Infotech Lead India: Rackspace Hosting announced product certifications for Rackspace Private Cloud partners.
“We have seen great demand from companies to certify their products, hardware or software, against Rackspace Private Cloud,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy, Rackspace Private Cloud. “We want to continue to foster adoption of open clouds and make it easier for our customers and partners to deploy Rackspace Private Cloud in their data centers.”
Rackspace claims that a Rackspace Private Cloud can be downloaded and deployed in a customer’s data center in less than an hour and supported by the open cloud experts at Rackspace.
Rackspace is extending the capabilities of this offer by providing programs to help its technology partners validate their offerings against Rackspace Private Cloud, and thereby making those solutions more attractive to customers using Rackspace Private Cloud solutions.
There are two types of Rackspace product certifications available:
Technology Alliance Program – Designed for hardware and platform vendors that provide products and solutions in conjunction with Rackspace Private Cloud. Technology Alliance Partners would include compute, hardware, storage hardware, networking, operating systems and management tools. Rackspace engineers work with partner teams to provide detailed testing criteria in QA and validation labs to validate compatibility.
Built For Program – Designed for software vendors building applications that run in the guest virtual machines or manage the application workloads on a Rackspace Private Cloud. Rackspace provides a testing suite and a hosted validation environment that confirms the compatibility of the application with Rackspace Private Cloud.
“Running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task,” Paul Rad, vice president, private cloud, Rackspace. “Our goal is to help enterprise IT to deploy private clouds that have the efficiency and robustness of Rackspace’s public cloud, which runs thousands of virtual machines. The product certification program opens the door for IT executives to choose a certified stack that has been validated and supported by Rackspace and its certification partners.”
PARTNER COMMENTS
Andrew Feldman, general manager, Data Center Server Solutions, AMD
AMD is excited to be at the forefront of building a robust Rackspace Private Cloud partner ecosystem. Certifying the industry’s highest density, most energy efficient server platform will allow customers to realize the benefits of the open cloud while drastically reducing energy consumption and operating expenses. This is a huge step forward for the industry and we look forward to being one of the leading partners in the program for standards-based, interoperable data center computing.
John Purrier, chief technology officer, AppFog
AppFog strongly supports the product certification program for Rackspace Private Cloud. By addressing enterprise compatibility concerns in deploying OpenStack-powered private cloud, it accelerates the growing adoption of our enterprise-class, polyglot PaaS product.
Tom Black, vice president, SDN Engineering, Arista Networks
The power and extensibility of Arista’s EOS (Extensible Operating System) software is a natural match for integration into Rackspace’s Private Cloud Certification Program. The Arista 7150 Series is the first next generation SDN switch for virtualized data centers and will be the initial platform we certify with Rackspace’s new program.
David West, senior vice president of marketing and business development, CommVault
We believe cloud computing is changing every organization’s strategy for data protection and recovery and requires enterprises to move beyond backup to compete and thrive in this new model for IT. The Rackspace Private Cloud program will help our customers dedicate more time on innovation that adds value to their organization instead of on maintaining infrastructure.
Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Server Solutions, Dell
Dell is committed to enabling our customer’s cloud environments with the industry’s best servers from our PowerEdge portfolio, including the PowerEdge C6220, which is purpose-built for hyperscale data centers. We have had an intense focus on bringing OpenStack-based solutions to market since the community’s inception, to help drive leading open source-based cloud and big data solutions for our customers. We think the Rackspace product certification program will provide customers with a great opportunity to choose a certified cloud environment.
John Roese, chief technology officer, EMC
EMC is pleased to extend our storage solutions and capabilities for Rackspace Private Cloud Software. Customers deploying OpenStack-powered private clouds with Rackspace can be confident of EMC’s innovation and support for their underlying storage and cloud solutions, as certified by EMC’s industry proven eLab infrastructure.
Billy Cox, director, Cloud Software, Intel
As an early adopter of OpenStack and a key proponent of open source, Intel welcomes the leadership of Rackspace in helping evolve this open source project into a robust enterprise cloud operating system. Intel looks forward to working with the Rackspace Private Cloud certification partner community to help enterprises deploy open, trusted clouds.
Jeffrey O’Neal, senior director, Solutions Incubation, NetApp
Private clouds are enabling organizations to pool and abstract resources, automate operations and optimize application management. This IT transformation is freeing up IT staff for business-critical functions as well as driving further efficiency and higher utilization across the enterprise. NetApp is continuing to collaborate with Rackspace, most recently on the Rackspace Private Cloud Software product certification program to drive private cloud adoption through OpenStack.
