Rackspace Wins Joint Server Farm Tender To Support MoD Websites

Released on: September 7, 2009, 4:20 am
Author: Rackspace
Industry: Internet & Online

Rackspace Hosting, the world's leader in hosting, has announced it has won a three year, competitive deal to provide fully managed support to the Joint Server Farm (JSF), a secure hosting environment for Ministry of Defence (MoD) websites. The partnership will see MoD, Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force websites consolidated onto a single, virtualised infrastructure to enable easier management, greater efficiencies and scalability.

Rackspace beat 18 other companies to win the contract to support the JSF following a European Journal Competition and tender for contract. Through the deal Rackspace will provide MoD partners with the flexibility to manage and change websites quickly to meet user demand. It will also provide enhanced security from firewalls and intrusion detection devices, which constantly monitor for threats, round-the-clock access to certified engineers and a 100% network uptime guarantee, backed by its service level agreement.

Rackspace's EMEA managing director Brian Thomson said: "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. 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."

The JSF is a single infrastructure for all services, websites and applications. It currently supports a number of well-known MoD campaigns, such as the recruiting website for the Army, Start Thinking Soldier as well as the Army Pathfinder programme. It also supports Navy and Air Force recruitment campaigns, all of the cadets' sites, a number of admin sites and facilitates small short-term public information campaign sites.

The MoD created the JSF because it had lots of disparate sites on different infrastructures, which were hard to maintain, inefficient and unscalable. With the growing influence of the internet it was also decided that a central hosting UK resource that departments could tap into for their web requirements was needed. In addition to this, the MoD was bound to meet the Transformational Government Agenda (TGA), which requires rationalisation of websites across all government departments. The MoD also moved to virtual servers for its consolidated infrastructure to provide greater flexibility when managing the sites.

Around 70% of MoD websites are currently hosted on Rackspace infrastructure and this deal extends the company's partnership with ArmyNET, the award-winning portal which allows soldiers to keep in touch with their families.

Rackspace consolidated 67 servers to 12 physical hypervisors and 72 virtual servers by implementing virtualisation across the MoD infrastructure. This solution when combined with a raft of changes to the contract cost model, including a reduction in SAN spindle storage costs, resulted in a reduction of overall costs. It also provides greater efficiencies for power and space, with a lower number of overall servers.

About Rackspace Hosting:
As the world's leader and specialist in hosting, Rackspace Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry's best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable.

A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support, furthering the company's mission to be one of the world's greatest service companies. Rackspace featured in the top 30 of both the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For list and the Financial Times Great Place to Work Awards, 2008.

Rackspace's portfolio of hosted services includes hosted exchange, managed hosting, dedicated server and cloud hosting.

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