We’re darn proud of our private cloud software. It gives you a world-class private cloud that can scale and frees you from the threat of lock-in. It’s built on a common code base and offers you modular services. And it just keeps getting better: we recently added the OpenCenter Graphical User Interface and API, high availability for OpenStack services and more host operating system choice in the latest software release. 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.

And while the software is important – and typically what most people see — there’s a lot more than meets the eye to running an enterprise grade private cloud. Think of it this way: the software is just the tip of the iceberg. Experience implementing and operating the software is much more important than the bits and bytes – ask anyone who implements CRM and they’ll tell you that. There’s still a need for great software, for sure, but the old software license model is outdated – our value add is that we have the hands-on experience it takes to run and operate clouds at scale, something few software vendors can claim. For example, at Rackspace we have deployed nearly 2,000 patches and upgrades to our public cloud in the last six months. We run as near to OpenStack trunk as possible to make sure customers get access to the latest features and updates quickly. This is expertise that we can pass directly on to you in our Private Cloud as well. We also have training and certification programs in place that can help you build the skills that you and your IT organization need in the cloud.

This is why running a private cloud requires you to look under the surface – beneath the software that’s already visible — and see managed services and operations.

Managed services are integral to running a private cloud. From system design and on-boarding to installation and configuration to troubleshooting, a breadth of managed services just below the surface ensure that the software runs as intended, and that it’s not your concern. This helps us stay in tune with your cloud environment. If a major business impacting issue occurs, we can react swiftly – we helped you design and deploy your cloud, so we know the intricacies of your environment. You don’t have to waste time explaining it to us when something goes awry.

But most important in our three-pronged cloud strategy is the bottom layer, the section that keeps the iceberg afloat: cloud operations. This is where the magic happens. With Rackspace Private Cloud, our expertise in operating clouds sets us apart. Yes, we provide great software, but without a team of experts to help you run it, the value proposition of a private cloud environment dwindles. Our team helps you run like Rackspace.

We deliver a team of DevOps engineers that can capture real world customer and cloud issues and sometimes even write code directly into our software, which ultimately helps drive the direction of our software roadmap.

With environment sizing, patch management and upgrades, the operations become the lifeblood of your cloud. We think that we run clouds better than everyone else, and we prove it by running the world’s largest OpenStack-powered cloud. You don’t have to hire and train a team to operate your cloud – save that time and expense to add value to your business.

If you want just software, there are a host of players out there to choose from. If you want 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; come to us. 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.

I must have heard this phrase a thousand times: ”IT needs to move up the value chain!” But what does this actually mean?

Let’s look at the transformational activities undertaken by corporate IT at Rackspace. We sought to reduce time spent on “keeping the lights on” and to redeploy key resources into value creating areas to effectively “move up the value chain.” Using Rackspace Private Cloud as a platform for innovation made this possible.

The Rackspace Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) team faced a key problem: the sheer size and amount of data created on a daily basis within the various Rackspace systems was becoming unmanageable with traditional relational database systems. Data points included customer account data and usage and billing information. The addition of monitoring, response and support metrics meant a massive increase in daily data creation and a need for real time access to analytics. The data is also highly sensitive and needed to remain on-premise.

The figure below shows the value chain and the three key IT transformation steps required to implement an innovative big data solution that resulted in major improvements in Rackspace’s ability to deliver exceptional service to you, our customers:

1. Reskill and Redeploy key resources
Database and systems engineers had to learn and understand a brand new way of operating. Moving from a relational database system such as SQL Server to a NoSQL solution like Hadoop and Cassandra requires brand new skills for the technical teams involved.

The entire system was to be deployed on an OpenStack-powered private cloud, meaning the team needed a deep understanding of OpenStack. By leveraging the expertise of the Rackspace Private Cloud Support team, the EBI developers could focus on the value-driving development activities of the data management solution. The complex mechanics of operating, patching and maintenance of the underlying private cloud infrastructure could also be outsourced to the Private Cloud Support team, as these activities did not lend themselves to actual value creation.

2. Automation for reduction in Capex and Opex
The system needed a platform that allows self-healing and elasticity. Using Private Cloud, the EBI Team developed an automated system that utilizes business rules to expand or shrink the available resource pool. Additional rules could be written that would monitor availability of a specific instance in the Private Cloud; and if service degradation occurred it would simply destroy and recreate the virtual machine and add it to the available resource pool. This automation reduced the need for employees to simply monitor and ensure system uptime.

3. Improve customer service and growth
Near real-time access to business data and the ability to deliver trending and reporting data could now be used to improve the customer experience and expose a gold mine of analytical information to drive strategic business decisions and to improve customer service.

Big data analytics allow the senior leaders of our company to make informed decisions around how many people we need to hire and when. The reporting structure we use today will aggregate our work across all shifts, normalize it and deliver the number of Rackers we need for each role in order to best service our customers.

- Curtis Morris, Senior Manager in Rackspace Customer Support

The key take away is that the EBI team remained laser-focused on the activities that would deliver business value and results. Had it worried about understanding the underlying mechanics of operating a cloud infrastructure it would have wasted precious resources. Businesses need to entrust these operational activities to experts like Rackspace to conserve their scarce talent pool.

You can read more about the evaluation and selection of the various solutions that lead to big data solutions on Rackspace Private Cloud being deployed in this white paper.

Rackspace Private Cloud Software is a free download that can be combined with tiered support offerings that give you access to as much or as little support as you need to deploy, manage and operate a private cloud in your datacenter.

First, I’d like to be blunt and start by saying: stop comparing the two! Once we stop with the comparisons, things get simpler to understand. It’s when we put them side-by-side that people get wrapped around the axle.

People frequently ask me about moving their applications from VMware to OpenStack. Or they ask how they can install OpenStack to run the legacy applications they built five years ago. These are the wrong questions to ask and are adding to the confusion.

The differences between OpenStack and virtualization are similar to the differences between two distinct types of power plants.

First, let’s look at a nuclear plant. It’s large and expensive to build. It is very time consuming to increase your power output as you need to build out the plant to give you more capacity to generate more power, but there are also limits to how many of those huge nuclear silos you can build on a site.

There are also facets of redundancy contained within this analogy: every aspect of the power plant’s infrastructure has built in redundancy, because you know that if something breaks the effect is loss of very valuable resources and a catastrophic drop in power output.

This basically describes traditional server virtualization. Virtualization offers redundancy and high availability built into the infrastructure, but is time consuming to add capacity to increase your performance output. Getting more performance means “scaling up” or “vertical scaling.” You primarily add more memory and processors to make your physical hypervisors perform better, but once again you can only add so much until you have maxed out your server hardware capacity, or you start to run into diminishing returns.

Now let’s look at OpenStack, which I compare to a wind farm.

A wind farm comprises relatively inexpensive turbines. To get more power output, you add more turbines. You can add an endless amount of these little turbines into a massive pattern and plug them all into the grid to create your output. Redundancy of each little turbine is not your biggest concern because if one turbine goes down you only lose a small amount of power output.

This basically describes cloud. In a cloud model you should never expect infrastructure to supply redundancy. You should build your application to be aware of infrastructure issues and to be self-healing. If a cloud server fails, your application can simply spin up a new one to take its place.

Gaining more performance is primarily done through adding more cloud servers into the larger pool, however adding virtual resources to existing servers can also be achieved based on the needs of your application. This process of spinning up additional cloud servers is called “scaling-out” or “horizontal scaling.” Your focus changes to adding (and removing) smaller and more inexpensive nodes as your application performance needs change over time.

Server virtualization is a technology solution; cloud is a whole new business model — it’s not simply an upgrade. To take advantage of the cloud you need to look at your application architecture and new ways to take advantage of the power that the cloud can give you. The application needs to become the brains of the operation that automates scaling and redundancy, with the infrastructure merely forming the supporting foundation.

This post is actually a summary of a video I did not too long ago that is hosted on the Rackspace Knowledge Center. In the video I also discuss application state, which is another consideration to be aware of when thinking about the cloud.

I hope this analogy eliminates the confusion between OpenStack and virtualization and helps you choose the best solution for your particular workload.

If you would like to get a better understanding or build your knowledge of OpenStack, you can download the freely available Rackspace Private Cloud Software powered by OpenStack. We have made it extremely easy to deploy by automating most of the installation steps for you.  This article explains the install in an easy to follow step-by-step process.

Cloud Technology translates globally and transcends international boundaries as IT departments all around the world start to realize the potential business impact of changing into cloud service providers to reduce the delivery time of much needed resources to their business users. At Rackspace, we have seen this phenomenon unfold over the last few months as more and more users and companies download and deploy our Private Cloud Software.

I am extremely proud to tell you today that just a few short weeks after the November 15 launch of our updated Rackspace Private Cloud Software, we have seen an amazing number of downloads. This accomplishment is even greater knowing that our reach has extended so far around the globe.

The free software, code-name Alamo, has been downloaded in Italy, Germany, China and Australia, to name just some of the larger countries. It’s incredible to see locales like the Republic of Moldova, Belarus, Qatar, Suriname and Botswana embrace the Rackspace Private Cloud. It’s a shame not to see any downloads from my home country, Namibia; but since some of my family down there still use 56K dial-up modems I completely understand.

The map says it all: Rackspace Private Cloud has gone global in a big way!

I’d like to thank everyone in our global community for your continued support and for making our launch a massive success.

If you’d like to get in on the action, download your copy of Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack. We have made it extremely easy to download and deploy a private cloud in a matter of minutes. If you need support or would like help deploying this into your production sites, we have an incredibly experienced team that can provide you with as much or as little support as you need.

To find out more information on all the features in this release check out my earlier blog post.

Another area where OpenStack is seeing tremendous growth is in the information technology jobs market. OpenStack-related skills are in high demand.

The graph below from Indeed.com, a leader in online job search, shows the relentless growth of OpenStack-related jobs in the IT sector. The graph also compares OpenStack job growth against other cloud software stacks like CloudStack and Eucalyptus. According to Indeed.com, their growth has slowed dramatically in recent months while OpenStack’s has skyrocketed.

There has truly never been a better time for technology professionals to build their skills and knowledge around OpenStack and to join the fast-growing ranks of OpenStack engineers and developers.

To help you sharpen your OpenStack skills at home or in your office, Rackspace offers a free, downloadable deployment of Rackspace Private Cloud Software powered by OpenStack. Our software package provides you with an extremely simple method to deploy a private cloud in minutes.

Rackspace also offers a training and certification program for OpenStack. Our hands-on courses are aimed at teaching technical roles such as DevOps engineers and application developers the fundamentals of administering and troubleshooting OpenStack-based clouds. We also offer a tangible way to prove your skills by taking our Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack exam.

We are in the open cloud era, and OpenStack is leading the charge. Don’t be left behind. Build your skills to effectively position yourself in one of the hottest and fastest growing job markets on the planet.

Rackspace itself has several OpenStack-related positions available. Check out the Rackspace careers site for more details.

Today we expand our private cloud capabilities even further with an update to Rackspace Private Cloud Software. The software update incorporates the latest stable release of OpenStack, dubbed Folsom. We’ve also extended our service and support portfolio to customers running private clouds in their datacenters or hosted at Rackspace.

In this new release, we have added the following key features:

Core Software Support: Rackspace Support Engineers can remotely log on and manage the Rackspace Private Cloud software stack including installation, configuration, patching, upgrade assistance, troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting and resizing of the environment. Rackspace offers this new service level in addition to the Software Escalation Support that is already available.

Block Storage: Highly scalable block storage turns external storage to an additional storage volume for a private cloud environment, based on OpenStack Cinder.

Object Storage: Powered by OpenStack Swift, object storage allows customers to create massively scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to reduce costs.

Monitoring: Graphite and Collectd applications are included to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.

Rackspace Private Cloud is a collection of software, services and training and certification programs that enable organizations to transform their businesses from an IT shop to a cloud service provider. Our software is based on OpenStack, the leading open source cloud operating system used by numerous customers and partners around the globe. We test and package OpenStack to make it extremely easy to deploy a fully functional private cloud within minutes. Once deployed, you can sign up for one of the tiered support level subscriptions from Rackspace to give you as much or as little assistance as you need with managing your private cloud environment.

And if you’d like to build the OpenStack skillset within your organization, we also offer Rackspace Training for OpenStack, a program aimed at educating application developers and DevOps engineers. The courses cover the fundamentals of setting up, administering and troubleshooting OpenStack clouds, all with real-world situations in a lab environment. If you are interested in a tangible way to showcase your  knowledge of OpenStack you can also sign up for the Rackspace Certified Technician for OpenStack certification. The certification exam provides a great way to prove your skill and knowledge in deploying and operating Private Clouds powered by OpenStack.

Rackspace Private Cloud is key component of the Rackspace open cloud story, which over the last few months has seen significant growth with the release of numerous new products including Cloud Databases, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Backup, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack and a shiny new Cloud Control Panel.

To download and get started with Rackspace Private Cloud, or for more information around support and training, check out www.rackspace.com/cloud/private. And come share your Rackspace Private Cloud experiences with other users and OpenStack engineers in our new community forums at https://privatecloudforums.rackspace.com/.

Organizational survival depends on responsiveness to environmental change. One of the scariest forces of competition (Porter, 1985) is the “Threat of new entrants.” Unknown competitors that innovate fast surprise large slow moving organizations and completely disrupt their business model overnight. eBay radically changed the way people shop for goods. NetFlix has destroyed the value of physical DVDs. LegalZoom is totally rewriting the rules of a thousand-year-old legal profession by giving people online access to uncomplicated legal assistance and advice.

CIOs must become change agents that drive organizational transformation through empowering employees to innovate. Ideas move at the speed of thought, there is no room for bureaucracy to get in the way of highly intelligent and motivated people. When creativity strikes there must be a seamless way to release resources that can be consumed immediately.

There are six major characteristics that are imperative to create a culture of innovation and to promote creativity (Amabile, 1998):

• Challenge – Match people with the right assignments and give them stretch goals that motivate them
• Freedom – Grant employees freedom and autonomy to be creative about reaching a goal, don’t tell them how to get there
• Resources – Time and project resources (money, tools, etc.) are the two most important means that can be utilized to increase creativity
• Work-group Features – Design teams that are mutually supportive and that have diverse backgrounds and perspectives
• Supervisory Encouragement – Freely and generously recognize great work done by individuals and teams. Extrinsic motivation through material reward is not always necessary
• Organizational Support – Organizational leaders must emphasize the value of creativity as well as put the correct procedures and systems in place

IT organizations can provide support and resources by giving access to development environments; enabling self-service compute, storage and networking infrastructure; and removing red tape. Employees with ideas do not feel compelled to jump through hoops to get access to systems that could potentially enable technology innovations that augment competitive differentiation for an organization. Intrinsic motivation can only go so far before ideas are dashed. Requiring extensive business cases that stipulate CAPEX requirements as well as defining ROI totally defeat the creative spirit.

We are in the cloud era and that empowers innovators by providing them with computing resources in minutes; the only requirements are a credit card and an Internet connection. An organization must be prepared to offer this type of access internally to ensure these resources do not fall outside the boundaries of IT oversight, risking security and compliance issues as well as data loss. Innovation is going to happen – the question is if IT will enable it or if it will be done outside of the prevue of IT.

Private cloud is a new option available to IT that empowers them to deliver resources and enable innovation and agility. An on-premise cloud that provides central management and self-service is quickly becoming essential to remove the hurdles of traditional IT. Computing power and storage can now be released in minutes. They can also be repurposed if projects don’t deliver as expected.

A private cloud allows organizations to place more “small bets” to find the one spin of the wheel that has an exponential level of payback. A private cloud can help IT change from being perceived as a “blocker” to an “enabler” to ensure it remains relevant in the age of technology innovation.

Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack can offer the level of freedom employees need to gain access to compute on demand, while still maintaining a level of control that is needed to ensure cost consistency and accountability. A self service dashboard provides users with access to infrastructure resources on demand, while ensuring data and applications are protected within the boundaries of IT security.

Building a private cloud can seem like a daunting task. It does not have to be. The Rackspace Private Cloud is a free download that can be up and running in a matter of minutes. Training, certification and technical support are also available from Rackspace. In other words, the investment, time and resources required to start on this journey is relatively small, and the payoff can be significant.

In the cloud era there are no more reasons for IT Leaders to stand in the way of progress. Transform from being an IT department to being a service provider, or risk being relegated to the IT graveyard.

Works Cited
Amabile, T. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review – September/October.
Porter, M. (1985). Competitive Advantage. New York: The Free Press.

The MyRackspace Private Cloud page is a one-stop shop for management capabilities and information regarding your Rackspace Private Cloud environment. From the page, Private Cloud customers can leverage a host of new features and functions to simplify how they manage their environments.

The new enhancements include the ability to more easily resize, configure and order virtual machines. You can now submit orders for VMs through a completely redesigned and integrated online order process. You also now have the option to order copies of existing VMs, removing the need to build and configure virtual environments from scratch. We have also added a dashboard that allows you to track the progress of each order in real time.

Our goal is to improve the quality of builds by performing validation and quality control directly inside portal before an order is placed. This method can also reduce deployment times and decrease build errors through the use of workflow automation behind the scenes.

Simplifying the daily management of your Rackspace Private Cloud environment is at the heart of these new features. And, as always, 24×7 Fanatical Support is available.

A deeper dive into these enhancements is available for current customers via a Private Cloud Improvements User Guide that is accessible via the MyRackspace portal. For additional information on new Private Cloud enhancements and MyRackspace Private Cloud updates, please contact your account team.