Rackspace to offer support for clouds in other data centers

To use the new Rackspace support services, an enterprise must use OpenStack according to a Rackspace reference architecture, which the company plans to make public. That architecture will specify hardware, configuration, networking and which OpenStack features to include. "We assure them if they're following that, we'll keep it up and running," said Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Cloud Builders.

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

Initially, the reference architecture requires Dell C Series servers, because Rackspace uses them in its own data centers and has a lot of experience with them, said Mark Collier, vice president 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.

List of system integrators

Rackspace has as well compiled a list of system integrators and consulting companies that it will recommend clients use for help with installing their OpenStack clouds. Rackspace has given these companies the reference architecture and some training on the kinds of deployments Rackspace will support. So far these companies include Cloud Innovation Partners, MomentumSI and Team Sun.

Rackspace joins a few other companies trying to make it easier for businesses to use OpenStack in their private clouds. Nebula, which was founded by a former CTO of NASA, is working on an appliance for building private clouds using OpenStack. Piston Cloud Computing, which was founded by the lead architect of NASA's cloud, is developing an OpenStack distribution designed to make it easy for businesses to use OpenStack. Attachmate's Suse division is as well working on OpenStack software designed for ease of deployment in private clouds.

The overall growth in demand for private clouds

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

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