OREANDA-NEWS. May 17, 2016. The security and control offered by a private cloud isn’t going out of style. In fact, demand for private cloud is increasing rapidly:

It’s in the context of this robust private cloud growth that Rackspace is introducing OpenStack Everywhere allowing companies to run a fully-managed private cloud in any data center around the world without bearing the high cost, risk and operational burden of doing it themselves. This is a turn-key integrated software, hardware and services solution that allows customers to get their OpenStack private clouds up and running quickly– whether in a Rackspace data center, a customer or third-party data center, or at a colocation provider like Equinix.

We’re excited about this addition to the Rackspace Private Cloud OpenStack solutions offering because it allows us to expand our relationship with an industry-leading managed services provider. It also increases the options for how Equinix customers consume cloud in our facilities. And it highlights key Equinix strengths – our worldwide footprint of 145 data centers in 40 markets and access to more than 6,300 enterprises and other potential customers. With Equinix’s global reach, Rackspace can extend its award-winning managed services solutions to a broader range of markets.

To start, Rackspace will offer the new solution in five Equinix metros: Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Silicon Valley and Seattle. But that number will grow, as Rackspace is planning future expansion in EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

Increasing Options

The growth of private cloud is being driven in large part by the rising demand for hybrid cloud, which marries the private cloud’s security and control with the public cloud’s scalability and flexibility.

Equinix offers access to more than 500 cloud services worldwide, including all the top public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and Rackspace Public Cloud, among them). And our Equinix Cloud Exchange delivers direct, simultaneous connections to multiple cloud services from a single port. Rackspace Private Cloud OpenStack solutions will use the Cloud Exchange to extend customer connections to cloud providers and to interconnect customer-managed environments and the Rackspace managed private cloud.

Rackspace highlights several key benefits of OpenStack Everywhere:

  • It allows organizations to deploy software-defined infrastructure components – including compute, storage and networking – into their data center of choice. Meanwhile, Rackspace manages the end-to-end deployment of the solution and on-boards the customer to their new private cloud environment.
  • It’s a complete cloud delivery service for customers, including designing, building, delivering and operating their OpenStack private clouds. And with Equinix, Rackspace can bring those customers closer to their end users, which maximizes response times and reduces latency.
  • From the floor tiles all the way up the service stack, Rackspace extends Fanatical Support® to the customer’s OpenStack private cloud – fully managing the underlying OpenStack software, hardware and networking.
  • It minimizes infrastructure acquisition, IT operations and IT management costs. This moves customer IT expenses from CAPEX to OPEX, so they can free up cash for other business investments.

OpenStack Expertise

OpenStack is a leading open-source platform for private, public and hybrid clouds. It’s also an ideal technology for customers who value reliability, flexibility and the Rackspace managed services approach. Rackspace has successfully scaled OpenStack to thousands of nodes, and they operate OpenStack clouds for some of the largest companies in the world.

We gladly welcome Rackspace customers to our global data center platform and look forward to teaming up with Rackspace to help those customers get all they can out of their OpenStack private cloud.