Category: Rackspace

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.

Rackspace Launches OpenStack-based Cloud

Today, Rackspace announced the launch of an OpenStack-based cloud that draws a “line in the sand against proprietary cloud providers,” according to Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier. Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud will come loaded with the company’s famed “fanatical support” and venerable history of delivering enterprise-grade IaaS cloud solutions. Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud features the following components in varying modes of readiness for production release to customers:

Limited Availability

• Cloud Servers: the OpenStack-based cloud that leverages OpenStack Compute.
• Cloud Control Panel: An intuitive control panel designed especially for Rackspace’s OpenStack cloud.

Early Access (Production ready products with limited support)

• Cloud Databases: A high availability MySQL database.
• Cloud Monitoring: A platform that enables customers to keep track of the performance of their cloud ecosystems.

Preview (Products still in the testing phase)

• Cloud Block Storage: Elastic storage capability.
• Cloud Networks: A solution for managing virtual networks.

Cloud Servers is available to a limited pool of customers at present but will be generally available starting May 1. The Cloud Servers, Cloud Databases, Cloud Block Storage and Cloud Networks products are all powered by OpenStack. Rackspace’s launch of its OpenStack-based cloud makes it the first vendor to come to market with a public cloud solution based on Essex, the latest OpenStack release. HP is scheduled to unroll a public Beta of its OpenStack public cloud based on Essex in May.

Rackspace Reaches Testing Milestone For Commercial OpenStack Offering

This week, Rackspace announced that testing for its OpenStack based cloud product had graduated to the Beta testing phase after completion of the alpha phase. The transition to the Beta phase represents a “huge milestone for OpenStack and for the Open era of the cloud” insofar as it constitutes an important step toward commercializing the world’s largest open source collaboration on cloud computing. Backed by over 150 companies including AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and AT&T, OpenStack promises to revolutionize cloud computing by offering vendors non-proprietary Infrastructure as a Service cloud solutions that allow customers to avoid vendor lock-in with respect to their cloud service provider. In the last year, OpenStack’s popularity has soared as more and more companies have joined the collaboration and public awareness of OpenStack skyrocketed. Moreover, OpenStack’s fortunes have been buoyed by a cottage industry of commercial OpenStack offerings by vendors such as Citrix Systems, Dell, HP, Internap, Nebula, Piston and Cloudscaling that have collectively begun to illustrate commercial interest in and the viability of OpenStack-based cloud products and services.

Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud offering promises to dramatically alter the cloud computing market landscape by lending even greater legitimacy to OpenStack, particularly given that Rackspace operates one of the largest proprietary public clouds in the world. In a blog post, Rackspace elaborated on OpenStack’s graduation to Beta testing as follows:

Rackspace is powering one of the largest public clouds in the world. We have the capability to test tens of thousands of instances in our Beta environment and we are committed to testing OpenStack at a new level of service provider scale and performance. We will continue developing and testing until it reaches the level of stability and reliability that our customers expect. Our bar is high. In fact, we have invested thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars in the infrastructure alone.

Alpha testing enabled improvements to “API responsiveness” and a user’s ability to deploy a fleet of servers. Beta testing promises to consolidate the transition to “production scale deployments” and additionally feature improvements to the user experience. The Beta phase includes a new control panel and a more robust API for developers. Beta testing will also feature stress testing on tens of thousands of compute instances as opposed to the hundreds that were used in alpha testing. Rackspace’s position as one of the largest cloud providers in the world enables it to “invest thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars in the infrastructure alone” and commit to markedly high testing standards for commercializing OpenStack.

Rightscale, a well known cloud computing management software vendor, participated in the alpha testing and noted that “Rackspace’s leadership in the OpenStack community has positioned them well to make Cloud Servers faster, more scalable and provide a reliable platform for partners like us and for their customers.” Moreover, Rackspace’s scale and experience in enterprise IaaS deployments uniquely qualifies it to deliver an enterprise-grade version of OpenStack. As such, Rackspace’s achievement of the Beta testing milestone for OpenStack marks a significant step toward increased cloud computing inter-operability and transparent cloud standards that are likely to accelerate market adoption of cloud computing technology even further. If testing goes well, Rackspace branded OpenStack clouds are expected to be ready for commercial deployment in the third or fourth quarter of 2012.

Rackspace Partners With Redapt To Deploy OpenStack Based Private Clouds

Rackspace has partnered with Redapt to deliver Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, featuring deployment of an OpenStack-based private cloud offering in addition to support. Under the partnership, Redapt will deliver hardware installed with OpenStack that conforms to Rackspace’s infrastructure specifications. Redapt will perform all hardware-related integration testing off customer premises such that the “hardware will arrive at a customer’s data center of choice in as few as 14 days after ordering, needing only power and network connectivity.” While the Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is based on Rackspace’s customized version of OpenStack, the San Antonio based company is looking forward to offering support for other deployments of OpenStack from vendors that similarly deliver commercial OpenStack deployments. Partnerships with other commercial OpenStack distributors would allow other vendors to take advantage of Rackspace’s legendary support services while increasing their distribution channel. Meanwhile, Rackspace’s partnership with Redapt illustrates the commercial interest in enterprise grade private clouds based on the OpenStack cloud operating system.

OpenLogic CloudSwing Joins Rackspace Cloud Tools Program

In late December, OpenLogic announced a partnership with Rackspace whereby its Platform as a Service (PaaS) product CloudSwing would be available on the Rackspace Cloud via its Cloud Tools Program. OpenLogic’s partnership with the Rackspace Cloud Tools program means that Rackspace customers can deploy applications using OpenLogic’s CloudSwing PaaS platform. Moreover, Rackspace customers can track deployment costs for CloudSwing from all of their Rackspace accounts. CloudSwing deployments on the Rackspace cloud can leverage the CloudSwing dashboard to understand performance within their cloud infrastructure. OpenLogic’s disclosure of its participation in the Rackspace Cloud Tools Program comes roughly three weeks after it bundled New Relic into its CloudSwing offering. New Relic provides 360 degree cloud monitoring tools that enable customers to access cloud infrastructure performance data at a level of granularity beyond the server or instance level. New Relic provides user monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring, and availability monitoring within an integrated SaaS solution.

OpenLogic’s partnership with the Rackspace Cloud Tools Program is set to increase CloudSwing’s distribution by rendering it readily available to all Rackspace customers. OpenLogic CloudSwing brands itself as “industry’s first-ever fully flexible Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud solution” that “offers an entirely customizable array of infrastructure, languages, and technology stacks, giving companies and developers the flexibility they need to choose the best platforms for all their cloud deployments.” CloudSwing currently supports a number of pre-configured technology stacks including Java, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript with platforms based on Rails, Tomcat, LAMP, node.js, and nginx.

Cloud Computing 2011: The Year in Review

Whereas Time magazine selected “The Protester” as the Person of the Year, the award for Technology of the Year surely goes to Cloud Computing. 2011 marked the year that cloud computing emerged with force and gravitas onto the enterprise landscape. In the case of enterprise CIOs and IT leaders pondering the use of cloud computing infrastructures, the question of the day suddenly morphed from whether to engage the services of a cloud provider to when and how. Over the course of the year, cloud providers grew, emerged, acquired companies or were acquired, raised venture capital and announced products at a dizzying pace.

Within months, the cloud computing landscape transformed from the Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Terremark, Savvis show to something radically heterogeneous and complex. As more and more cloud technologies proliferated, analysts and technologists alike began to feel that the term “cloud computing” itself was losing its meaning. Meanwhile, news agencies and blogs struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation and deployment as startups and enterprises alike announced new, exciting and powerful cloud technologies day after day, week after week.

Below are some of the highlights of cloud computing in 2011, the year of the cloud:

• In January and February, Amazon Web Services busted out of the gate in 2011 with the launch of Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation. Elastic Beanstalk automates the process of deploying an application on Amazon’s virtual servers. CloudFormation automates the provisioning of virtual resources using templates that streamline the setup of an infrastructure for deployments of new instances.

• In May, Citrix announced plans to launch Project Olympus, an IaaS platform that allows customers to leverage the OpenStack operating system code to create public or private clouds. Project Olympus marked the first commercialization of OpenStack and thereby inaugurated a series of commercial OpenStack deployments throughout the remainder of 2011.

• In May, Red Hat launched IaaS platform CloudForms and PaaS platform OpenShift. CloudForms signaled genuine innovation in the IaaS space because of its Application Lifecycle Management capabilities and hybrid infrastructure flexibility. OpenShift, meanwhile, presented direct competition to Google Apps, Windows Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk because of the breadth of its deployment platform and claims about increased portability.

• In June, Apple announced details of iCloud, a software framework that synchronizes files across multiple devices such as iPads, iPhones and personal computers, and pushes software updates to a constellation of devices in unison. In a keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs famously remarked that iCloud would “demote the PC and Mac to being a device,” because “we’re going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”

• In August, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of GovCloud, a private cloud for government agencies that complies with regulatory and compliance rules for the Federal government such as FISMA, FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, SAS-70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1.

• In September, OpenStack, the open source cloud computing infrastructure that gained the backing of 144 companies including AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Citrix, released Diablo, its latest software version since the Cactus release in April 2011. Diablo, the first upgrade to OpenStack released on a 6 month schedule, upgrades its existing Nova, Object Storage and Glance components.

• Also in September, Joshua McKenty’s startup Piston Cloud Computing launched pentOS, one of the first enterprise grade versions of OpenStack for private clouds. With the launch of pentOS, Piston joined HP, Citrix Systems, Nebula and Dell in an elite group of vendors that commercialized the OpenStack platform in the latter half of 2011.

• In October, Rackspace revealed plans to turn over the leadership of OpenStack to an independent foundation. After founding OpenStack with the collaboration of NASA in the summer of 2010, Rackspace decided to hand over trademarks and copyrights to an independent foundation to ensure that OpenStack remains vendor neutral.

The meteoric rise of OpenStack constituted the cloud computing story of the year, by far. Commercial deployments of OpenStack by Piston Cloud Computing and other vendors underscored the emerging power of OpenStack as an increasingly competitive option to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Moreover, OpenStack promised global cloud inter-operability and standards resulting from an open source organizational framework for which respect snowballed within the developer and enterprise community alike. Much of the story of cloud computing in 2012 will hinge on the ability of the OpenStack foundation to continue to promote the software framework’s adoption in the private sector and establish itself as a credible counterweight to first mover Amazon Web Services and other proprietary cloud vendors.