Rackspace Inc. has teamed up with Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. to add another Openstack-as-a-Service offering to its lineup.

Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat is essentially Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform hosted on Rackspace’s private cloud, and sits alongside Rackspace’s own Private Cloud powered by OpenStack.

The service comes with Rackspace’s standard “Fanatical Support” customer service infrastructure, and is managed by the company’s OpenStack and Red Hat specialists.

If you’re scratching your head as to what makes this a “private” cloud, well, let’s just say that Rackspace uses a different definition of the concept from most of the rest of the IT industry. The general concept of a private cloud is that it exists on a company’s own on-premises servers, otherwise behaving as a public cloud would. And if that private cloud occasionally taps into a public cloud for a little extra oomph, then it becomes what’s known as a “hybrid cloud”.

However, Rackspace’s “private cloud” can either be run entirely from Rackspace’s cloud, from Rackspace-powered hardware in your own data center, or on both AND a mix of third party public clouds, if one so wishes. So in reality what Rackspace and Red Hat are offering is all three varieties of cloud, set up as you wish, together with Rackspace’s Fanatical Support.

As to why Rackspace is teaming up with Red Hat to offer its platform on its own servers, well a lot of it probably has to do with Red Hat’s overwhelming popularity among OpenStack users. Rackspace is banking on many of those users wanting access to a second, or private cloud option besides their current platform. Also, Rackspace has given up trying to catch Amazon Web Services and the rest of the public cloud crowd, so it needs more unique offerings to differentiate itself.

By offering Red Hat’s OpenStack as-a-service, Rackspace suddenly has a new product offering that’s likely to appeal to many existing OpenStack users, not too mention the legion of companies who’re planning to adopt OpenStack but perhaps don’t quite understand how to get it up and running.

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