UK users are central to the Rackspace next generation cloud, powered by OpenStack

10 May, 2012

Last month we announced the launch of the world’s first large-scale, production-ready next generation cloud, powered by OpenStack.

This new Rackspace Cloud represents a hugely exciting development for the company and the culmination of thousands of Rackers’ hours and quite a few millions of dollars of investment. There’s been some 140 organisations, including NASA, IBM, Red Hat, Morphlabs and Piston Cloud Computing who have helped to bring the project to where it is today – ready for unveiling.

Ours is the first cloud to launch on the OpenStack platform, but the real value will come when we’re joined by other industry giants (Hewlett-Packard are next in line after us), as the platform becomes a thriving community full of innovation, collaboration and healthy competition. The ultimate beneficiaries though will be customers, who will see outstanding performance, unparalleled scalability and custom features - covering everything from monitoring to virtual networking.

We’ve invited all our customers to sign up for Rackspace's Limited Availability Programme - and from May 1, we’ll begin rolling out the service. There has been some confusion among our large base of UK customers over the availability of the next gen cloud, something we’d like to clear up without further ado…

Since February, we’ve been trialling the Beta stage from the US, in a closed group, and we now have an Early Access Programme up and running, where anyone can get to know how it works. You can see the scale, you can do some testing of how it would perform in certain scenarios and you can test your code. We’ve kept this programme located in the US for the simple reason that we want to keep everybody in the same place, so instances of our next gen cloud are centralised and contained.

That doesn’t mean that our UK customers don’t have access to the service. Quite the reverse, UK customers have been some of the most active contributors to the development of our OpenStack™-powered products. We’ve been monitoring users’ feedback, and watching how everything scales. But the actual Cloud Servers are sat here in the UK, raring to go. When we fully open them up over the next few months, the service will be available here in the UK and in the US simultaneously.

To ensure the best experience for all our customers, we will be staggering its release, initially making it available to a limited number of customers from May 1. We will then gradually keep increasing numbers, so that in the space of a few months, we expect the next gen Rackspace Cloud will be open to everyone.

Make sure you sign up and be part of this seismic shift that’s set to transform cloud computing. The future, we firmly believe, is based around open standards - ones that will give enterprises unprecedented freedom across the broadest possible portfolio of cloud products and services.