Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

Michael Garrity — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:15:00 GMT

The open cloud company Rackspace ranks high among major players like Amazon and Windows in the cloud computing industry, which is an impressive feat. But the company isn’t about to rest on its laurels, as it just announced a slew of new features and enhanced support offerings for its Rackspace Private Cloud Software.

Rackspace just launched Private Cloud Software in August and already thousands of businesses and organizations from more than 125 different countries have downloaded it.

These new additions have been collectively named “Alamo” and incorporate “Folsom,” the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform that came out in September and included nearly 200 new features. This is the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud.

Alamo has allowed Rackspace to extend its service portfolio for the Rackspace Private Cloud, particularly with a new support level – Core Software Support – that includes remote access support for the Private Cloud Software stack all day long and every day of the year. Core Software Support will allow the cloud company’s engineers login to a customer’s private cloud environment to install, configure, patch and troubleshoot, as needed.

Some other new features are highly scalable Block Storage that turns external storage into an additional storage volume and Object Storage powered by OpenStack Swift that allows customers to create “massively scalable” storage resource pools for storing files, with server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to provide reduced costs. It also provides new Monitoring that includes Graphite and Collectd applications to extend monitoring and alerting capabilities. All of these new features were designed to work in private cloud environments.

Rackspace Certifies Private Cloud Partners

Michael Garrity — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Rackspace, the developer of a popular open cloud, is now offering product certifications to its Rackspace Private Cloud partners.

In case you still haven’t heard of Rackspace, it’s a company that helps businesses easily deploy and manage private clouds, which can quickly (as in under an hour) be downloaded and used in a customer’s datacenter. These clouds are supported by Rackspace’s open cloud experts.

At present, thousands of different businesses, organizations and individuals across the globe use the Rackspace Private Cloud software, and according to the company, many of their partners have been asking for a way to certify their Private Cloud products, hardware or software through Rackspace. In doing this, it will be able to extend the capabilities of its open cloud solution by providing programs to its partners that can validate their offerings against Rackspace’s solution, making them more attractive to potential customers that also use the Private Cloud.

Because it can be difficult and costly (both in time and monetary investment) to build hardware, apps and platforms that run on Rackspace OpenStack private clouds, as it requires “deep expertise and knowledge,” customers can turn to the Rackspace Private Cloud certification program, which provides a consistent, supportable, tested platform to test products for compatibility with other open private clouds.

To increase versatility, Rackspace is actually offering two different types of product certifications. The first is the Technology Alliance Program that is designed for hardware and platform vendors that offer products and solutions in conjunction with the Rackspace Private Cloud. Partners can include compute, hardware, storage hardware, networking, operating systems and management tools, and they will work with Rackspace engineers to get detailed testing criteria in QA and validation labs to ensure compatibility.

The other type is the “Built For” Program, which was designed for software vendors that want to build applications running in guest virtual machines or to manage app workloads with the Private Cloud. Again, they’ll receive a testing suite and hosted validation environment that confirms their app’s compatibility with the Rackspace Private Cloud.

“Running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task,” says Rackspace’s private cloud vice president, Paul Rad. “Our goal is to help enterprise IT to deploy private clouds that have the efficiently and robustness of Rackspace’s public cloud, which runs thousands of virtual machines. The product certification program opens the door for IT executives to choose a certified stack that has been validated and supported by Rackspace and its certification partners.”

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Remote Support for Private Clouds from RackSpace

Rackspace Certifies Private Cloud Partners