• The add-on/extension required on the internet browser sometimes are difficult to get working at first. We've experience instances where the add-on/extension latest versions will not work and have to downgrade to an older version.
• The server console lacks features and tools. For example it would be useful to have a copy and paste tool or a file upload tool.
• The vCloud Director management site uses Adobe Flash, which makes it impossible to use on a mobile device.

Incentivized

Zadara: This is our current provider. We have a SaaS (Storage as a Service) solution coupled with cloud disaster recovery. So far, this service has been exemplary.

Incentivized

I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.

Incentivized

vCloud Director is definitely my favorite as far as cloud managers. The only thing that compares is Cisco UCS Director, but it has slightly different functionality and purpose. I understand why a lot of clients still go with vCloud Director even though VMware intends to sunset it

Incentivized

• Hard to say as we never really tested the data recovery, even though it was part of the scope of the project.
• Considering the challenges, I would say we paid for something we didn't receive. However, when escalated we got somewhere.
• From a customer service standpoint, it was 50/50.

Incentivized

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized

• Saves a lot of time, and time is money
• Stable, so little to non downtime
• With P1 , good support

Incentivized