HPE and Rackspace offer on-premises ‘cloud’ systems

HPE and Rackspace have partnered to offer pay-as-you-go services similar to the public cloud but located in private data centers. The OpenStack-based services can have the systems installed in users’ own data centers, in a colocation facility, or in Rackspace’s data centers.

The move is meant to counter the growing popularity of public cloud services where you pay as you go rather than make the up-front massive investment and then have to maintain and eventually dispose of the systems when they are old.

And in case you haven’t noticed, this idea is gaining traction. Microsoft offers Azure Stack, which puts Azure in your private data center, Oracle has Cloud at Customer, and Google and Cisco plan to bring Google Cloud Platform to on-premises users in the near future.

It’s an idea that’s catching fire. According to an IDC prediction, the pay-as-you-go consumption models will account for 50 percent of on-premises and off-premises physical IT and data center asset spending by next year.

OpenStack Private Cloud features

The new managed service is called OpenStack Private Cloud. It is being aimed at industries that have short bursts of computational needs, such as retailers during Christmas. With the colocation or Rackspace hosting, customers can add capacity in minutes, then disengage the hardware when it is no longer needed.

In a blog post announcing the new service, Rackspace claims customers can save up to 40 percent vs. the leading public cloud, although it doesn’t go into detail. It also promised the service would run on a single-tenant model so that users don’t have problems with a “noisy neighbor,” a term used to describe another tenant in the virtual machine that monopolizes the system hardware, thus degrading their application performance.

A single-tenant model also allows customers to more easily meet security, compliance and data sovereignty needs.

OpenStack Private Cloud will be generally available in all regions on Nov. 28. Rackspace said it will offer similar Private Cloud services powered by VMware and Microsoft Azure Stack some time in 2018.