Rackspace Inc. and Dell EMC announced at the OpenStack Summit in Boston Monday that they’re working together to offer a private cloud as a service solution.

According to Rackspace, this is just the first step of an expanded partnership with Dell EMC that aims to make it easier for organizations to get started with public clouds. The partnership means customers can combine Rackspace’s OpenStack Private Cloud solution with Dell EMC’s compute and storage hardware. Initially, the companies will provide support for VMAX Hybrid, VMAX All Flash and Dell Servers, with Dell EMC ScaleIO to be added later.

The move comes at a time when some analysts say enterprise adoption of private clouds is wavering, but Rackspace and Dell EMC said the new solution gives enterprises more options for their multicloud approaches, while tapping into demand for OpenStack.

“Dell EMC is committed to providing customers with best in class solutions to simplify their OpenStack deployments while taking advantage of new innovations,” said Jay Snyder, senior vice president of global alliances, industries and service providers at Dell EMC. “One example of this commitment to OpenStack is our latest offering with Rackspace.”

The announcement comes at a busy time for Rackspace, which saw longtime Chief Executive Officer Taylor Rhodes step down just last week. Current Rackspace President Jeff Cotten is filling in for Rhodes on an interim basis and could well land the job. Recently, Rackspace also announced a new global solutions and services offering that will deliver professional services to enterprises and midsized companies looking to migrate workloads from public to private clouds and vice versa.

In Monday’s announcement, Rackspace and Dell EMC said they’re looking to lower the barrier to entry for private cloud, while providing the same elasticity afforded by public clouds, with added performance and security benefits. According to the companies, the new private cloud-as-a-service solution can be deployed by customers in their own data center, one of Rackspace’s facilities or a third-party location.

“Rackspace has a unique track record of enabling customer success with private clouds by delivering OpenStack as-a-service and leveraging our operational expertise gained from more than 1 billion server hours managing OpenStack,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president and general manager of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “This is why 451 Research has said that ‘Rackspace is the world’s leading OpenStack service provider.’”

The companies added that they will share further news about their partnership later in the year.

Image: GEC OPEN/Flickr