Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Rackspace Is Open for Enterprise Business On Its Cloud 

For all the talk about how clouds are going to take over the world, large enterprises have been typically conservative, waiting for the hype to die down. It has, and now big companies are making the call to Rackspace Hosting to talk about the possibilities. And so, EnterpriseTech made the call to John Engates, chief technology officer at the company, to talk about what large enterprises are up to.

While Rackspace is an example of a company with an extreme-scale computing environment with a complex mixed workload, its enterprise customers are still only deploying applications in the tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of virtual or physical machines. The big workloads are yet to come, but they will come, and they will not come directly to the public cloud but indirectly though OpenStack-based private clouds.

"I think the largest enterprises and the biggest names will probably engage in a private cloud," says Engates. "That could be a private cloud that they manage, one that Rackspace manages in their own data center, or the hybrid cloud, where you get both the private and the public in the mix together. I think that's by far the likely ways that enterprises will engage."

It is difficult to get details out of enterprise customers on precisely what they are doing, but Engates gave a few examples. Financial services firm Fidelity Investments has hired Rackspace to help them build a private cloud in its data center, and the company is also experimenting with the open source hardware designs promoted by Facebook and Rackspace at the Open Compute Project. Industrial manufacturer Emerson Electric is a new customer that just signed up this quarter, and they are doing hosted systems at Rackspace plus public cloud. Specifically, Emerson has 43 servers at the moment running a set of applications and will be up to 100 by the end of the year; the company also uses Cloud Files object storage and Cloud Storage block storage services plus load balancing, firewall, and database services from Rackspace in this application. SaaS marketing supplier HubSpot uses a mix of bare-metal and virtualized servers in a hosted environment plus some capacity on the public cloud.

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Rackspace has made a lot of noise about openness with its OpenStack effort, which it started with NASA as an alternative to several other cloud controllers three years ago, and this has resonated with large enterprises. OpenStack is an uber-operating system of sorts. It manages groups of virtualized servers, switches, and storage and the workloads that run atop this virtual infrastructure as a giant pool of resources. OpenStack is an open source effort, and is mirroring the speed of development and uptake of the Linux operating system fifteen years ago. Rackspace was banking on this happening when it started the OpenStack effort, in fact, and is trying to position itself as the open alternative to Amazon Web Services, the revenue leader in the public cloud and one that tightly controls its own software and does not make it available for companies to use in their own data centers.

"I think a lot of large enterprises are somewhat reluctant because they have big investments in data centers, they have got compliance issues that they have to deal with, they have got security concerns," says Engates. "And so I think an OpenStack-based private cloud inside of an enterprise is the easy way to start learning and using cloud and getting developers to start innovating on top of cloud. And I do think it is a natural next step to use the public cloud as an extra bit of capacity either when they have applications outstrip the capabilities of their own data centers or they want to go to a new region or continent. Especially because it is OpenStack, you will have the option to run those workloads in a number of different contexts."

One of the largest-scale OpenStack deployments that Rackspace is helping to build is at CERN, where the IT department has commissioned Rackspace to help figure out how to virtualize the research lab's many different clusters. Eventually, CERN expects to deploy on the order of 15,000 hypervisors (not virtual machines, but hypervisors) for its various workloads on its own clusters.

One reason why Rackspace customers have not had large installations on its public cloud is historical, and the other is technical.

"I don't think, as a general rule, that Rackspace has targeted these massive use cases, mostly because our roots are in Web hosting and infrastructure for Web sites, SaaS companies, and those doing e-commerce and mobile platforms," says Engates. "So we are not targeting those high-performance computing or financial calculation workloads. But, having said that, there is interest from a number of different areas about what could be done with the cloud."

So, for instance, the big gaming sites that run on hosted private clouds in Rackspace's data centers are not only asking for GPUs to accelerate their applications, but they are also asking how this can be implemented on the public cloud side of the company rather than on dedicated iron. OpenStack does not yet have pass-through support for GPUs – the community is working on finishing this up – and once it is done, customers will start asking for it, says Engates.

The other limiting factor on the size of installations on the public cloud at Rackspace was its own management console and provisioning tools. Before Rackspace moved to OpenStack late last year, the prior dashboard and provisioning tools ran out of gas with about 100 virtual machines under management. With the new OpenStack tool, that limit has been removed and there is no ceiling.

The only practical limit to the size of an installation on the Rackspace public cloud is the availability of hardware. As for what those limits are, Engates says he is not at liberty to say, and jokes that it is "much more than hundreds and lower than hundreds of thousands" of VM instances. Rackspace has just shy of 100,000 servers across its datacenters, which host applications for over 200,000 customers.

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