Build your own OpenStack™ powered private cloud with technology, expertise, training & support from one of the world's largest public cloud providers

STEP 1: Is Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition Right for You?

Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is a new approach for customers looking to build medium-to-large scale private clouds. By leveraging the OpenStack open source platform, customers avoid costly software licensing fees and benefit from access to new features in the future with the help of the over 100 companies who back OpenStack. Rackspace is now taking the democratization of IT to the next level by freely publishing reference architectures for OpenStack and enabling Certified Deployment Partners to build clouds to the specification. We focus on what Rackspace does best, providing ongoing Fanatical Support® to customers, while customers pay for what they truly need: help running their cloud, not technology lock-in and software upgrades.

This new approach addresses the needs of our customers looking for full control and high scalability in private, dedicated environments that can be almost anywhere—in customer-premise data centers, Rackspace data centers, or partner data centers globally.

Because this is the Private Edition of our Rackspace Cloud, we have based it on technologies and best practices that have been tested at scale. Rackspace is putting the power of the OpenStack cloud operating system into both public and private editions of the Rackspace Cloud, enabling compatibility and interoperability across diverse environments.

By adopting OpenStack open source cloud software, enterprises get access to a software platform that's continuously evolving based on contributions from the industry's leading tech companies, without incurring costly license fees.

STEP 2: Choose a Data Center

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is the wide choice of locations for your private cloud deployments. It's now possible to have Rackspace support an OpenStack—powered cloud almost anywhere in the world.

• Customer DC: Most commonly, though, our customers want to have their private clouds located in their own data centers, with OpenStack managed and run by Rackspace.
• Partner DC: You may have an environment in one of our partner data centers—Equinix, for example, has a global network of data centers where Rackspace can now deploy and manage private OpenStack-powered clouds.
• Rackspace DC: Rackspace can manage a private cloud for you located in our own worldwide data centers using hardware dedicated exclusively to you.

STEP 3: Choose a Deployment Partner

Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition will be built by Rackspace Certified Deployment Partners who are trained to implement the tested reference architecture, including Cloud Technology Partners, MomentumSI and TeamSun.

Rackspace is publishing the Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition Reference Architecture to share the software and hardware configuration used to build real world clouds for customers. The initial design is based on tested OpenStack configurations and hardware from Dell & Cisco, and will evolve over time with input from customers, partners, and the OpenStack community. The architecture contains detailed information about the logical and physical architecture of a reproducible OpenStack deployment. Rackspace Managed Services for OpenStack are designed to support clouds built to this specification.

STEP 4: Rackspace Provides Full, Ongoing Management

Once in production, Rackspace will provide Managed Services for OpenStack to remotely manage the cloud for customers including patching, version upgrades, performance tuning, and escalation support for cloud operations or engineering questions.