Rackspace’s OpenStack Set to Compete with Amazon
Rackspace’s OpenStack Set to Compete with Amazon by UCStrategies Staff
A global network of OpenStack-powered public clouds for large service providers and carrier customers has now been planned by San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace. This move will compete directly with Amazon’s strong public cloud move, and Rackspace intends to create and run this new global network.
The OpenStack project was co-founded with NASA in 2010, and Rackspace claims that a high level of public cloud expertise has been gained in order to assist customers to start using and operating the services, as opposed to if those customers were to build OpenStack public clouds on their own.
The director of strategy at Rackspace, Scott Sanchez, said: “As operators of the world's largest OpenStack-based public cloud, we've gotten very good at running clouds at scale.”
It is possible for customers with data centers to offload their heavy lifting in terms of starting to use the OpenStack public cloud, and this also includes the ongoing patching, tuning and monitoring, which is quite a big deal, certainly in the sense that OpenStack is in a key stage of its growth and will need a large amount of integration and fine tuning. Public cloud services, marketing and support training to customers will also be provided by Rackspace.
Sanchez stated: “Rackspace will deploy our public cloud into a service provider data center and remotely operate that cloud, and the service provider will provide the physical data center operations as well as market, sell and support the co-branded cloud directly to its end-customers.”
Rackspace plans to create a global network of service provider and carrier clouds through which work can be shuffled across locations as it will all be based on OpenStack. If the company succeeds in reaching its target, OpenStack could become flexible and aid simpler usage, which is similar to what made Amazon such a strong contender in the public cloud space.
Managing director of technology at New York City-based Systems Solutions integrator, Frank Basanta, said: “By utilizing the OpenStack technologies, we maintain a unified base, and that only helps growth in the future. I see this as a big plus for the end-user community, whose day-to-day business relies on good, stable code.”
Furthermore, leveraging the adoption of OpenStack means that the global network will be more flexible, and can work with Open Stack clouds so that customers can be attracted away from Amazon Web Services.
Sanchez added: “This is our vision for the cloud – truly interoperable open clouds at global scale. We've been asked for it by service providers on nearly every continent. And now we have a team working hard to deliver it.” (CY) Link