More Security, Support with OpenStack Pike, the Latest Rackspace Private Cloud

The latest release of Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, available now, provides customers with the latest bug fixes and security patches, as well as upstream OpenStack support for new private cloud deployments.

Backed by Rackspace’s assurance of an enterprise-ready, security hardened and scalable experience, legendary Fanatical Support and our industry-leading 99.99 percent uptime guarantee, this new version, based on Pike, is an obvious choice for any organization considering OpenStack private clouds, offering four key improvements:

Security hardened Cinder block storage

Version 16 of Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, or RPC-O, comes with 'revert to snapshot' and volume extension abilities in Cinder block storage. The 'revert to snapshot' feature enables users to reset data after running tests or in the event of data corruption and the volume extension feature allows users to extend storage volumes without shutting down the VMs, keeping applications online during such extensions. Rackspace OpenStack experts have worked to security harden these features to ensure your data is secure and your cloud and applications are scalable.

Alignment with OpenStack's release cadence

It's no secret that OpenStack's release cadence (two major releases per year) is fast-paced and can cause operational disruption if customers attempt to keep up with this pace by always upgrading to the latest version. To provide a better user experience, Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack chose to skip the Ocata series in order to focus on improving our customers' upgrade experience.

With version 16, we are rapidly moving towards our goal of getting back in sync with OpenStack's release cadence, while still providing value added capabilities to each offering. Be on the lookout for more releases coming soon.

Evaluation and prescription of enterprise capabilities

OpenStack is powerful. Because of its power, it is not only complex to deploy, manage and operate, but it’s extremely complex to evaluate and prescribe production worthiness for various services and configurations each time a new major version of OpenStack is released.

As OpenStack experts, Rackspace handles this evaluation on your behalf and prescribes what we’ve found works best for enterprise workloads. In short, we do the time-consuming job of testing and evaluating new release changes so you don't have to.

Interoperability based on compliance

Finally, our new release is InterOp compliant, which means we follow the guidelines set up by the OpenStack InterOp Working Group. Confirming interoperability is critical to many Rackspace customers, who either have other OpenStack clouds or are working to create additional OpenStack clouds alongside existing cloud environments. You can read about this in more depth in our blog post, "Driving OpenStack Interoperability."

In short, our support for version 16 helps our customers receive the best possible OpenStack experience. To learn more about Pike, visit "Release Notes for Pike 16.0"

Rackspace private cloud leadership

Supporting this release continues our commitment to remain leaders in the OpenStack community. We’ve proud to have invented OpenStack in partnership with NASA, in 2010. Rackspace pioneered the “as a service” consumption model for OpenStack and we’ve been delivering our 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee for years.

Unlike any other vendor in the marketplace, we have more than one billion server hours of experience successfully managing OpenStack clouds at scale, for some of the leading companies around the globe. To learn more and find out whether private cloud as a service might be a good fit for your organization, take advantage of a free strategy session with a private cloud expert — no strings attached. SIGN UP NOW.