The Cloud Wars are Bigger than OpenStack vs. AWS – Rackspace Director Pushes for Standardization
Rackspace would welcome a world in which the cloud standardized around OpenStack, because the company’s value proposition has always been the distinctive quality of its support and customer service. At the EMC World 2013 event this week, stopping by theCUBE with host Stu Miniman, was Chris Wetzel, Director of Enterprise Storage Product, Rackspace. Full video below.
OpenStack is Key to Rackspace’s Cloud Strategy
OpenStack is a key to Rackspace’s strategic position, and a major focus of the development at the company. Wetzel recognized the importance of encouraging technology service providers and the developers at other organizations that use their services to standardize around a cloud platform. Rackspace has seen a lot of success in its promotion of the OpenStack platform and community.
Wetzel says customers can choose to deploy private, public or hybrid cloud services on the new OpenStack powered services, adding that the open source platform offers customers the flexibility to deploy servers in a Rackspace data center or elsewhere.
Wetzel notes that, expanding beyond their own hosted services OpenStack, Rackspace is offering build OpenStack deployments to other hosting providers. The company has also developed a number of other hosted services based on OpenStack for storage, network and databases.
Competing with AWS
Ultimately, the objective of OpenStack is a fully automated, standardized cloud infrastructure that enables workloads to be moved around among various OpenStack clouds. Speaking on Rackspace competitors, the Rackspace Director said the company is in competition not only with AWS but with other providers also.
Wetzel said the cloud is a paradigm shift that affects IT operations, and defining Open Reference Architectures is an essential step towards achieving cloud maturity. Rackspace has that advantage over others in that customers using Rackspace Cloud Software with OpenStack can more easily implement a reliable and flexible cloud solution.
Rackspace deploys public cloud into a service provider data center and remotely operate that cloud, and the service provider offers the physical data center operations, as well as market, sell and support the co-branded cloud directly to its end-customers.
Furthermore, Wetzel added that leveraging the adoption of OpenStack means that cloud would be more flexible, and can work with Open Stack clouds so that customers can be attracted away from Amazon Web Services. See Wetzel’s entire interview below:
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