Rackspace unveils white label telco cloud offer

Internet hosting firm Rackspace is positioning itself as a supplier of cloud services to telcos and enterprises alike, as it seeks to integrate its own public cloud with service providers worldwide.

As the OpenStack Summit kicks off in the US this week, Rackspace is proposing to build and operate white label telco clouds within its own datacentre infrastructure.

The offering will be built on open source cloud computing software OpenStack, which is seen as an alternative self hosted platform to the likes of Amazon’s Web Services.

Rackspace is currently focusing on building cloud stacks that are pre-configured, to minimise the upfront build time for developers and allow them to focus more on designing applications while Rackspace manages the backend operations.

With a growing emphasis on the mobile market, Rackspace has also introduced an ecosystem of partners to give developers access to robust software developer kits (SDK), push services, mobile backend-as-a-service, testing and monitoring capabilities from the likes of FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob, and Trigger.io.

John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, said: “Our pre-configured mobile stacks were developed based on our experience with hosting thousands of complex applications. These stacks are reducing complexity for mobile developers who no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time they build and deploy mobile apps.”

OpenStack, recently won a vote of confidence and a significant new user in the form of PayPal.

PayPal and its parent eBay are understood to be replacing up to 80,000 servers currently running VMware with OpenStack over the coming months. The change from a commercially licensed product to an open source one highlights the flux ongoing in the IT virtualisation space which may well come to the telco space soon.

OpenStack was also recently identified as the cloud management platform to be used by Huawei in its SDN play.