Rackspace delivers OpenStack "Alamo" for private clouds

Rackspace, a leader in public cloud computing and a co-founder of OpenStack, made available this week an OpenStack private cloud distribution that it claims can be installed in 30 minutes.

The private cloud offering, code named "Alamo," which incorporates the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS host operating system, a KVM hypervisor and the "Essex" version of OpenStack, is free.

The installer can deploy private clouds of as many as 20 nodes and customers can purchase support separately.

"The cloud is fully configured and ready to use either in your data center or in ours on gear hosted by us," the Rackspace blog announced on Aug 15. "You can rapidly spin up and use an OpenStack-based Rackspace Private Cloud – a cloud that runs the same software that Rackspace uses to power our public and private clouds — at no cost."

The code includes configurations that are integrated and tested and can run in a customers' data center on on the Rackspace cloud.

Rackspace turned on its OpenStack based cloud engine last month and along with co-creator NASA has attracted significant support for the open source cloud platform, which is now backed by more than 180 companies.

This private cloud offering will compete against Piston's Enteprise Cloud OS and other OpenStack platforms as well as the CloudStack code Citrix donated to the Apache Software Foundation.