When your correspondent wrote last week, to open the news that Google was becoming Salesforce’s preferred cloud provider, ‘meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners’, it was always going to be a short-lived title.
And so it has proved: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Rackspace have announced a partnership to offer what is claimed as the industry’s first pay as you go OpenStack private cloud.
The pay as you go pricing model will leverage HPE’s Flexible Capacity infrastructure service, with savings of 40% or more compared to leading public cloud vendors according to Rackspace internal pricing analysis. Aside from the pricing, other key features of the combined offering include instant scalability, enterprise-grade security, and managed services expertise.
Rackspace has been focusing many of its efforts on bolstering this expertise of late. The company acquired managed service provider Datapipe in September in what it called the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in its history.
“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, Rackspace executive vice president of private cloud in a statement. “We are proud to partner with HPE to continue enabling customer success with private clouds.”
Michelle Bailey, group vice president at IDC Research, added: “The OpenStack Private Cloud offering from Rackspace and HPE specifically addresses organisations’ needs to provide security and performance benefits, the cornerstone of a private cloud environment.
“With Rackspace’s private cloud expertise and service-first culture, they are well positioned to address the needs of HPE’s large installed base of infrastructure customers and help reduce any cloud migration risk. This pay-per-use infrastructure is a new step forward in helping enterprises deploy private clouds with improved flexibility and cost transparency.”
The service will become generally available in all regions on November 28, with the two companies adding they plan to extend this model to Rackspace’s entire managed private cloud portfolio, including VMware and Microsoft Azure.