Rackspace Adds 99.99% Uptime Guarantee to Private Cloud Offering

Rackspace (RAX) says it has added a 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee to its private cloud offering.

The San Antonio, Texas-based managed cloud hosting company on Thursday said Rackspace Private Cloud, which is powered by OpenStack and designed to run enterprise production workloads, was built on the latest reference architecture and deployment model upgrades to be able to uphold its uptime guarantee.

“Our new architecture deploys the core OpenStack services in such a way that provides redundancy and fault tolerance, which gives us the confidence to stand behind such an SLA,” said Bryan Thompson, senior director of product management at Rackspace

In addition to the uptime guarantee, Rackspace Private Cloud now includes increased scalability to hundreds of nodes and DevOps automation services for application lifecycle management.

“With the API interfaces that OpenStack provides to manage the underlying infrastructure, coupled with the automation and orchestration functionality that tools such as Chef bring to deploy and configure the virtual servers running on top of that infrastructure, organizations are able to focus their resources on developing their software, not deploying it,” Thompson said.

He added: “With the Rackspace DevOps Services now available on top of our Private Cloud services, we are able to help organizations with this journey — providing services to help them architect and template their applications to be deployable via these automation tools as well as implementing the monitoring and orchestration policies needed to operate those applications once deployed.”

Customers can deploy the offering in a Rackspace data center or another private facility. “As with previous versions of our Private Cloud offering, we tend to see an even mix between customers deploying these clouds in Rackspace datacenters and those deploying in their own or a partner’s facility,” Thompson said.

The new release of Rackspace Private Cloud is available immediately for customers located in the United States and will roll out in Rackspace international data centers in early October 2014.

“As with previous releases of the Rackspace Private Cloud offering, our reference architecture, software tooling used to deploy the cloud and documentation is all open-sourced, and can be accessed via our public GitHub repository,” he said. “Customers seeking an operating partner to give them a fanatical support experience and work with them on architecting their cloud, deploying it and operating it for them just need to give us a call.”

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