Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat Delivers Benefits of Cloud, IT Stability

For many IT organizations, stability can be an elusive goal.

Frequent cloud platform upgrades are disruptive, while compliance and certification requirements that require extensive, costly testing procedures are financially onerous. Yet they’re often required, even when workloads or applications don’t require the latest features.

Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat, based on OpenStack Platform 13, delivers the kind of IT infrastructure stability that enterprise applications need. It provides customers a jointly architected and engineered OpenStack private cloud solution, delivered as-a-service by Rackspace. Benefits include strategic flexibility, optimal economics and easier migration to the cloud.

Rackspace Private Cloud blends technology and automation, plus human expertise, to provide ongoing support, security and 24x7x365 operations. We deliver this unique combination alongside the best customer experience in the industry. It’s a Fanatical Experience, focused on your success.

Our partnership with Red Hat means you get its expertise in packaging open-source software with our open-source operational expertise to deliver a fully-tested, validated and security-hardened OpenStack private cloud designed for the most rigorous enterprise workloads.

Rackspace now offers support for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, which includes several new features and improvements designed to increase efficiency and productivity — and that means an improved return on your cloud investment.

These new capabilities include:

Barbican secrets manager

Barbican, the OpenStack key manager service, is generally available in the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release. The Barbican API can be used to manage keys, certificates and passwords for all OpenStack services, in one central location. Barbican provides customers increased security by allowing a centralized way to provision, manage and store secret data.

Manila filesystem

Red Hat OpenStack Platform allows for the containerized deployment of Manila, the OpenStack multi-tenant, secure file share as a service. Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director can be used to deploy a Manila instance. This file share as a service system allows operators to provision file systems from a pre-configured storage pool for the consumption of many instances, providing ease of implementation and the ability to scale your cloud.

Octavia load-balancing as a service

Octavia, the OpenStack load balancing service can be deployed in a traditional or a containerized manner in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13. Octavia helps customers evenly manage incoming requests across multiple compute instances, thus improving scalability of the cloud. This on-demand, load balancing service allows customers to maximize their resources in a cost-effective manner while improving the reliability and stability of applications.

Long life release

Beginning with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, Rackspace has supported two lifecycle support options from Red Hat.  For businesses that are moving fast, using continuous delivery concepts and want the latest features as quickly as possible, Rackspace supports Red Hat’s standard lifecycle releases.

For many IT organizations, however, frequent cloud platform upgrades are disruptive; for these customers, Rackspace offers Red Hat’s “long-life” support, available every third release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is a long-life release, meaning we provide customers with 18 months of full support, including new feature releases and major and minor bug fixes, followed by a second 18 months of maintenance support, which includes major and minor bug fixes only. Upon the completion of maintenance support, customers can purchase extended support for a period of 24 months.

Finally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 also allows for Fast Forward upgrades, which allow customers on Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 to directly upgrade to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, reducing the potential downtime associated with upgrades.

Accelerate your digital transformation

By providing a certified deployment of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Rackspace delivers private cloud-as-a-service — giving customers the agility and efficiency of a public cloud plus the enhanced security, control and performance of a dedicated environment.

Because whether it’s private cloud, public or a hybrid environment, Rackspace accelerates the value of your cloud. Partnering with our experts can help you innovate with new technology and enhance your own customers’ experience while maximizing your IT investment.