Rackspace announced new features and enhanced support offerings for the Rackspace Private Cloud. Since the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud Software launched in August, thousands of organizations have downloaded the software from over 125 countries spanning all continents, with people from Fortune 100 companies, colleges, universities and research centers downloading the product.


As part of this new release, Rackspace has extended its service portfolio for Rackspace Private Cloud. The new support level, Core Software Support, now includes 24x7x365 remote access support of Rackspace Private Cloud Software stack.

Rackspace is offering this new service level in addition to the Software Escalation Support that already exists. With Core Software Support, Rackspace engineers will now remotely log in to customers’ private cloud environments to provide services such as installation, configuration, patching and troubleshooting.

Some of the new features of Rackspace Private Cloud Software include:

Block storage: Highly scalable Block Storage turns external storage into an additional storage volume for a private cloud environment, based on OpenStack Cinder.

Object storage: Powered by OpenStack Swift, Object Storage allows customers to create massively scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images taking advantage of commodity hardware to reduce costs.

Monitoring: Graphite and Collectd applications are included to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.

The latest feature release of Rackspace Private Cloud Software incorporates the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform, Folsom, released to the public in September 2012 and the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud supporting thousands of customers. The Folsom release was developed by hundreds of contributors in the OpenStack community who implemented about 185 new features.