Open cloud company Rackspace Hosting†has announced new features and enhanced support offerings for the Rackspace Private Cloud Software, dubbed “Alamo.”
As part of this new release, Rackspace has extended its service portfolio for Rackspace Private Cloud. The new support level, Core Software Support, now includes round-the-clock remote access support of Rackspace Private Cloud Software stack.
Rackspace is offering this new service level in addition to the existing Software Escalation Support offering. With Core Software Support, Rackspace engineers will remotely log in to customers’ private cloud environments to provide such services as installation, configuration, patching and troubleshooting.
“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,” says Mike Aeschliman, Rackspaces’ head of engineering. “With the new release, we can now offer support to customers’ cloud software using our remote access tools.”
Aeschliman adds that the new support represents “a huge step” in the company’s mission to “enable SMBs to start realizing the benefits of clouds and trust them for mission-critical workloads.”
New Features
The latest feature release of Rackspace Private Cloud Software incorporates the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform, Folsom, released to the public in September 2012. The Folsom release was developed by hundreds of contributors in the OpenStack community who implemented about 185 new features.
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 enables SMBs to create scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images.
- MONITORING – Graphite and Collectd applications are included to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.
