Rackspace, the company that co-founded the OpenStack cloud computing platform project along with NASA, today announced a change in its operations. Until now, companies that wanted OpenStack to manage their deployments had to build their own hardware and infrastructure. This is about to change now.
This meant that enterprises had to make arrangements of their own hardware and talent to get the service up and running. This had always been a difficult task for most companies as getting the right talent for this job is like finding a needle in a haystack.
To solve this crisis, Rackspace announced that it will now build, monitor and manage OpenStack clouds from the hardware up to the software stack for enterprises and mid-market organizations that want to switch to OpenStack for their private cloud deployments. This means that the clouds will be fully managed and the companies will not have to invest much into this sector. Rackspace adds that this service is available for any data center around the globe, with minimum risk and operational burden.
Apparently, the company is hoping to provide OpenStack as a simplified service with a complete suite of managed features. Rackspace GM and VP of OpenStack Private Cloud Darrin Hanson told TechCrunch that this new service allows them to bypass the talent crunch required for building and managing OpenStack and reduces the barrier of entry.
The service, until today, would require companies to build their own hardware and architecture and then deploy this according to Rackspace’s reference architecture. Now companies can set up their own data centers. Rackspace’s employees will then manage everything from there and help on-board customers to their new clouds.
To make things even better, Rackspace has partnered up with Equinix to make deployments in that company’s data centers even faster and easier. This doesn’t mean that other types of data centers aren’t supported. On paper, all data centers on every part of this planet are supported by OpenStack.
