rackspace private cloud software

While I was putting together my keynote presentation for OpenStack EMEA, I took a trip down memory lane and uncovered documents, emails and slide decks chronicling the earliest iterations of what would later become OpenStack.

Rackspace and NASA founded OpenStack in 2010, and since then the cloud operating system has seen explosive growth in several key areas. With the mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform, OpenStack Foundation has attracted over 5,600 individual members from 87 countries and 850 different organizations.

Since the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud Software launched in August, thousands of organizations have downloaded the software. We’ve seen downloads from more than 125 countries spanning all seven continents – yes, even Antarctica. And at least 25 percent of the Fortune 100 and nearly 100 colleges, universities and research centers have downloaded the software.

Through Rackspace Training for OpenStack we want to get you up to speed on OpenStack. The goal is to achieve a high degree of OpenStack expertise in a dynamic hands-on environment.

We’ve received a bunch of questions since our launch of Rackspace Private Cloud Software (code-named Alamo) about how we are using open source software. How is Alamo licensed? Are we adding restrictions to the components? What happens to the components if you stop using Alamo? And many more. If you have these same questions, this blog post is for you!

This week, Rackspace opened our latest data center in Australia. You might think this marks our entry into the country, but we have actually been there for some time. Throughout our history we have had a large number of Australian companies serving their customers and markets from our other data centers, and in particular in our Hong Kong facility. In 2009, we setup a permanent team of Rackers in Australia to serve those customers led by the awesome Mark Randall (@racker_randall). With this investment, and the rollout of our cloud portfolio, the demand from the market for us to have a local data center rapidly grew; hence opening the new data center this week.

Deploying a private cloud shouldn’t be so complex and expensive, or require a cloud expert to make it happen. In the two years since we founded OpenStack®, one of our missions has been to create fast and easy ways for our customers to deploy a free OpenStack-based cloud wherever they choose.  And to do so not using a proprietary installer or version of OpenStack, but instead using the community bits themselves. In other words, we think it’s critical that the OpenStack community version be usable.