Rackspace’s Alamo Targets Private Cloud Enterprise OpenStack Space

Hot on the heels of Red Hat’s announcement of the preview release of its OpenStack distribution, Rackspace revealed the availability of its Private Cloud Software branded Alamo. Available as a free download on its website, Alamo intends to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack across enterprises, with a particular focus on enterprise IT administrators that have little prior experience with OpenStack. Alamo represents an important step in Rackspace’s efforts to transition from its proprietary cloud based software to OpenStack-based solutions given that, earlier this month, Rackspace converted its public cloud service to OpenStack. Alamo allows Rackspace to target private cloud enterprise customers that may elect to leverage Rackspace’s Escalation support solutions alongside its free OpenStack download.

Jim Curry, general manager of Cloud Builders, Rackspace’s private cloud division, positioned the release of Alamo within the broader community of cloud and OpenStack users as follows:

“To date most of the market for OpenStack has been people who were experts in it. We wanted to make it so a systems administrator who doesn’t know anything about OpenStack and maybe knows a little bit about cloud, can easily get an OpenStack cloud up and running so they can evaluate and determine if it’s a good solution on the same day.”

Alamo consists of the Essex release of OpenStack Nova compute, the Glance library of images, the Horizon dashboard and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The distribution also includes Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution of Linux and Opscode’s chef cloud automation software. Rackspace intends to support Red Hat’s distribution of Linux soon as well.

With the release of Alamo, Rackspace intends to streamline OpenStack installation and productize its entry into the enterprise IT ecosystem. Rackspace President Lew Moorman noted that the installation allows IT administrators to install OpenStack “anywhere within minutes” and quickly appraise its utility as a supplement to existing data center and cloud options. In addition to establishing Rackspace’s footprint firmly within the private cloud enterprise OpenStack space, Alamo is likely to accelerate OpenStack adoption more generally and lend credence to OpenStack’s status as a credible alternative to proprietary IaaS cloud solutions. Rackspace’s release of Alamo marks the intensification of a battle for market share within the private cloud OpenStack space that is likely to feature competition from Red Hat and vendors such as Piston Cloud and Nebula as well.