Rackspace launches OpenStack-based private cloud distribution

Rackspace Private Cloud boots up

Rackspace has announced a free-to-download private cloud based on OpenStack. The release of Rackspace Private Cloud follows the opening of RackSpace's public cloud, Open Cloud, earlier this month. Based around OpenStack's Essex release and hosted on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the distribution, code-named "Alamo", is "100% open source" according to the company.

Ubuntu is only initially an exclusive option; Rackspace says it is working with Red Hat and other distribution makers to offer choices of both host operating system and OpenStack distributions in the future. After noting Red Hat's preview release of its own OpenStack distribution, Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, applauded Rackspace's efforts to encourage wider usage of OpenStack and saw "great potential in ongoing collaboration with Rackspace to deliver open hybrid clouds to our enterprise customers". Rackspace will be backing Rackspace Private Cloud with an optional commercial support offering.

The Alamo distribution is a 1.8GB download and is designed for installation with a character-based display for simple deployment; it requires hardware virtualisation, ideally on bare metal, to run its underlying KVM virtual machines. It also include a Chef server alongside OpenStack's Compute (Nova), Authentication (Keystone), Image services (Glance), and Dashboard (Horizon). A controller node requires a minimum of 16GB of RAM and 144GB of disk space, while a compute node requires a minimum of 32GB of RAM. It can be downloaded from the Rackspace web site after giving details such as email address, name and company. A Getting Started guide is also available.

(djwm)