Rackspace Technology accelerates growth with F5 innovation and tools

Rackspace Technology® is the trusted operator of the full enterprise AI stack — from governed private cloud to AI inference and agents in production. With more than 25 years of operating mission-critical environments 24x7x365 across approximately 40 global data centers, Rackspace serves customers of all sizes around the world and in every industry.

As it continues to pursue modernization and virtualization, the company recently replaced more than 300 virtual application delivery controllers (ADCs) with an expanded investment in F5 BIG-IP solutions.

“We looked at open-source solutions and some other vendors,” says Josh Prewitt, Senior Vice President and Head of Transformation at Rackspace. “But ultimately, we kept coming back to our strong relationship with F5, the familiarity our staff already has with the BIG-IP platform, and the great innovation we continue to see from F5.”

Enable fast migration

In only 10 weeks, Rackspace IT staff migrated more than 200 customers from their previous ADC instances to F5 Virtual Editions running BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP DNS for global traffic management.

“This was a significant undertaking that required close collaboration with F5,” says Prewitt. “Their team provided strong support throughout the process, and tools like F5 Flipper helped streamline the migration effort. By using Flipper to rewrite configuration files, we were able to accelerate delivery across more than 200 customers within a compressed timeframe.”

Surf AI tailwinds

As it moves forward, Rackspace is heavily involved in AI deployments, which Prewitt says are growing “at an astounding pace.”

He explains, “AI is driving a major shift in enterprise IT, and organizations need more than models alone to realize value from it. At Rackspace, we help customers operate the full AI stack, from infrastructure and data to inferencing and ongoing operations, so they can move AI into production with confidence and scale.”

“This creates a great flywheel effect for our business,” he notes. “The more we can help our customers leverage AI technologies, that drives more consumption of the compute, storage, and network capacity in our data centers. And all these customers have significant requirements that require us to bring in partners like F5.”

In particular, Prewitt highlights F5 technical collaboration and support throughout the engagement. “F5 has been a strong partner for our team,” he says. “Their technology and expertise have helped us support customers through complex challenges and deliver to meet their goals. The F5 partnership has played an important role in helping us scale and continue growing alongside our customers.”

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