Rackspace Enhances Private Cloud Software Dubbed Alamo

Rackspace Hosting announced new features and enhanced support offerings for its Private Cloud Software, dubbed Alamo.

Since the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud Software launched in August, thousands of organizations have downloaded the software from over 125 countries spanning all continents, with people from Fortune 100 companies, colleges, universities and research centers downloading the product.

"The goal of the Rackspace Private Cloud Software is to provide customers with a fast and easy way to deploy a free OpenStack-powered private cloud anywhere in the world," Mike Aeschliman, head of engineering and product for Rackspace Private Cloud. "With the new release, we can now offer fanatical support to customers’ cloud software using our remote access tools. This is a huge step in our mission to enable organizations to start realizing the benefits of clouds and trust them for mission-critical workloads."

As part of this new release, Rackspace has extended its service portfolio for its Private Cloud. The new support level, Core Software Support, now includes 24x7x365 remote access support of Rackspace Private Cloud Software stack. The company is offering this new service level in addition to the Software Escalation Support that already exists. With Core Software Support, Rackspace engineers will now remotely log in to customers’ private cloud environments to provide services such as installation, configuration, patching and troubleshooting.

Some of the new features
of Rackspace Private Cloud Software include:

• Block Storage: Scalable Block Storage turns external storage into an additional storage volume for a private cloud environment, based on OpenStack Cinder.
• Object Storage: Powered by OpenStack Swift, Object Storage allows customers to create massively scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to reduce costs.
• Monitoring: Graphite and Collected applications are included to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.

The latest feature release of Private Cloud Software incorporates the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform, Folsom, released to the public in September 2012 and the same platform that powers the Rackspace cloud supporting thousands of customers. The Folsom release was developed by hundreds of contributors in the OpenStack community who implemented about 185 new features.

"Fisoc’s product, Buzz Points, is a merchant-funded loyalty program that enables banks and credit unions to connect consumers and merchants through social media engagement and rewards. As a result of our firm’s rapid growth in the financial services industry, we selected Rackspace’s Private Cloud Software to provide a secure, scalable and reliable environment," stated David Fruhling II, chief operating and financial officer for fisoc, Inc. "The new software features are particularly important to us for two key reasons. First, the enhanced monitoring, alerts and support capabilities will allow us to provide the highest levels of uptime to our banking customers. Secondly, we are a big-data company with massive amounts of financial and social data to use in targeting and analytics, and the new Object Storage features will allow us to store and manage this data in a more efficient and cost effective manner."

Organizations that choose Rackspace as the foundation for their private cloud strategy will benefit from the large OpenStack ecosystem of innovation, plus a common architecture between their private cloud and some of the leading public clouds, empowering them with choices. To help organizations in their journey to the cloud, Rackspace also offers training and certification courses for application developers and DevOps engineers. These programs enable customers to build their private cloud skills and the experience required to install, run, and operate OpenStack clouds.

To download the software (registration needed)