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.
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 in almost any data center in the world – one of ours, one of yours, or one of our partner's.
Rackspace is publishing the Reference Architecture for OpenStack to share the software and hardware architecture used in building real world clouds for customers. The initial design is based on tested OpenStack configurations and hardware from Dell and 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 reliable and reproducible OpenStack deployment.
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.