Rackspace Wins UK Defense Deal

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) has won a three-year managed hosting deal with the UK Ministry of Defense that will consolidate the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force websites onto a single virtualized platform. Rackspace beat 18 other companies to win the contract to support the Joint Server Farm (JSF), a secure hosting infrastructure that will make it easier to manage, scale and secure the Ministry of Defense web sites.

"We are delighted to have extended our relationship with the MOD by winning this tender in what was a hard fought pitch by lots of companies," said Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director for Rackspace Hosting. "At a time when costs and efficiencies are being brought to the forefront, we know we can truly help simplify the MOD infrastructure to meet these challenges."

Around 70 percent of the Ministry of Defense web sites are currently hosted on Rackspace infrastructure.
Rackspace previously consolidated 67 servers to 12 physical hypervisors and 72 virtual servers by implementing virtualization across the MOD infrastructure.

The JSF is designed to address challenges in the minidtry's existing web operations, which houses key sites on different infrastructures that have proven hard to maintain and unscalable. The intiaitve also satfisfies the Transformational Government Agenda (TGA), which calls for rationalizing web sites across government departments.