Rackspace Open Cloud Offers Easily Scalable Computing — and Freedom From Vendor Lock-in

Business Wire

Wednesday, August 1st 2012

Customers Can Now Start Using Public, Private or Hybrid Hosting Solutions on the industry’s First Production-Ready Cloud Powered by OpenStack Software

Today, Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the service leader in cloud computing, announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful and elegant new Control Panel. These solutions, backed by Rackspace’s renowned Fanatical Support®, further expand Rackspace’s broad Cloud hosting portfolio, which is used today by over 180,000 customers worldwide.

The introduction of these open cloud products marks the first time any company has deployed a large-scale open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Customers can now select from private, public or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their solutions in a Rackspace data center or another data center of their choice.

Rackspace’s open cloud products also give application developers and IT organizations in businesses large and small the ability to build, test and deploy applications in the cloud for the first time without being locked-in.

“Rackspace is disrupting the current model of how IT is consumed,” said Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. “We have delivered on our promise to implement OpenStack in our cloud offerings, and to free customers from the vendor lock-in that they face at other major cloud providers. We’re delivering open, high-performance, scalable and easy-to-use cloud solutions, while empowering customers to choose features, services, prices and locations based on the needs of their business. At the heart of Rackspace is Fanatical Support, which means we put our customers’ needs and wants first. Today, we are extending this approach by giving the market an open alternative, enabling them to choose how and where they use the cloud.”

Rackspace’s expansive open cloud portfolio includes not only Cloud Servers and Databases, but also Cloud Files object storage with a content delivery network, Cloud Sites platform as a service for .NET and PHP, load balancers, and monitoring.

“Our experience with the open Rackspace Cloud products has been absolutely seamless,” said Nand Mulchandani, CEO of ScaleXtreme. “One of the things we found right away is that it is completely standards-compliant and we didn’t have to make any changes to our OpenStack APIs. Also, the new control panel is much richer, much simpler and a lot faster than the previous version. Customers will find it a completely new experience, although the core functionality is familiar.”

The new Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack deliver increased efficiency, scalability and agility to customers, who can launch as many as 200 reliable cloud servers in 20 minutes.

Cloud Servers highlights:

This marks the first large-scale, production-ready public cloud deployment powered by OpenStack
Enables private, public, and multi-vendor cloud applications, on or off premise, under one open technology
Delivers enhanced API performance, as it is 25x faster for server create requests
Increases ability to scale, as it has default rate limits (which can be raised on a per account basis) of 20x more servers per day

“The new Rackspace Cloud Servers began delivering business value to us and our customers almost instantly,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. “We were able to easily integrate them into our performance testing platform, CloudTest® and we have successfully spun up thousands of servers for real-world online and mobile app testing. When we conduct testing around large initiatives such as the 2012 London Olympics, the ability to scale quickly is an absolute must. We are seeing what a difference the OpenStack API is making. Making API calls to spin up servers is so much faster now, and that’s crucial for a performance and load testing solution like SOASTA.”