Rackspace Unveils OpenStack

At Cloud Connect, Rackspace unveiled a new professional services offering, called Rackspace Cloud Builders, that helps enterprises deploy private cloud services based on OpenStack. The offering includes training, design consulting and support from Rackspace.

Rackspace is leveraging its own expertise and experience with OpenStack as well as the experience it acquired with Anso, which worked with NASA to build the space agency's cloud. Since Rackspace runs OpenStack in its own cloud offerings, the company has a wealth of hands-on experience with the cloud offering already, and will use that experience to provide support to enterprises just starting out in cloud.

A cloud service is more than just installing virtualization services and calling it a day. Operations and management functions need to be optimized, hypervisors and virtual machines have to be monitored and managed, and configurations have to be maintained.

There are a number of software offerings that can perform those functions, but getting the technical and organization design down correctly can be a stumbling block. Rackspace joins a number of other companies, including Cloud.com, HP and IBM, that provide design, training and support services so that organizations can build private cloud services.

While Cloudscale's Randy Bias believes that private clouds don't provide enough economic benefit--he claimed during his keynote that based on his company's internal models, private companies will spend six to eight times the money to build a private cloud than a public cloud provider will, and thus doing so doesn't make economic sense--organizations are, in fact interested in building private clouds.There are other benefits, such as more agile IT, reduced operational costs and modernization, that could outweigh the increased costs for an internal cloud compared with using a public cloud. Rackspace is already working with Canadian company Cybera and ComputCalcul Canada, which are using Cloud Builder to create a cloud service to help Canadian SMB/SME organizations for research and development.

The success of private cloud computing relies largely on getting the service up and running reliably. We expect to see more services like Rackspace's targeted at jump-starting cloud deployments in the coming year.

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