i2Coalition Member Spotlight: RAKsmart

For over 13 years , RAKsmart has been delivering cutting-edge Internet and cloud services to a global customer base from its Silicon Valley headquarter. RAKsmart’s rapidly growing ecosystem thrives with its comprehensive range of solutions, including public cloud, multi-cloud management, bare metal cloud, fully-managed private cloud, web hosting, and domain name services. The company’s success is further bolstered by its robust affiliate and reseller programs. We recently interviewed David Zhang, Director of Operations at RAKsmart, to discuss servicing smaller companies and AI application-friendly cloud services. 

i2Coalition: Can you give us the elevator pitch for RAKsmart?
David Zhang: RAKsmart offers cloud solutions specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, featuring an intuitive user interface, a marketplace with SME-focused applications, and complimentary 24/7 customer support. Unlike AWS, which primarily caters to Fortune 500 companies, RAKsmart’s services are particularly appealing to SMEs. This is evident from our rapidly expanding customer base, which has already reached hundreds of thousands of users. Our offerings include a comprehensive range of services such as cloud servers, databases, storage solutions, and network security, all tailored to meet the unique needs of growing SME businesses.

i2Coalition: Most people think of “The Cloud” as one big, nebulous thing—basically, “not my computer”. How do you service the different public, private, and multi-cloud configurations? 

[Ed. note: In broad strokes, the public cloud is like a dorm or shared apartment for your data and applications; hybrid/multi-cloud is like a townhouse or semi-detached; and private cloud is like your own house, for which you are responsible for the yardwork.]

DZ: Raksmart offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for both public and private cloud deployments. These services encompass compute, storage, networking, database, middleware, and container applications.

For public cloud deployments, customers can access these services through www.raksmart.com, www.petaexpress.com, and petacloud.ai. Private cloud options are available for customers requiring dedicated, behind-firewall solutions.

The multi-cloud approach combines PetaExpress and RakSmart’s public and private cloud offerings with third-party public cloud services like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This is managed through a single pane of glass interface, providing unified visibility and control across diverse cloud environments.

Whichever cloud a customer needs, the key benefits of our services are flexibility, bespoke service options, scalability, optimized cost, and ease of management through a single portal—from compute, storage, and networking to virtualization, database and container management, and cybersecurity.

This multi-cloud approach provides customers with the flexibility and optionality needed to optimize their diverse workloads and meet evolving business requirements while maintaining unified management across different cloud environments.

i2Coalition: Bare metal and dedicated servers both make up a big chunk of what you do. How have demands around generative AI impacted your operations and service offerings?

DZ: Our Bare Metal Cloud and Dedicated Servers are very powerful and easy-to-use solutions for our clients’ demanding workloads— as they are increasingly investing in generative AI-related solutions. We are definitely seeing increasing interest for our Bare Metal Cloud and Dedicated Servers as part of our clients Generative AI initiatives, due to their raw computing powers. 

i2Coalition: Why did your team find it important to join the i2Coalition?
DZ: As RAKsmart expands globally, we’re proactively addressing complex international legal and regulatory challenges in cloud services. By collaborating with industry partners like i2Coalition and Secure Hosting Alliance, we’re developing robust best practices to ensure compliance and maintain our commitment to responsible, secure cloud infrastructure across diverse regulatory landscapes