Despite its reported immaturity, Rackspace has gone production with the Essex version of OpenStack, making it the first large-scale public cloud deployment of the fabled open source platform.
It’s positioning Open Cloud as freeing users from vendor lock-in, a taunt directed at Amazon, Google and Microsoft whose customers it expects to run off.
Other OpenStack clouds should follow quickly, say, from HP, Dell and Intel, and since they’ll be look-a-likes users able to flit from one to another.
To get the roll-out started Rackspace is offering public, private and hybrid hosting solutions and says there’s unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and both Linux and Windows Cloud Servers on OpenStack.
Some mojo called RackConnect will integrate public and private clouds.