Rackspace Adds Akamai as CDN Partner

Rackspace Hosting has struck a deal with Akamai Technologies to provide expanded content delivery ootions to its cloud computing customers, the company said today. Rackspace will resell Akamai’s web acceleration and cloud optimization services as part of its dedicated and cloud hosting portfolio.

The agreement reflects Rackspace's continuing focus on offering customers additional tools to manage complex web sites on its cloud platforms. Last month the San Antonio-based provider acquired CloudKick to enhance its cloud management tools.

"The next decade presents new opportunities for two industry leaders, Rackspace and Akamai, to better help customers succeed with their cloud strategies, especially around feature-rich content, SaaS applications, and dynamic websites," said Lew Moorman, president, cloud and chief strategy officer for Rackspace. “Having independently served hundreds of Akamai’s customers, we are excited to streamline the customer experience on dedicated and cloud platforms with the leading cloud optimization services provider, all backed by our trademark Fanatical Support."

Services from Limelight Will Continue
Back in 2008 Rackspace (RAX) announced a similar arrangement with Limelight Networks (LLNW), Akamai's leading competitor in the CDN sector. "We continue to use Limelight to help us provide our customers with a great service experience," Rackspace said in a statement.

Rackspace said that integrating Akamai’s services into the Rackspace product portfolio addresses four common challenges for cloud customers: latency, availability, scalability and security. Akamai distributes customer content across 77,000 servers located in 71 countries.

"This is a strategic relationship for Akamai and Rackspace aimed at helping our enterprise customers realize the full potential of cloud services from the data center to the end user," said Willie Tejada, vice president, application and site acceleration for Akamai. "By combining two best-of-class solutions for application hosting and cloud acceleration, Rackspace customers can gain improved performance, security and reliability for their Web-based applications."

The initiative will begin with Akamai’s content delivery services being integrated with Cloud Files, a Rackspace service that provides online storage for files and media. Rackspace said it plans to provide support on a range of Akamai services to be sold in conjunction with Rackspace dedicated and cloud hosting services beginning in the second quarter.