Rackspace Open Cloud Offers Easily Scalable Computing — and Freedom From Vendor Lock-in

London, UK – 1 August 2012 – Today, Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the service leader in cloud computing, announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful and elegant new Control Panel. These solutions, backed by Rackspace's renowned Fanatical Support® further expand Rackspace's broad Cloud hosting portfolio, which is used today by over 180,000 customers worldwide.

The introduction of these open cloud products marks the first time any company has deployed a large-scale open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Customers can now select from private, public or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their solutions in a Rackspace data centre or another data centre of their choice.

Rackspace's open cloud products also give application developers and IT organisations in businesses large and small the ability to build, test and deploy applications in the cloud for the first time without being locked-in.

"Rackspace has delivered on our promise to implement OpenStack into the second largest public cloud on the planet, said Nigel Beighton Rackspace VP Technology.

"The new Open Cloud is set to shake up the market by offering an alternative to the proprietary clouds of other major providers. Among other things, it means that cloud users have more choice and flexibility and our customers can avoid costly vendor lock-in. Our new Open Cloud is production-ready at scale and available to tens of thousands of customers", added Beighton.

Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca, said: "For the growth in the use of public cloud platforms to continue, standards need to be established. This will enable businesses to make use of shared infrastructure for some of the most powerful use cases for public cloud. For this to happen organisations need to be able to build internal cloud platforms that are compatible with those of cloud platform providers. OpenStack looks to be rapidly becoming one of the main standards for provisioning such capabilities and creating hybrid clouds as more and more organisations take it up, attracted by it being open source."

Rackspace's expansive open-cloud portfolio includes not only Cloud Servers and Databases, but also Cloud Files object storage with a content delivery network, Cloud Sites platform as a service for .NET and PHP, load balancers and monitoring.

"Our experience with the open Rackspace Cloud products has been absolutely seamless," said Nand Mulchandani, CEO of ScaleXtreme. "One of the things we found right away is that it is completely standards-compliant and we didn't have to make any changes to our OpenStack APIs. Also, the new control panel is much richer, much simpler and a lot faster than the previous version. Customers will find it a completely new experience, although the core functionality is familiar."

The new Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack delivers increased efficiency, scalability and agility to customers, who can launch as many as 200 reliable cloud servers in 20 minutes.

Cloud Servers highlights:
•    This marks the first large-scale, production-ready public cloud deployment powered by OpenStack
•    Enables private, public, and multi-vendor cloud applications, on or off premise, under one open technology
•    Delivers enhanced API performance, as it is 25x faster for server create requests
•    Increases ability to scale, as it has default rate limits (which can be raised on a per account basis) of 20x more servers per day
"The new Rackspace Cloud Servers began delivering business value to us and our customers almost instantly," said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA.  "We were able to easily integrate them into our CloudTest® platform and we have successfully spun up thousands of these servers for real-world online and mobile app testing. When we conduct testing around large initiatives such as the 2012 London Olympics, the ability to scale quickly is an absolute must.  We are seeing what a difference the OpenStack API is making. Making API calls to spin up thousands of servers is so much faster now, and that's crucial for a performance and load testing solution like SOASTA."

Rackspace's Cloud Databases offering is developed with an architecture that combines open cloud technology and a dedicated storage network that is purpose-built for consistent, superior performance.

Cloud Databases highlights:
•    Based on OpenStack, the MySQL database service is built on infrastructure that is optimized for running databases in public cloud environments
•    Delivers 200% faster (3X) performance than a leading competitor (using benchmark tests described at this link: www.rackspace.com/blog/performance-matters-rackspace-cloud-databases-is-...)

All of Rackspace's open cloud products can be accessed through the new Control Panel, which gives IT administrators and developers a simple and intuitive user interface designed from the ground up with their perspective in mind.  The Control Panel is built for speed and ease of use, and allows customers to manage both existing and new cloud products as they emerge. The new Control Panel makes complex, large-scale cloud deployments as easy as a few mouse clicks.

The new Control Panel:
•    Tags servers, databases, and websites to easily identify and organise infrastructure elements
•    Searches by name, tag, IP address and more
•    Filters lists to quickly find a server
•    Uses Action Cogs to display contextual menus of most-used actions to complete tasks faster
•    Offers Dynamic Feedback to provide real-time status information about the state of infrastructure

All current Rackspace customers can begin experiencing the new Control Panel immediately by signing in with their existing usernames and passwords.  Once inside the Control Panel, customers can view and manage their current services and launch new Cloud Servers and Cloud Databases.

New customers can sign up for the open Rackspace Cloud solutions at www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud-hosting/.

In addition, customers now have the ability to use the open Rackspace Cloud in hybrid or private cloud instances.  Customers can choose the best platform for their applications by realising the power of hybrid computing through RackConnect ™. This solution allows the flexibility and elasticity of the open cloud, as well as the enhanced security and performance characteristics of traditional hosting on dedicated hardware. RackConnect provides integration between public and private clouds within Rackspace, and the Open Cloud provides open standards to help customers experience the power of Hybrid Hosting between clouds located anywhere.

To further strengthen its open cloud portfolio, Rackspace is planning to offer unlimited availability of Cloud Networks and Cloud Block Storage this fall.

ENDS