The new features include:

API-Only:

• Container Quotas
• TempURL File Name Overrides
• Bulk Operations (Delete & Auto-Expand Archive)
• Static Large Object support

Now in Control Panel:

• Multiple File Upload
• Editing Headers

All of these features are now available in both the U.S. and U.K. regions.

To avoid the risk of getting into TL;DR territory; let’s take a high-level look at how each new feature works. I’ll follow-up with subsequent posts in coming weeks that dig deeper into how each new feature works along with specific API details.

Here’s what’s new:

Container Quotas

You can now set simple quotas on your containers by setting the X-Container-Meta-Quota-Bytes and X-Container-Meta-Quota-Count headers in your container metadata. This can be useful for administrators who want to put limits on containers used by non-admin users (users who cannot modify container metadata). The X-Container-Meta-Quota-Bytes header is used to limit the maximum size of a container, in bytes. The X-Container-Meta-Quota-Count header is used to set the maximum object count of the container.

TempURL File Name Overrides

With the new TempURL File Name Override feature, you can specify a “filename” query parameter to override a TempURL’s Content-Disposition header in order to instruct their browser to save a TempURL file with a specific name. This is done by appending &filename=my_file_name to the end of a TempURL.

Bulk Operations (Delete and Archive Auto Extraction)

Two new bulk operations are now available: delete and archive auto extractions. You can upload and auto-extract tar archives upon PUT request to your Cloud Files account. This is done using the query parameter ?extract-archive=format specifying the format of archive file. Accepted formats are tar, tar.gz, and tar.bz2. Root directories in the archive will be converted to containers if uploaded at the account level, or mapped to pseudo-directory names if uploaded into existing containers.

Static Large Object Support (SLO)

Static Large Object Support (SLO) is very similar to Dynamic Large Object (DLO) support in that it allows you to upload many objects concurrently and download them afterwards as a single object. It is different than DLO in that it does not rely on eventually consistent container listings to do so. Instead, a user-defined manifest of the object segments is used to help guarantee that every segment in the manifest exists and has matched the specifications. If everything does match, you will receive a 2xx response and the SLO object is ready for downloading. This can improve consistency when uploading multiple segments concurrently and subsequently downloading the resulting large object a short time after.

Multiple File Upload

You can now use the Control Panel to select and upload multiple files through one Upload Files operation.

From your container, select the Upload Files operation and the click the Choose Files button.

Select the multiple files you want to upload to your container.

After you have selected them for upload, notice that the number of files selected is shown next to the Choose Files button. Now select the Upload File button.

At this point your files will be uploaded into your Cloud Files account. Once the operation has completed, the Control Panel will show the updated contents of your container.

Editing Object Headers

You can now also use the Control Panel to modify some of the most common HTTP object headers including:

• Access-Control-Allow-Credentials
• Access-Control-Allow-Methods
• Access-Control-Allow-Origin
• Access-Control-Expose-Headers
• Access-Control-Max-Age
• Access-Control-Request-Headers
• Access-Control-Request-Method
• Origin
• Content-Encoding
• Content-Disposition

To edit object headers, go to the cogwheel next to your object and select Edit Headers from the drop down.

Select the header you wish to set along with its value and click the plus sign to add:

You will see any custom headers that have been set when you select the View File Info dropdown from your object’s cogwheel. Reselecting Edit Headers from the cogwheel drop down will allow you to set any additional headers or modify existing ones that you had previously configured.

For additional information on setting object headers or details on any other Cloud Files features, please refer to the Cloud Files API Developer guide.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts with details on how to access these new features through the API with command-line examples using cURL.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to ask them here, contact our Fanatical Support Team or email me directly at jose.malacara@rackspace.com.

Be sure to subscribe to our product and development blog for future product updates and announcements.

For a deeper look at some of these features, head over to the Rackspace DevOps Blog.

This powerful new feature makes it easier to deploy applications with greater flexibility. You can add or remove interfaces from your servers at any time without having to tinker with the server or worrying about getting the networking right the first time.

At this time, you can use either the python-novaclient or the Rackspace API for attaching/detaching a network to/from an operational Cloud Server. We are working to support this operation using the Rackspace Control Panel at this time and hope to offer this capability shortly.

In order to use this feature using the python-novaclient, you first have to install the Cloud Networks virtual interface extension as specified in the below URL:
http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cn-gettingstarted/content/section_gs_install_vir_interface.html

The API operations to attach and detach interfaces are listed here:
http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cn-devguide/content/api_virt_interfaces.html

We would like to hear more about other networking features you’d like to see. We look forward to helping you deploy the next generation of applications on the Rackspace open cloud!

We heard your feedback and added the capability to the open cloud! And what’s better? We have launched a promotional offer on additional IPv4 addresses in the next generation cloud. For a brief period of time, the additional IPv4 addresses on your Cloud Servers can be obtained for free!

For more information on this promotional pricing offer and to provision additional IPv4 addresses on your Cloud Servers in the next generation cloud, you can contact Rackspace support.

More details on requesting additional IPv4 addresses can be found here: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/requesting-additional-ipv4-addresses

If you use RackConnect and require additional IPv4 addresses on your Cloud Servers, please see the following article for more details. Please contact the ‘Dedicated’ support team for further details and assistance.

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/multiple-ssl-certificates-on-a-single-rackconnected-cloud-server-pat

In addition, we are working on offering the ability to provision additional public IP addresses on servers via a self-service API. Once this capability is available, you will no longer need to call support to provision them. Watch this space for further updates.

As always, we greatly value your feedback and we look forward to helping you deploy the next generation of applications on the Rackspace open cloud!

Rackspace Developer Support marks the first time we will officially support your application code. When you’re programming your application to interact with the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, we want to make sure it is as easy as possible. We offer Software Development Kits for the world’s most popular programming languages. Right now, this includes PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and .Net. We are also working on node.js, which we hope to release soon.

Providing you a simple and strong SDK is only part of the puzzle to make your life easier. The other piece is to make sure you have Fanatical Support when you use them. Therefore, when you or your developer are writing code against our APIs or SDKs and you have a question, let us know. We’ll give you answers and even take a look at the code you’ve written around the use of the APIs or SDKs. If the problem is in your application code, we’ll even help you fix it. As the first step, stop by developer.rackspace.com for documentation and answers to a lot of your questions.

With the launch of this service, you will be able to contact Rackspace and reach API and SDK experts for the following:

• Analysis and optimization of where your code interacts with our APIs, SDKs, and infrastructure
• Help with identification and resolution of any API or SDK coding issues
• Advice on API usage, SDKs, architecture and best practices

Here are some examples of ways you could use Rackspace Developer Support:

• When you want to automatically create servers based on your application’s logic
• When an application on your dedicated configuration needs to scale out into the cloud when it reaches certain thresholds
• When you need a custom monitoring script to check the status of MySQL replication
• When you want to automate DNS failover between data centers
• When you want your app to automatically provision and attach, or detach, Cloud Block Storage volumes to a Cloud Server as the application storage needs change
• When you want to programmatically grant access to a user of a Cloud Database instance

As a developer, when you take our SDKs and add Rackspace Developer Support, you get a powerful combination that will make sure you don’t get stuck. You can focus on your app’s exciting core functionality instead of your app’s boring infrastructure code.

We are excited to extend Fanatical Support to help make your cloud automation ideas a reality. And, best of all, Developer Support is free for customers of all service levels! To use it, just contact Rackspace and we will get you in contact with a Racker that will be able to help.

Server Monitoring: Check The Internal State Of Your Servers

An outage on a web server often isn’t necessarily a catastrophic event, but it is caused by a problem that could have been detected by watching internal statistics like CPU usage or memory. To help detect these problems, we’ve launched a new feature of the Cloud Monitoring platform: Server Monitoring.

Server Monitoring can be enabled by installing the Cloud Monitoring Agent, which allows you to create checks on load average, CPU, memory, filesystem and network usage, as well as more advanced checks (currently available via the API only) including a custom plugin check that uses a user-supplied check to gather any metrics you like. In addition to creating checks, which continuously gather data in the background, you can query certain information “live,” enabling visualizations on the server detail view in our Cloud Control Panel:

There is no shortage of monitoring tools available today; you may already be familiar with Nagios, Munin, collectd or other tools from the open source community and startups. Those tools can work well for some users that are familiar with them. Our new Cloud Monitoring Agent is different. It was built based on your feedback and includes several key features that you’ve asked for.

You said you need redundancy across multiple datacenters, so you can be confident that your monitoring system is up and running. And we know that you’re concerned about performance, so we’ve engineered our monitoring agent to have a small memory footprint. You want first-class support for both Windows and Linux, so we built the agent on top of libuv, the same cross-platform library that powers Node.js. Flexibility is also important, so we open-sourced our agent and offer custom plug-ins. We utilized industry-leading security standards, so you can use it anywhere without having to worry about the security of your data, and we hope you find it easy to manage with the familiar Cloud Monitoring API used in our remote monitoring solution.

Server Monitoring will be free to try out until July 31, and we’re excited to get more of our customers using it! See below for more technical details, or install the agent to get started!

Graphs

Each time a check is run – whether a Remote check or, now, a Server Monitoring check – Cloud Monitoring stores the data it collects. Starting today, we’re giving you the ability to view the history of your Cloud Monitoring metrics with a new graphing feature in the Control Panel.

For each Cloud Monitoring check you configure, we’ll show you graphs of some of the most useful metrics. You’ll be able to find out whether your server responds more quickly from London or Chicago, how much filesystem space you have left, whether or not you run out of memory during heavy traffic and more:

To get started with graphs, all you need to do is create some checks via our Control Panel. Expect to see more features in the coming months that will help you get more insight into your infrastructure. In the meantime, if the Control Panel isn’t enough for you, you can use the Cloud Monitoring Metrics API to fetch, analyze or display this data on your own. Get started with the documentation today.

PagerDuty Integration

Cloud Monitoring can now route alerts to PagerDuty. PagerDuty is a popular incident management tool, which handles alerting (via phone, SMS, email or mobile push), on-call scheduling and automatic escalation of critical incidents.

We use PagerDuty ourselves and love it, so we’re excited to let customers use this feature. Currently the Control Panel doesn’t expose the ability to add the details of your PagerDuty account to Cloud Monitoring, so you’ll have to use the API for that step. But once you’ve got it set up you can begin using PagerDuty just by selecting the appropriate Notification Plan from the dropdown when creating checks or modifying alarms. See our post on the DevOps blog for details.

Integration With Managed Cloud

If you’re a Rackspace Managed Cloud customer, the agent will be automatically installed on your servers when they’re created. When you configure a check, you’ll be given the option to route alerts to your Rackspace support team so we can handle the problem while you focus on your business. If you’re not a Managed Cloud customer but want to be, sign up today!

Multi-Data Center Redundancy

We’ve made a big deal out of the fact that remote monitoring runs in a multiple geographically separated data centers so that an outage in one data center doesn’t affect our ability to continue checking your infrastructure or alert you to failures.

In a similar way, the Cloud Monitoring Agent connects to three Cloud Monitoring data centers but only requires a connection to one to operate correctly. Even if Chicago and Dallas are attacked by Godzilla, your agent will continue to send check data to London and you will continue to receive alarms.

Small Memory Footprint

The agent is built to have a small memory footprint. We understand that a 512 megabyte Cloud Server is large enough to do many jobs, but if our agent was too large you wouldn’t be able to monitor these smaller machines.

To be specific, we built the agent to consume about 6 megabytes of RAM; around one percent of the RAM on our smallest Cloud Server.

Excellent Security 

To protect your data, the agent uses TLS for all connections and a private Certificate Authority (CA). This means that even if some public Certificate Authority incorrectly issues a certificate for our domain to a third party, like the recent TURKTRUST incident with Google.com, our agent will refuse to connect due to an untrusted certificate chain.

The Linux binaries that we provide are signed with a GPG key that you can download from our API server over SSL. Meanwhile, the servers that build and sign those binaries are on an isolated network free from the dangers of the open Internet. Similarly, we will be using Authenticode when the Windows agent launches.

On top of that, the agent does not have the ability to execute arbitrary commands; it simply gathers and reports metrics.

Open Source Software

The agent is an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project. This gives the agent a few distinct advantages:

1. You can audit the code: We are proud of the engineering and security stance of our agent, but don’t take our word for it; dig into the code yourself.
2. You are free to compile the agent for your own distro: We provide a large list of supported binary packages for Windows, as well as Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc. But we understand that we won’t be able to provide binaries for every distro and architecture. If we don’t support your platform, you’re free to compile the agent yourself. With time, we are certain that the agent will be ported to routers and phones.

We look forward to seeing your pull requests on Github.

Custom Plugins

A number of agent check types are available out of the box for common system statistics and applications. But, these checks are only a starting point and can’t cover every conceivable use case. For example, say you want to get alerted when the number of rows in the session table of your database grows above 1,000 – you can do this with a custom plugin for the agent.

The interface for custom plugins is simple and straightforward. The agent simply executes a script that you place in the plugins directory and gathers the metrics from standard out.

Say you write a script that queries your PostgreSQL database for the number of active sessions, let’s call it session_metrics.py. All this script would need to do is query the database and output the following format:

status 235 active sessions in the database
metric sessions int64 235
metric oldest_session int64 50034

Now you can write an alarm when the number of sessions is over 9,000 and be prepared to scale your infrastructure for the additional load.

Familiar API

Entities, checks and alarms are the basic types in the Cloud Monitoring API. To fit into these types the agent only adds one additional property to the entity called the agent_id. So, if you already have an entity for your webserver, you can link a new agent to that entity and start allocating agent checks like the agent.plugin check right alongside your existing remote.ping and remote.http checks. Even alarm criteria are written in the same manner as usual.

if (metric['sessions'] > 90000) {
 return new AlarmStatus(CRITICAL, 'The database says the session table is over 9000!');
}
return new AlarmStatus(OK, 'The session table is not over 9000');

Try It Free

As we mentioned above, Server Monitoring is free to use until July 31, 2013. We look forward to getting your feedback and seeing cool uses of the custom plugins interface.

And as always, we are hiring.

EMC Isilon is a scale-out NAS storage solution designed to provide a powerful, simple and reliable platform for enterprise customers wanting to consolidate data and applications exceeding 100 TB. Rackspace provides support for the EMC Islion NL400 (for high density and efficiency, with massive capacity capabilities) and X400 (for large capacity and high performance) models.

The Isilon platform:

• Supports up to 144 nodes and 16PB of usable (20 PB of raw) file-based storage per cluster – allowing you to massively scale-out your capacity and maintain flexibility in your storage environment
• Supports NAS and Hadoop file-level protocols (SMB/CIFS, NFS and HDFS) – allowing you to choose the most suitable protocol to help simplify your workload and increase the operational flexibility of your storage
• Provides built-in data protection – affording you a highly resilient environment that can withstand multiple, simultaneous component failures, without data loss
• Provides simple storage management – scaling capacity and performance with each node from a single file system and a single volume
• Efficiently does it all! – ensuring efficient use of your budget by providing a storage utilization rate of over 80 percent.

In addition to supporting the Isilon platform, Rackspace provides support for the following EMC data protection and data management features:  SyncIQ™, SnapshotIQ™, SmartPools™, SmartQuotas™ and SmartConnect™.

How can you use the EMC Isilon platform?
EMC Isilon is suitable for a number of use cases, but it is ideal for NAS fileshares, home directories, content libraries, media streaming and Big Data, to name a few.

For NAS fileshares and home directories, Isilon can help eliminate file server sprawl by providing you with the means to consolidate your organization’s data all in one place, with a single namespace. It also improves management through automated processes that balance internal workloads and capacities, while providing automated tiering via EMC’s SmartPools feature to optimize your storage performance.

In the case of content libraries and media streaming, Isilon helps simplify the management of your content by allowing you to use a single volume, a single file system and a single namespace for active and archived data. It also quickly scales to increased capacity to accommodate your ever-growing repositories of content.

For Big Data solutions, Isilon supports native integration of HDFS, Hadoop’s distributed file system protocol, allowing you to combine scale-out NAS technology with the Hadoop open source software framework to provide a data-intensive, highly scalable Big Data analytics solution. It also easily integrates multiple protocols, simplifying data integration across different applications and workloads. Data analysis is also simplified by reducing the need for manual data movement.

EMC Isilon rounds everything out by ensuring data protection through built-in resiliency-supporting software. You can use SyncIQ to replicate and distribute your data to our multiple data center locations around the world, and SnapshotIQ to reliably preserve your data in snapshots, as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Where can you get more information?
For more information about EMC Isilon at Rackspace, contact a member of our sales team, or if you are already customer, contact your Account Manager or Business Development Consultant.

We will also be at EMC World in Las Vegas from May 6 to May 9. Make sure to stop by our booth to meet the team and learn more.

This journey is something service providers and telcos struggle with as well – they know the power of the cloud, their customers are asking for it, but they’re not sure where to start. So many questions… Should they pick a hardware vendor and buy a truck full of gear? A software vendor and buy some licenses? Some kind of appliance? An integrator to custom-build them something or to plug those things together? How will they package, productize, price, sell and support these offerings? How will they build an engineering and operations team to maintain the high levels of SLAs their customers will demand?

Lots of questions, no great answers. Until now!

Today, Rackspace is telling the world that we plan to build and run a linked global cloud network for large service providers and telcos. This cloud network will run the Rackspace public cloud – the largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the world – at global scale, creating a networked cloud of clouds through which service providers are linked together behind the scenes.

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. The end result is more OpenStack in the hands of more users, which has been the Rackspace vision since we founded the project in 2010.

This extension of our public cloud portfolio will give both service providers and their customers access to a network of interconnected global data centers – customers will be able to run their workloads in any data center that is part of the network, while maintaining their business relationship with the local provider of their choice. It will also expand Rackspace’s global data center footprint to include these service provider partners, ultimately letting us and our partners increase resource utilization and cloud growth. Users will be able to run their workloads where they want, when they want.

As operators of the world’s largest OpenStack-based public cloud, we’ve gotten very good at running clouds at scale. We’ll share that expertise with our service provider and telco partners, giving them everything they need to build an OpenStack cloud offering: we’ll design it, deploy it and operate it. They’ll have access to our expertise in technology, operations, go-to-market and support. It will be powered by OpenStack, and we’ll provide the patching, tuning and monitoring backed by carrier-grade SLAs. We’ll give our partners sales and support training, collateral and more to help them successfully enter the cloud market faster while helping to reduce their business risk.

Now, service providers and telcos can broaden their portfolios to offer their customers cloud services on a global level. They can complement their existing services with a proven public cloud offering that is powered by open source software and taps into the vast expertise of Rackspace.

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.

This is a major step in helping OpenStack gain wider adoption – and we’re building it to better serve the world and our customers.

Questions or comments about this blog post? Let me know below or on Twitter: @scottsanchez

Specifics of what is supported can be found in the Knowledge Center article about Cloud Servers with Managed Service Level – Spheres of Support.

At its heart, Nginx is a web server, a very fast web server! The key to Nginx’s speed is its asynchronous or event driven model for serving out objects where each request and response is seen as an individual event that is then forgotten until the next event. By comparison, Apache uses a threaded model where each request ties up resources until the full request is made, responded to and the connection is terminated.

There are three common use-cases where Nginx really stands out, and your Managed Cloud Support Team can help implement for you:

1. As a reverse proxy / cache in front of Apache
2. As a reverse proxy /cache in front of an Application Server or Framework
3. As a replacement for Apache and mod_php

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy / Cache In Front of Apache

Probably the simplest use-case to implement is using Nginx in front of Apache to serve and cache static content while passing dynamic content like PHP back to Apache to serve. Used in this way, you can scale your application right away while changing very little, if any of your code.

Configured this way, you can scale your servers vertically, serving many times more customers by implementing caching and serving static objects directly out of Nginx. If you use any of the most common CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, then you’re probably a good candidate to scale your environment this way.

As a Reverse Proxy /Cache in Front of an Application Server or Framework

Application servers and frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, IIS and others handle complex logic and query requests well but generally don’t serve http requests as effectively as Nginx or provide as robust of a security posture as well as a web server.

Nginx can be used in front of those applications to handle the initial requests, cache static content, provide additional security and load balance between multiple application servers allowing you to easily scale out your application.

Nginx as a Replacement for Apache and mod_php

Nginx does not directly replace Apache, so the title of this use-case is a bit misleading. To fully replace Apache with mod_php, an additional application called PHP-FPM is also required to handle the PHP processing. The good news is that it can be easily installed from any of the major distribution repository systems, and our system administrators can help configure PHP-FPM for your environment.

As a replacement for Apache, Nginx can handle all of Apache’s major functions including redirects, authentication, aliases, and server side includes, as well as provides some new capabilities like in-line substitution of page content, streaming video and integration directly with mail servers.

Next Steps

If you’re interested in finding out how Nginx can help you scale your environment, just reach out to your Managed Cloud Support team by ticket, phone or chat and we’ll help you design and implement an Nginx environment customized for your needs.

Since launching the service last year, we have heard constantly from you that you are dealing with MySQL databases of increasing complexity and size. To assist you with those requirements, we have updated Cloud Databases to include:

• Higher memory flavors: We are adding the option to create 8GB and 16GB instances, four times what was previously available. The new flavors have more memory, CPU, network bandwidth and I/O priority, which give you greater performance for your workloads and, as you can see in the Cloud Databases pricing page, they are competitively priced.
• Triple storage: With more I/O comes larger datasets, so we are also tripling the maximum storage for instances from 50GB to 150GB.
• Storage capacity alerts: To help you avoid inadvertently reaching your storage limit, we will automatically send you a ticket when you consume more than 90 percent of your storage allocation.
• Enhanced user management: We are giving you the ability to perform password changes and to assign user access on existing database users via the API (coming soon to the Control Panel).

We ran SysBench, the popular performance benchmark tool for MySQL, across all flavors to do a quick performance spot check and give you an idea of what to expect from our new and existing flavors.  As you may know, SysBench has several test modes, including CPU, threads, memory, File IO, OLTP, etc. We used the OLTP test mode, which is used to benchmark the performance of a database under transactional loads. The test involved point value queries, ranges, SUM(), ORDER BY, UPDATEs, DELETEs, INSERTs, etc. In other words, it tries to emulate the type of workloads your applications are currently handling.

Below is the five-run average of what Sysbench reported in Transactions per Second (TPS) on an OLTP workload with binary logging off and 64 threads on all flavors:

Of course, your mileage will vary based on your workload’s individual characteristics, but the above should give you a good idea of what you can expect.

WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING: BUILDING BEAUTIFUL CHARTS WITH YOUR DATA AND CHARTIO

I love to hear what others are doing with Cloud Databases. Today, I would like you to learn from Dave Fowler, founder of Chartio. Chartio provides data analytics and visualization tools for business intelligence applications, and allows you to bring data from Cloud Databases and other data sources together into beautiful visualizations. Read the guest blog that Dave wrote about how to use Chartio with Cloud Databases, or visit Chartio directly.

As usual, let me know what apps you are building these days with Cloud Databases or any one of our products @jrarredondo.

Today we took another step forward with Rackspace Private Cloud that will simplify running an open cloud in your data center. We’ve added a new set of features to the free, open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software, including an advanced operations fabric called OpenCenter. This is our third software update to Rackspace Private Cloud in just over six months.

OpenCenter is a centralized system that automates and simplifies the operational activities required to deploy, manage and maintain private clouds. Deploying new features is as simple as drag-and-drop. The intuitive new interface will lay the groundwork for you to leverage the expertise we’ve built around continuous integration and deployment in the public cloud in your own data center and have it backed by our award-winning Fanatical Support.

OpenCenter makes it easier than ever to run open clouds at scale in your enterprise’s data center. OpenCenter also leads to improved uptime by offering API or point-and-click deployment and management of high availability environments for OpenStack controller nodes.

In addition to the inclusion of OpenCenter, the latest Rackspace Private Cloud Software update allows you to choose which host operating system you use. You can select Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS in your Rackspace Private Cloud deployment. Customers have always had the freedom to run their guest operating system of choice in Rackspace Private Cloud.

And this is just the beginning of what we will work on delivering in 2013. This year we will continue to add new capabilities to our open cloud portfolio that will give you the power to have a true cloud anywhere experience. Our engineering teams are hard at work to help customers take advantage of:

• Continuous integration and delivery: Take advantage of continuously developed, tested, integrated and deployed innovations and improvements to Rackspace Private Cloud. You will receive access to bug fixes, patches, upgrades and features as they become available in near real-time, or at whatever pace you choose.
• Workload portability:Seamlessly move and scale workloads between Rackspace public and private clouds transparently. To put it more simply: build in either, run in either – with no application conversion or redesign.
• Network interoperability: Create a true hybrid or multi-zone cloud that uses a single software-defined network.

With our Private Cloud Software including OpenCenter, we enable you to become a service provider in your own data center and run like Rackspace. The latest software features, combined with our training, support and operations expertise around our OpenStack-powered Private Cloud, help organizations realize the efficiencies and true value of the cloud. Since Rackspace Private Cloud Software launched in August 2012, we’ve offered Private Cloud expertise, support and operations to more than 100 organizations, including 19 of the Fortune 100.

You can leverage our support as needed, or allow us to completely run your private cloud environment, either on or off-premise. We’re experts at building and running massive clouds at scale – we’re founders of OpenStack and run the largest OpenStack-powered public cloud in the world. You want your cloud to just work. We’ll take care of your cloud for you so you can focus on your business.

Start building your private cloud today. Download the free, open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software including OpenCenter and have a Private Cloud powered by OpenStack up and running in less than an hour: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/private/

For a deeper technical drill-down into OpenCenter and high availability, check out the Rackspace DevOps Blog.