Rackspace, Redapt Partner on OpenStack Private Clouds

Rackspace Hosting and solution provider Redapt have partnered up, with the latter delivering pre-configured, OpenStack-powered hardware to the data center of the customer’s choice to enable the former’s Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition service.

As a quick refresher, Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is essentially a managed service that sees the customer install the server hardware necessary for an OpenStack private cloud in their data center (or the same dedicated hardware hosted with Rackspace itself or in any of Equinix’s data centers). Rackspace handles the monitoring and maintenance of that private cloud as a managed service.

While many customers have opted to either have a systems integrator build that hardware for them or do it themselves, Rackspace Cloud Builders Director Scott Sanchez said some just wanted to order hardware and have it shipped. That’s where the Redapt partnership comes in: With a few clicks, customers can select the requirements for their private cloud, and Redapt does integration, testing, and configuration in-house. The cabinets arrive at the data center ready for a power and a network connection.

Sanchez said the goal is to bring an element of modularity to Private Edition. As businesses grow their clouds, they’re free to order more and more cabinets from Redapt. And while according to Rackspace the Redapt partnership isn’t necessarily going to be exclusive, the two organizations have a lot in common, and Redapt’s strong Dell systems-builder business gives it an expertise in this kind of service.

At the end of the day, Sanchez said, this Redapt partnership really speaks to Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition’s status as less of a product than a service: “You don’t have to be an expert at running it, just an expert at using it.”

While Redapt’s offering might not necessarily meet the needs of every single customer who goes after a Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition deployment, a major point of interest of the original announcement was the room for systems integrators to get involved. This could — emphasis on could — siphon away the smaller guys’ part of this play.