OpenStack

In 2001, I bought my first cell phone; a Motorola phone from Radio Shack. For $40 per month, I had 400 minutes of analog reception, an extendable antenna and a good game of Snake.

Academic and scientific research often involves the construction of mathematical and numerical models to solve scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these complex and intensive computational models have been implemented on super computers or high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.  These models are difficult to setup and operate, and can create a painful experience for researchers who often have to wait in a long line to use their university’s super computing infrastructure, whether it’s for a few hours or a few days.

A book in a week? Yes, a book in a week. It can be done! It’s called a book sprint, and it’s intense. As the documentation coordinator for OpenStack, I knew we’d find the right book to write with this technique. In February, it all came together thanks to generous funding from the OpenStack Foundation for $10,000 to fly the team into our Austin Rackspace location.

Rackspace Private Cloud Software is free. We give it away. We arm you with the software you need to deploy a private cloud in your own data center, and we don’t ask for a penny. It’s open source and powered by community OpenStack, the same cloud operating system that powers our open public cloud.

During SXSW Interactive, thousands of technologists from across the globe come to Austin to find out about the next big things on the tech horizon, share their knowledge as technology thought leaders with others, network with like-minded geeks and reserve their nocturnal hours for some of the most stellar parties on the planet. Within this subset of technologists are the developers, who are creating and building the architecture, infrastructure and software that allows you to run things on the web today.

Adopting any technology has risks. Moving away from open source software can also be difficult. In the cloud, the main benefits of open technologies, specifically OpenStack, are not primarily derived from the access to see or modify the source code or the ability to use the software without paying a license fee. Open in the cloud is important because it mitigates the risks inherent in adopting a software technology broadly and provides organizations flexibility and choice. The open cloud is like an insurance policy for your cloud strategy.

For the past two and a half years, Rackspace has been leading the open cloud revolution — a movement to break the grip of closed, proprietary cloud vendors and instead put choice and power in the hands of customers. For the most part, we’ve kept our heads down: writing code, launching new products and serving customers on our new open platform. But now we’re ready to tell the world what we’ve been doing — and what we can do to boost businesses of all sizes.

With Rackspace Private Cloud, one of our missions is to arm you and your business with the ability to run like Rackspace. We give you the OpenStack-powered software we built and tested using our experience and expertise running the world’s largest OpenStack-powered cloud along with many OpenStack-powered private clouds. You then choose whether to run it yourself, for free with no lock in, or have us help you. And we do it in your data center or ours.

Like many other enter­prise IT shops, Rack­space IT is turn­ing to ser­vice providers to help us design, pro­vi­sion and sup­port enterprise-class sys­tems. Our goal is to more effi­ciently and effec­tively serve our inter­nal cus­tomers. We want to take advan­tage of effi­cien­cies and scale that the open cloud can pro­vide and we need help to do it. With this in mind, we’ve kicked off a pro­gram called “Rackspace IT: Drive to the Open Cloud.” The focus of the program is for Rack­space IT to become an enter­prise cus­tomer of Rack­space, lever­ag­ing the same solu­tions Rack­space offers our many exter­nal cus­tomers and dri­ving as many of our enter­prise appli­ca­tions as pos­si­ble to the Rack­space open cloud.

The words “run like Rackspace” are something we hear from customers and prospects all the time. Everyone from enterprise CIOs to ISV development leads want to build private clouds that look, feel and operate like our open public cloud. They want the same software, the same configuration and the same operations that power our public cloud, but they want it all to themselves, most often in their own data centers.