Rackspace Rallies Partners Around OpenStack Private Clouds

Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is working Dell, HP, EMC and other technology vendors to ease large-scale private cloud deployments based on the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

Rackspace has released a series of Private Cloud Open Reference Architectures to drive the effort. Included in the development of the architectures are AMD, Dell, EMC, HP, Arista Networks, Brocade, Hortonworks, NetApp and CommVault. The launch, which was announced on the Rackspace blog, includes three reference architectures.

As Paul Rad, Rackspace vice president of private cloud, noted in his blog post, "deploying, managing and running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task." Included in the reference architecture list are:

• Mass compute with external storage, an architecture design for scalable cloud compute where data can be stored to external resilient volumes and exported to iSCSI.
• Mass compute, a scalable compute cloud architecture designed for variable workloads in which data resides on the compute nodes directly.
• Distributed object storage, which is an architecture for an object storage cloud for enterprises to store critical data across multiple zones for increased resiliency.

Reference architures are one way toward achieving maturity in a business technology, and that's what Rackspace is hoping to do. At the same time, it may give it and the channel partners that deal in private OpenStack cloud infrastructure and deployments an advantage, as the references should, ideally, make it easier for them to design private clouds for their customers.

At the same time, Rad introduced the Rackspace Private Cloud Certification Toolkit, which "validates all of the functionality of an OpenStack private cloud so your cloud operations team can be sure that your cloud is operational and that it has all of the necessary components properly installed and configured." It sounds like another good tool for partners that are deploying private clouds, but for remote private cloud operations, Rad forwarded readers on to Rackspace CORE software support.

What's next for Rackspace and OpenStack-based private cloud? Certification, of course. Rad wrote that Rackspace intends to certify Open Compute Project providers for integration with the Rackspace Private Cloud. The company also plans to add to the reference architectures over time, adding new ones based on high availability, security and software-defined networking (SDN).

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