Rackspace Finally Goes Public with OpenStack Cloud Servers

Rackspace customers can now, at long last, benefit from the open source OpenStack project. Rackspace today announced the general availability of its Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack technology. Rackspace is one of the original co-founders of OpenStack alongside NASA back in 2010. Over the last two years, more than 80 other organizations have joined the effort, including big names like IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP and AT&T. Yet despite the growing vendor participation, Rackspace has not had its own public cloud offering powered by OpenStack, until now.

Back in April, Rackspace first began to offer OpenStack as a beta to select customers. It's an effort that has now led to the general availability of the stack. Existing Rackspace cloud customers, though, will not automatically benefit from the new OpenStack based offering. Jim Battenberg, senior marketing manager at Rackspace, explained to ServerWatch that existing customers will not be automatically upgraded, even though they will now be given more choices. "Customers can spin up for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, which are faster and feature a more responsive API, or they can stay with their existing legacy servers for now," Battenberg said...