public cloud

We’ve been hearing a lot lately from customers who are frustrated by the limitations of one-size-fits all clouds, whether they’re based on public cloud or private cloud or bare metal servers. These customers want each of their workloads to run where it runs best and most cost-effectively. And that’s what we at Rackspace work to deliver to them, through our hybrid cloud.

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.

Lots of companies out there will come out and sell you software, hardware or both to help you build a private cloud. It’s our opinion at Rackspace and the opinion of thousands of customers using our cloud solutions every day that OpenStack, by far, represents the best software for building a cloud. Our public cloud is powered by OpenStack and our private clouds are built using our freely available Rackspace Private Cloud Software. We use reliable and tested hardware in our data centers and help our customers architect and implement the same reliable, high performance hardware in their own data centers.

If you’re not quite sure exactly what OpenStack is; you’re not alone. We’re frequently asked what OpenStack is and why we think it’s better than anything else out there.

In every conversation I have with enterprise cloud customers they use the words public, private and hybrid to describe the projects or phases of projects they’re considering. It’s fantastic that people are finally thinking about how they will use the different types of resources available. But this mindset of “many clouds” in your enterprise is flawed. I’m not the first person by a long shot to say this, but it bears repeating because most enterprises aren’t listening.

Rackspace knows how to build and run clouds. And RightScale knows how to help customers manage workloads on those clouds.  I’ve worked closely with engineering and product teams on both sides and can say that Rackspace and RightScale represent some of the brightest minds in the cloud biz.

We want to take the headache out of deploying and using Big Data solutions. And today, through a strategic partnership with Hortonworks, a leader in Apache Hadoop development, implementation, support, operations and training, we will do just that.

CloudPassage was founded in early 2010 by security experts with decades of technology experience including the development of early virtualization security solutions. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, CloudPassage is backed by Benchmark Capital, Tenaya Capital and other leading investors.