After a trial period of four months, Rackspace has just introduced its Open Cloud platform based on OpenStack, which could be defined something like a cloud version of Linux, a project that Rackspace has worked for the past two years.
The project OpenStack was launched about two years ago to develop an open architecture for public, private or hybrid cloud. It was initiated as an open-source project of NASA and Rackspace. The project then quickly gained popularity, appealing over 3,300 programmers and 184 companies. Meanwhile, the platform is supported by numerous other companies including HP, Dell, Canonical, Red Hat, IBM, Open Stack, Citrix, Intel and AMD.
With Rackspace Open Cloud, customers can choose from private, public or hybrid clouds and they also have the freedom to implement their solutions in a datacenter of Rackspace or another supplier. The open cloud Rackspace products give application developers and IT departments the ability to build applications in the cloud, test and deploy without vendor lock-in.
“Customers can spin up for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, which are faster and feature a more responsive API, or they can stay with their existing legacy servers for now,” Jim Battenberg, senior marketing manager at Rackspace.
The new OpenStack Cloud Servers deliver greater efficiency, scalability and flexibility. Thus it is possible to live set two hundred cloud servers within twenty minutes. Rackspace Cloud Servers also deliver improved performance API for new servers to handle 25 times faster productivity.
“When a customer signs up for a new cloud server, it will be powered with Nova cloud computing fabric. Historically, it has been powered using our legacy codebase,” said Jim Curry, head of OpenStack at Rackspace. Rackspace servers are priced from US$0.022 per hour (or $16.06 per month) for a Linux server with 512MB of working memory. A Windows server, with 1GB of working memory, starts at $0.08 per hour, or $58.40 per month.”
Rackspace will provide access to MySQL relational database via the OpenStack API. Users can then create, produce and maintain MySQL database through the full service of Rackspace Cloud Database. These databases will be stored in a SAN (Storage Area Networks). The Cloud Databases provide up to three times more performance than the solution of the leading competitor, says Rackspace. Another service, Cloud Storage Block, allow the storage of raw data or storage in blocks over a SAN or storage on SSD drives.
The open cloud products from Rackspace can be accessed via the new online Control Panel. This gives IT administrators and developers a simpler and more user-friendly interface. The new control panel makes complex, large-scale cloud deployments easier in a few clicks. The panel also provides real-time status information about the infrastructure.
“Rackspace is developing a broad portfolio of OpenStack-based solutions,” Battenberg said. “In addition to Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, we will release our Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Block Storage and Cloud Networks solutions by the end of the year.”
Back in April, the company started offering OpenStack as a beta to select customers in a bid expand open source OpenStack project.
With this move, Rackspace is competing with giants like Google, Amazon or Microsoft, leveraging advantages as the joint development of software, the agility to quickly launch products or support small businesses.
