HPE & Rackspace Tout ‘First Ever’ Pay As You Go OpenStack Private Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rackspace have teamed up to offer an OpenStack Private Cloud, which is available on an ‘industry-first’ pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing model.

The pay-per-use infrastructure is available as a managed service, and is another step designed to remove any possible barriers to private cloud adoption.

It comes after the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, Mark Collier, said earlier this month that whilst both public and private cloud deployments are expanding, the reality is that OpenStack is now the de facto standard for private clouds.

Instant Scale

And there is little doubt that spending on public cloud infrastructure is booming, but HPE and Rackspace believe that their new joint PAYG OpenStack Private Cloud will make private cloud 40 percent less expensive than public cloud.

This cost saving estimate is based on Rackspace’s internal pricing analysis, and the savings were “measured against the leading public cloud vendor.”

“With this solution, enterprises receive the benefits of a public cloud – cloud-like utility pricing, elastic infrastructure and simplified IT – in a private cloud environment located in their data centre, a colocation facility or a data centre managed by Rackspace,” said the two firms.

They cited analyst house IDC which predicted that “pay-as-you-go consumption models will account for 50 percent of on-premises and off-premises physical IT and data centre asset spending by 2018.”

The pay-as-you-go pricing model utilises HPE flexible capacity, in that customers only pay for what they use. It allows organisations to closely align resources to growth and gives these firms instant scale, as it will deal with traffic spikes and capacity bursts, without the need to pay for additional (and permanent) capacity.

“The launch of OpenStack Private Cloud with pay-per-use infrastructure, delivered by Rackspace and HPE, marks a pivotal moment in the private cloud market and in the industry at large,” said Antonio Neri, president of HPE. “This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds, and we fully expect this simple pay-per-use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions.”

Meanwhile Rackspace said it intends to extend this PAYG model to its entire managed private cloud portfolio.

No More Barriers

“With this innovative delivery model, Rackspace and HPE are removing the barriers to private cloud adoption, giving customers even more choice of technology platforms that best fit their application needs,” said Scott Crenshaw, head of private cloud at Rackspace.

“We are proud to partner with HPE to continue enabling customer success with private clouds. And, with this common goal in mind, our companies plan to extend this model to Rackspace’s entire managed private cloud portfolio in the future, including VMware and Microsoft Azure Stack technologies.”

And Rackspace and HPE also touted the advantages of their solution over a public cloud service, as its single-tenant model means that customers can “eliminate the performance and ‘noisy neighbour’ issues commonly found in multi-tenant environments, and can more easily meet security, compliance and data sovereignty needs.”

And the solution will deliver peace of mind as the OpenStack Private Cloud can be consumed with pay-per-use infrastructure as a managed service. This includes a 99.99 percent API uptime guarantee from Rackspace.

OpenStack Private Cloud with pay-per-use infrastructure will be generally available on 28 November.

And additional solutions for Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Microsoft Azure Stack are expected to arrive next year.

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