Rackspace Expands Private Cloud Offering with OpenCenter
March 15, 2013
By
Erin Harrison, Executive Editor, Cloud Computing
Rackspace (News - Alert), one of the original participants in the CloudStack project, recently announced the next major release of its private cloud solution, which is designed to offer high availability for OpenStack controller nodes, as well as official support for Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux and CentOS for the host operating system.
In addition, Rackspace released OpenCenter, a new graphical interface and API, which is designed to serve as the fabric of a private cloud installation. The OpenCenter Graphical User Interface and API offers high availability for OpenStack services and more host operating system choice in the latest software release, according to Duan van der Westhuizen, product marketing lead for the Rackspace Private Cloud portfolio.
“We’ve taken the lessons we’ve learned from running OpenStack clouds and built this into our new Private Cloud Software so you can realize those same benefits,” van der Westhuizen said in a recent blog post.
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. All of the code for OpenStack is available under the Apache 2.0 license.
The Apache Software Foundation uses various licenses to distribute software and documentation, to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products.
“These licenses help us achieve our goal of providing reliable and long-lived software products through collaborative open source software development,” Apache explains on its website. “In all cases, contributors retain full rights to use their original contributions for any other purpose outside of Apache while providing the ASF and its projects the right to distribute and build upon their work within Apache.”
As van der Westhuizen pointed out, if businesses just want software, there is a myriad of vendors to choose from. But he said Rackspace offers the “trifecta” of great software, managed services and cloud operations provided by a team of experts that “know your environment cold and can run large OpenStack clouds at scale.”
“We run your cloud so you don’t have to, and you don’t have to dive deep beneath the ocean’s surface to see that,” van der Westhuizen said.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey