Rackspace Technology launches OpenStack Enterprise

Rackspace Technology has reaffirmed ts long-standing commitment to OpenStack® with the launch of Rackspace OpenStack® Enterprise, the only fully-managed, enterprise-ready cloud solution built from the ground up to ensure critical workloads are secure, efficient, and perform at scale. Rackspace’s investment in OpenStack empowers businesses to prioritize innovation over infrastructure, offering cloud flexibility at a fraction of the cost of competitors. Customers leveraging OpenStack Enterprise also benefit from Rackspace’s unparalleled support and expertise, ensuring peak performance and efficiency across their cloud environments.

“Enterprises are seeking cost-effective, flexible cloud alternatives that provide a high degree of control, aligned with open-source principles and community-driven innovation,” said Josh Villarreal, General Manager, OpenStack and Kubernetes, at Rackspace Technology. “Our re-dedication to OpenStack tackles long-standing platform challenges by simplifying complexity and delivering a range of fully managed services that enhance accessibility. We strongly believe in the impact of open source and the value of collaborative community efforts. OpenStack Enterprise reflects our longstanding confidence in its ability to revolutionize the cloud industry and deliver top-tier solutions for our customers.”

Over the past year, Rackspace has solidified its role as a leader and innovator in open-source cloud technologies by launching a comprehensive product roadmap for OpenStack and introducing frequent feature updates. The updates include a significant increase in upstream code contributions to the OpenStack community, aligning with Rackspace’s One OpenStack Strategy, which centers around using a single technology stream for the OpenStack products. The strategy’s alignment ensures that customers can seamlessly leverage each solution without a technology barrier between each product.

Rackspace’s OpenStack investment legacy dates from the platform’s original creation in collaboration with NASA in 2010. To date, Rackspace has contributed more than 5.6 million lines of code to OpenStack and is one of the largest OpenStack cloud providers in the world. Its expertise includes over one billion server hours of experience operating production-ready OpenStack clouds at scale, with a dedicated team comprising more than 150 OpenStack experts and 50+ Kubernetes administrators.

OpenStack aims to cater to a wide range of customer needs, including security and compliance for sensitive data requiring the highest levels of protection and control, with data locality and sovereignty options. It also addresses cost efficiencies, offering a pathway to lower the total cost of cloud infrastructure. Moreover, OpenStack services enable seamless application and data center modernization, allowing customers to migrate applications to the cloud without extensive changes and transition to fully managed solutions.

“As cloud infrastructure options have evolved, traditional solutions can tether enterprises with high costs and limited flexibility, limiting innovation,” said Kevin Carter, Product Director, Rackspace Technology. “We are empowering customers with industry-leading, enterprise-grade, open-source solutions that simplify infrastructure management and enable them to own their destiny, stay in control, and modernize with the latest technological advances.”

In line with its enhanced commitment to OpenStack, Rackspace worked with CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, to accelerate its scientific knowledge management breakthroughs by modernizing its OpenStack Private Cloud. The mission-critical private cloud environment supports CAS in providing scientific innovators access to cutting-edge, lifesaving, chemistry-related, and life-science research. CAS prioritized high availability, reliability, and performance to meet its cloud platform’s highest standards.

“We partnered with Rackspace as our managed service provider to raise the bar for our private cloud on OpenStack — including everything from resiliency and reliability to service robustness,” said Luke Chandler, Senior Director of Cloud Platforms and Solutions, Infrastructure and Support Services for CAS. “Rackspace played a crucial role in enabling CAS to implement a robust private cloud infrastructure that will empower people, companies, institutions, and academics to develop innovations faster and deliver scientific discoveries that save people’s lives.”