Rackspace offers OpenStack training

Rackspace has announced a new division of its business today called Cloud Builders, providing companies with expertise on how to launch their own clouds based on the OpenStack operating system (OS).

Although the favoured OS for Rackspace's own operations, this new service will bring training, certification, deployment services and support out of its own data centres and into the public domain for any customers choosing OpenStack.

Rackspace plans on offering classes to bring up the knowledge base around cloud computing, as well as ongoing technical support for when users' own deployments get off the ground.

Cloud Builders has brought together a number of open source specialists, along with Rackspace employees and members of Anso Labs recently acquired by the cloud and hosting company.

OpenStack was first launched last year by Rackspace and backed by NASA. However, it has gained a lot of support further afield and now boasts backing from the likes of Dell, Citrix, Microsoft and Intel.

John Igoe, executive director of cloud software solutions at Dell, said: "By deploying OpenStack based solutions quickly, customers can migrate workloads and applications to cloud-based infrastructures more easily."

"We've been a strong supporter of OpenStack since its inception and believe a de facto open source cloud standard is the right solution for deploying cloud technology."