Private clouds were on display at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara yesterday, and companies announced their new offerings for that market. These included commercial service and support for OpenStack from Rackspace, and the launch of the Nimbula private cloud product.
For companies looking to host their own open-source private cloud, Rackspace will offer this OpenStack commercial service to companies currently deploying OpenStack, and the company has already begun working with the Canadian government on such a project.
But it’s still early days for OpenStack support offerings, and Rackspace has yet to standardize a pricing model for the service.
Mark Collier, vice president of marketing and business development at Rackspace, said that currently, every deployment is different. “Everybody’s in the build phase right now. People are still figuring out how to get it deployed, and it’s too soon for us to know what the particulars will be. We’d like to get it standardized, but we need to get a few of these under our belts.”
Elsewhere in the private cloud world, Nimbula announced the general availability of Nimbula Director, its cloud operating system. The Nimbula cloud was built by Chris Pinkham, the development manager responsible for leading the construction of the first iteration of Amazon Web Services.
With such close ties to Amazon, it’s not surprising that Nimbula can push disk images out to AWS as well as to internal cloud systems, bridging the gap between private and public clouds.
“We made our beta software publicly available last December and have since been working with a strong, dedicated community of enterprise and service provider beta testers,” said Willem van Biljon, cofounder and vice president of products at Nimbula. “Their commitment and feedback has helped us prepare for our general availability in the best way possible.”
Nimbula too offers service and support contracts, but Nimbula Director is initially free for deployments under 40 cores.
