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RackConnect v2 Terminology

If you are a customer of Rackspace and utilize RackConnect technology, you may have encountered Rackspace specific terminologies while interacting with Rackspace via Ticket/Phone. This post will provide some of the terminologies and explanations:

“EDGE Device” is the outermost network device (Firewall or Load Balancer) in your infrastructure.

“CONNECTED Device” is the network device (Firewall or Load Balancer) that is connected to the Public Cloud infrastructure.

“RC Environment” refers to the combination of “EDGE” and “CONNECTED” device and the cloud account in a particular Data Center. A customer can have multiple “RC Environment” within the same DC or in multiple DC.

Example:
Customer A can have “Primary(LON)” and “Seconday(LON)” – 2 RC Environments (Primary & Secondary) in the same DC – LON

Customer B can have “Primary(DFW)” and “Secondary(LON)” – 2 RC Environments (Primary & Secondary) in 2 different DC – DFW & LON

Traffic Flow between Cloud & Dedicated Servers in RCv2 & RCv3 is seen here:
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/comparing-rackconnect-v30-and-rackconnect-v20#i

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RackConnect Versions

RackConnect:

RackConnect is a Rackspace product that provides connectivity between Dedicated, Single Tenant Environment and an Openstack based Public Cloud Environment.

RackConnect_How

*Image taken from Rackconnect page.

RackConnect Versions:

RackConnect v1.0 is the very 1st version of RackConnect and it provides simple connectivity between the Dedicated, Single Tenant Environment and the Cloud Servers via ServiceNet.

After a cloud server is spun up, manual changes would have to be made to the cloud server’s route table, interface and software firewall/iptable in order to force the traffic to flow to dedicated servers.

RackConnect v2.0 is the next iteration of the RC product series. The major advantage of RC v2 compared to RC v1 is Automation. Changes to route table, cloud server interface, software firewall/iptable and IP assignment were taken care by the automation. RC v2 was also essential for utilizing the next generation “performance cloud servers” offered by Rackspace.

RackConnect v2.1 is similar to RC v2 but consists of RC v1 configurations that were migrated to RC v2.

RackConnect v3.0 is the latest in the RackConnect series. RC v3 utilizes SDN & Cloud Networks while the previous versions utilized the ServiceNet network offered for access to the different “Services” provided within the Datacenter.

Comparison of RC v3 & RC v2 is seen here.

As of Q4 2014, new customers will be provided with RC v3 features. There are quite a few customers on RC v2 and RC v2.1. RC v1 is almost non-existent.

Reference:

RackConnect