Rackspace to Offer Support for Clouds in Other Data Centers

Rackspace for the first time plans to extend its support services to OpenStack befog implementations that occupy within the walls of an endeavor or third-company commercial data centers, the company declared Monday.

To use the new Rackspace support services, an go-ahead must expend OpenStack according to a Rackspace character reference architecture, which the company plans to name populace. That architecture will specify hardware, configuration, networking and which OpenStack features to include. "We assure them if they're following that, we'll hold bac it up and moving," said Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Cloud Builders.

Rackspace, on with NASA, contributed code to OpenStack, which is open source software for building clouds infrastructure.

Rackspace will offer support for enterprises that run their cloud execution in an internecine information center, host it with Rackspace or another hosting service. Equinix, one of the largest information center operators in the world, is one hosting provider that enterprises can use and get Rackspace support.

"We want to get to a manakin where we can provide technology innovation for OpenStack if it's in an Equinix facility, in a customer facility and extraordinary running at Rackspace," said Curry.

It plans to offer the same gentle of supporting services IT offers customers using its own hosted services, though not all will glucinium open ab initio. The executives were reluctant to share many details of how IT would extend such plump for outside of its own information centers, but they said some of the services would require software functional happening customers' servers.

Once the specified hardware and software is in place, Rackspace's bear services include making "sure the cloud stays up and running," Curry said. That includes pushing out the latest versions of OpenStack, responding to a variety of issues such as a customer having unhinge loading images and proactive planning for things like future elaboration.

Rackspace will use many of the same tools it already uses to run and operate its own world cloud, he said. "The goal is to make IT so each the tools and processes and know-how we have are things we'll make usable to customers," he said.

Initially, the reference architecture requires Dell C Series servers, because Rackspace uses them in its own information centers and has a great deal of receive with them, said Mark Collier, V.P. of business development at Rackspace. IT includes Cisco products at the networking layer. "Over time we expect to expand the options in the reference architecture," he said.

Rackspace has also compiled a list of system integrators and consulting companies that it will recommend customers use for help with installing their OpenStack clouds. Rackspace has given these companies the extension architecture and some breeding on the kinds of deployments Rackspace wish put up. So far these companies include Fog Engineering science Partners, MomentumSI and Team up Solarise.

Team Sun is one of the biggest system integrators in China, Coal miner aforementioned, which is a market that has surprised Rackspace with the layer of pastime in OpenStack.

Rackspace joins a few other companies trying to build it easier for businesses to use OpenStack in their privy clouds. Nebula, which was based past a previous CTO of NASA, is working on an appliance for construction private clouds exploitation OpenStack. Piston Cloud Computing, which was founded by the Pb architect of NASA's cloud, is developing an OpenStack distribution fashioned to gain it easy for businesses to use OpenStack. Attachmate's Suse division is too working happening OpenStack software designed for ease of deployment in private clouds.

Rackspace could admit some of those products in its reference architecture, the executives said. "Those aren't basically incompatible with our feeler. At this point, the pure OpenStack approaching is ace we have the most experience with and we finger are the most mature," Coal miner said. The products from Nebula, Piston and Suse aren't til now obtainable.

Interest in using OpenStack for private clouds is growing along with the overall growth in demand for personal clouds, Collier said. "As these IT organizations within big enterprises are grapple with what platform to choose, they know that over the long take to the woods they'll run away some portion of their business publicly clouds. Choosing the architecture widely adopted by service providers is a good bet," he same. OpenCloud was initially most unputdownable to public swarm providers, many of whom decided to use it to build their services.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Divine service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478046/rackspace_to_offer_support_for_clouds_in_other_data_centers.html

Posted by: williamsstalow.blogspot.com