Hosting company Rackspace has launched Private Cloud which (as the name suggests) is a private cloud ‘as a service’ built on the foundation of OpenStack technology.

The new offering is an addition to its portfolio of Rackspace OpenStack-as-a-Service offerings, as part of the hosting company’s strategy to simplify and popularise OpenStack private and hybrid clouds.

The service is to be fully managed by OpenStack and Red Hat experts at Rackspace and backed by the company’s ‘Fanatical Support’ team. The offering is backed by a guarantee of 99.99% OpenStack API uptime. Rackspace contributes to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform by testing and certifying hardware and software compatibility and benchmarking its performance and availability. Rackspace manages and maintains the Red Hat environment including the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

It’s all about making the customer’s infrastructure problems go away, according to Darrin Hanson, vice president and general manager of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “We help make OpenStack simple by eliminating the complexity and delivering it as a service to customers in their data centre, a Rackspace data centre or in a colocation facility,” said Hanson.