UPDATED 12:07 EDT / APRIL 08 2016

NEWS

Rackspace bolsters private cloud lineup with new on-premise OpenStack offering

Six years after its initial release, OpenStack is proving to be an attractive alternative to traditional data center management software for many organizations. But not every enterprise that would potentially be interested in adopting the platform can put together an implementation by itself, a segment Rackspace Inc. set out to tap this week by introducing the option to have its professional services arm do the heavy lifting on customers’ behalf.

The provider says that it’s willing to dispatch its engineers to practically any location where a client might be looking to install their OpenStack deployment, whether it’s a remote private data center or a co-location facility operated by a third party. Rackspace even offers the ability to rent out room in one of its own sites for an added fee. After arriving at the designated site, the company’s personnel assemble the customer’s cluster using the same equipment that powers its public cloud, much of which is based on free designs from the Facebook Inc.-led Open Compute Project.

According to Rackspace, the service not only spares organizations the expense of hiring their own OpenStack deployment specialists but also removes the need to buy the hardware that makes up their clusters upfront. Instead, the equipment costs are bundled into a subscription that provides the ability to pay in installments and easily purchase any ongoing management services that might be required after the initial deployment process.  The company offers to handle most of everything from server maintenance to applying patches and providing technical support for end-users.

Rackspace hopes that its reputation in the OpenStack ecosystem, which it helped found and continues to lead to this very day, will win clients away from the numerous other systems integrators there. Its perhaps biggest competitor is Mirantis Inc., another early contributor to the project that boasts the added distinction of being its top commercial distributor. The startup offers both implementation assistance and a hyperconverged appliance series that likewise removes the need for organizations to set up the platform from scratch, although it doesn’t provide as much customizability as the manual deployment route.

If Rackspace manages to stand out from the crowd, there’s a good chance its professional services division will start looking beyond OpenStack for additional revenue opportunities. Executive Darrin Hanson told Fortune that his company initially plans to focus on helping organizations with implementing their VMware, Hadoop and Microsoft environments, as well the occasional MongoDB deployment.

Image via Wikimedia

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