[jarito]

That's not entirely true. While Rackspace does provide a shared private network for intra-DC communication, it also provides the Cloud Networks product that is capable of creating tenant specific networks. Think VLAN tagging for Cloud.

On that private network, you can use your own addressing, use multi-cast, etc. Much less limited and more secure than a shared private network. It's also free.

Mandatory Disclosure: I work for Rack.

[Goranek]

Amazon supports this as well with their Virtual Private Cloud(VPC)

[sgs1370]

The last time I looked in the Rackspace docs, it looked like this was in the process of being rolled out ("production ready but will be available to customers in a phased release"). Is Cloud Networks considered fully supported now?

[jarito]

Sorry for the slow reply. Yes - Cloud Networks is fully supported.

[bluedino]

>> I work for Rack.

Can you give any insight into what RackConnect actually is?

[jarito]

Sorry for the late reply.

RackConnect is a product that allows us to link cloud servers in our public Cloud environment with servers in a dedicated configuration.

We are currently using RackConnect 2.0 which achieves this by attaching the shared private network to the dedicated environment and configuring the cloud servers network stacks to use the dedicated load balancer and firewall as their default gateway, so that all traffic flows through the dedicated config. Incoming traffic (or traffic from the dedicated configuration) will be routed out to the Cloud servers by the dedicated load balancer.

RackConnect 3.0 (coming soon) will provide the same service, but the connection from the cloud servers to the dedicated configuration will be provided by Cloud Networks, our SDN product. This simplifies the configuration and provides additional security to the traffic.