Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Rackspace are teaming up on a new offering that will combine the OpenStack IaaS fabric with HPE servers run at a data center of a customer's choosing, with metered pricing. The companies claim customers can save at least 40 percent compared to using the "leading public cloud," also known as Amazon Web Services. Here's how HPE and Rackspace describe the value proposition:
Leveraging HPE Flexible Capacity, customers pay for what they use in an on-demand consumption model for infrastructure. This feature enables private cloud customers to more closely align resources to growth and handle burst capacity and traffic spikes without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity.
Enable enterprise-grade security and reliability: With a single-tenant model, customers can eliminate the performance and “noisy neighbor” issues commonly found in multi-tenant environments, and can more easily meet security, compliance and data sovereignty needs.
Rackspace will provide managed services for the systems, with a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee. The company terms itself the world's most seasoned OpenStack operation, with greater than a billion "server hours of OpenStack expertise."
The systems are set for general availability on November 28. Rackspace plans to offer similar managed private clouds based on VMWare and Microsoft Azure Stack next year.
Analysis: A sensible partnership, but will customers follow?
On paper, the deal makes good sense for both HPE and Rackspace. The former gave up its public cloud ambitions entirely, ceding the market to AWS and others, but still has massive amounts of server and networking kit to sell. HPE also has useful software assets for private cloud management, with the acquisition this year of Cloud Cruiser. It had already been the largest customer of Cloud Cruiser's technology for monitoring and measuring IT infrastructure usage and spending, rebadging it as HPE Flexible Capacity.
Meanwhile, Rackspace has steadily moved away from its roots as a hosting provider and into specialized managed services, particularly for OpenStack, which it co-created with NASA in 2010. Today, OpenStack is a highly successful project managed by the OpenStack Foundation, with more than 500 participating companies. That means Rackspace can't claim to be the only player with the right OpenStack chops, but its experience with the technology obviously puts it in the lead.
Where HPE and Rackspace's announcement should prompt cause for skepticism comes in the cost saving claims. Rackspace's website says its estimates are based on an "internal pricing analysis," the methodology of which hasn't been made public. Prospective buyers of the new private cloud service would do well to hold Rackspace's feet to the fire on its pricing claims.
However, even if the savings don't quite measure up to those lofty heights, the large enterprises HPE and Rackspace are targeting may find the service's key differentiator lies in its single-tenant model. although AWS and other public cloud providers may have a quibble with HPE and Rackspace's invocation of "noisy neighbor" problems on their services. The term refers to cases where on a multitenant cloud service, a particular application begins to hog bandwidth and other shared resources, causing performance issues for other tenants. This problem can be avoided through bare-metal deployment options, which have been available for years but do incur fractionally higher costs.
Overall, HPE and Rackspace's announcement came without much ceremony, but the service's success will certainly be one to watch closely in the coming months.