Rackspace has announced the launch of a new open source, private cloud service aimed at supporting organizations running regulated workloads.

The infrastructure specialist said Rackspace OpenStack Business will offer enterprises a “cost-effective cloud solution centered around privacy, security and control” and expands on its existing private cloud offerings.

A key focus here, the company said, centers around tackling vendor lock-in while enabling organizations to drive application development and modernization.

The new service will support a “broad range of use cases” but is designed specifically for performance-sensitive applications, as well as enterprises operating in regulated industries with strict compliance requirements.

The company said it also aims to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by combining an open source platform approach with enterprise-level performance.

Lance Weaver, chief product and technology officer at Rackspace Private Cloud, said the service represents the “next evolution in private cloud infrastructure”.

“This platform is built for customers requiring performance, security, privacy and control,” he said. “Delivered as a fully-managed open source platform, it provides businesses the freedom to modernize on their terms.”

The launch of the private cloud service follows on the success of Rackspace OpenStack Flex. Introduced in 2024 again as a cost-effective private cloud solution, the two services will work in tandem, the company said.

Rackspace OpenStack Business, for example, will provide a "stable foundation" for steady-state workloads, while the Flex service will offer scaling capabilities based on demand.

Rackspace taps into private cloud interest

The move by Rackspace comes amid a period of growing appetite for private cloud solutions.

A recent survey from GTT Communications, for example, found that growth rates for private cloud are currently outstripping investment in public cloud. Alternative research from Node4 also showed 97% of respondents plan to move a significant portion of workloads back on-prem.

Naturally, generative AI has been a key factor in this trend, with GTT Communications noting that rising concerns over security, and cost are all contributing to the shift.

Regulatory compliance considerations, particularly in Europe, are also adding to the growing interest in private cloud, both studies found. In recent months, a host of big tech provider have launched expanded private cloud offerings to tap into this growing interesting, including Broadcom and HPE.

What to expect from Rackspace OpenStack Business

According to Rackspace, the new private cloud service will provide a range of benefits for users, including full API access, 24/7 support, and proactive monitoring and management tools.

Rapid deployment times are a main talking point for the company in the wake of the new service. Rackspace said enterprises will be able to accelerate time-to-production in “hours instead of days, weeks, or months”.

Similarly, with a strong focus on efficiency, the company said users will be able to draw upon “predictable performance” to run applications and avoid multi-tenant resource congestion.

MORE FROM ITPRO

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• There’s a ‘cloud reset’ underway, and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a chance for Broadcom to pounce on it

SAP has announced new sovereign cloud capabilities in the UK, meaning customers will now be able to process data entirely within the borders of the country.

The offering is now fully operational and available to customers, SAP said in a statement, and is designed to meet the highest standards of data residency, security, and compliance within the UK.

It’s targeted specifically at public sector organizations, critical national infrastructure such as utility firms, and any other highly regulated industries. SAP said it’s particularly relevant for organizations in aerospace, defense, government, and energy or natural resources.

The offering includes a range of SAP products, including SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, SAP SuccessFactors HCM, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, and others.

This move builds on SAP’s initial investment into the UK in 2021, the firm said, and aligns with growing customer demand for sovereign cloud services that ensure security and compliance.

“In today’s complex global environment, it is vital for our customers to understand that their data, as well as our solutions and services, are secure,” Leila Romane, managing director, SAP UK & Ireland, said.

“These are managed by security-cleared personnel in dedicated, local, secure facilities. Sovereignty is essential in protecting against unlawful data access, ensuring compliance, and mitigating risk,” she added.

SAP jumps on the sovereign cloud bandwagon

SAP is the latest in a string of businesses to announce sovereign cloud offerings as customers in the UK and Europe flock to data residency options. Analysts previously told ITPro that sovereign capabilities are now the “bare minimum” for cloud providers.

Oracle has been pushing particularly hard on this front, unveiling a dedicated sovereign cloud region in Europe in 2023 and talking up demand for sovereign cloud more recently at Oracle CloudWorld 2024.

Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison even went so far as to predict that most international governments will want a sovereign cloud region, with Oracle well placed to serve that demand.

Other firms have been rolling out services in this domain as well. Rackspace unveiled a sovereign cloud service targeting UK public sector customers earlier this year, for example, while Scottish cloud provider DataVita and HPE announced a dedicated sovereign cloud service for UK customers in August.

Similarly, Microsoft rolled out data residency plans in Europe at the start of this year, with one tech analyst telling ITPro that the move had been a “long time coming.”

The demand for sovereign cloud has to do largely with regulatory compliance in Europe. Data on a sovereign cloud must reside entirely within the borders of a region, and so its risk of being accessed by another region is reduced massively.

This is an attractive feature for certain businesses, particularly public sector ones and those in critical infrastructure, as it ensures that potentially sensitive or high-risk data is protected from external access.

Some data processing regulations also demand that data be processed in-region, with EU regulators in particular focusing heavily on these requirements.

Rackspace's recently confirmed ransomware attack allegedly may have been facilitated by hackers exploiting the company's out-of-date Exchange clusters, according to one researcher.

The cloud computing firm confirmed the attack on 6 December had affected its hosted Microsoft Exchange environment, the fallout from which is causing service disruptions for customers.

It was suggested by security researcher Kevin Beaumont that the cyber criminals were able to launch their attack after exploiting Exchange server clusters that didn't appear to have been patched since August 2022, before the patches for the ProxyNotShell exploit were released.

In his analysis Beaumont added that Exchange log build numbers aren’t always reliable, and the breach could have happened because of other issues.

Microsoft released the patch for the ProxyNotShell vulnerability at the start of November. It implemented fixes for two security issues that affect Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. Attackers were able to escalate privileges to run PowerShell and achieve arbitrary or remote code execution, enabling them to target server accounts. Attackers can then try to trigger malicious code.

“The Microsoft-supplied mitigations for ProxyNotShell are bypassable," said Beaumont. "IIS rewrite, which Microsoft used for mitigations, doesn’t decode all URLs correctly and as such can be bypassed for exploitation. If you relied on the PowerShell mitigation or EEMS application, your Exchange Server is still vulnerable - Microsoft just hasn't told you this clearly. The fix is to patch."

He added that the exploits function without multi-factor authentication as Exchange Server doesn’t support Modern Authentication, due to Microsoft deprioritising this implementation work.

“If you are an MSP running a shared cluster, such as hosted Exchange, it means that one compromised account on one customer will compromise the entire hosted cluster. This is high risk,” said Beaumont.

Scale of the attack

Rackspace believes the attack only affected its hosted Exchange business, and its other products and services are fully operational.

It’s committed to implementing additional security measures and is monitoring its systems for any suspicious activity. It has also hired an incident response firm to investigate the matter, alongside its internal security team.

Rackspace is helping Hosted Exchange customers to migrate their data to a new environment as rapidly as it can, it said. It has increased the amount of support staff it has to help with this and is aiming to help customers through the migration process so that their own operations aren’t impacted as much.

“Although Rackspace Technology is in the early stages of assessing this incident, the incident has caused and may continue to cause an interruption in its Hosted Exchange business and may result in a loss of revenue for the hosted Exchange business, which generates approximately $30 million of annual revenue in the apps and cross-platform segment,” said the company. “In addition, Rackspace Technology may have incremental costs associated with its response to the incident.”

Thousands of companies across the world will feel the consequences of this attack, said Jordan Schroeder, managing CISO at Barrier Networks. He said that it will also underline the duty organisations that store or host business data have to also keep it secure.

“Rackspace also must re-evaluate its defences against ransomware, because when it comes to modern threats, prevention is always better than cure,” said Schroeder. “This involves re-establishing their cyber hygiene baseline, using zero trust principles to limit the impact of breaches by protecting key accounts and preventing lateral movement, and training employees regularly on cybersecurity and the evolving threat landscape.”

The company first reported that the incident began on 2 December, communicating that it was investigating an issue on its hosted Exchange environments.

Hours later, it told customers it was working through an issue with hosted Exchange accounts and that it had proactively shut down the environment to avoid further issues. It also gave customers access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licences on Microsoft 365 as a temporary workaround.

The next day, Rackspace said the issue was a security incident that affected a portion of its hosted Exchange platform. On 4 December, the company said the incident was set to be an extended outage of the hosted Exchange.

It urged customers to move to Microsoft 365, saying this was the best solution. Although it said that it had restored email services to thousands of customers on Microsoft 365, it said that it understood that self-migration wasn't simple and could be challenging to implement.

Rackspace has unveiled new services for customers running Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Rackspace Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) allows engineers to assess a business' critical apps, how they're designed, implemented and managed to ensure they can stand up to a wide variety of scenarios as well as boosting installed app reliability and resiliency.

The firm also unveiled RMS Proactive Detection and Response and Compliance Assistance for GCP, which have been designed to identify breaches and respond to them as quickly as possible by making use of pre-approved actions.

Rackspace explained it launched these two new features on its GCP platform to help businesses with their digital transformation efforts.

"Our new CRE offering provides a way for companies to pinpoint which applications matter most from a business perspective and then systematically measure and improve upon that," said Warren Jonas, general manager of Managed Google Cloud Platform, EMEA at Rackspace.

"With RMS and compliance assistance, we're helping to ensure their data, applications and infrastructure are protected every step of the way. These offerings, paired with Rackspace and Google Cloud's combined technical expertise, will make these applications more reliable and secure, and ultimately help drive greater business value."

Although there are fewer users of Google's Cloud compared to the likes of AWS and Azure, Rackspace seemingly thinks it's vital to address the needs of its Google customers too - and Google appreciates this.

"Our collaboration with Rackspace has continued to evolve over the past year and together we are driving some exciting innovations that will deliver more value to our customers," added Choon Aun Quek, Google's head of Cloud Platform, North Central & Canada.

"The CRE and managed security and compliance assistance offerings for GCP ensure customers' applications are high performing, reliable and secure. We look forward to ongoing collaboration."

Rackspace has announced it will no longer be offering discounts on hosting for open source projects, although it will only apply to new customers rather than those with projects already up and running on the platform.

The closure of Rackspace's programme was announced on Twitter by director of the Python Foundation and co-founder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs, Eric Holscher, who posted a picture of the announcement alongside the message, "Looks like @rackspace is ending their OSS hosting program. Thanks for hosting @readthedocs for all these years! #fundoss."

However, he later added that Rackspace had since been in contact and had clarified that the cutbacks would only apply new applicants of the open source discount (OSS) scheme and not those that had been using the hosting for current projects.

The company apologised for the confusion in an email to Holscher, adding: "While Rackspace is no longer accepting new applicants to the Open Source Discount (OSS) program, all existing OSS program customers will keep their credits. Rackspace is committed to open source technology, and we look forward to continuing to support you and your open source project."

Rackspace offers "generous discounts on hosting" for open source developers, which it hoped would encourage the community to choose its hosting rather than signing up to a rival service. It seems to have worked, with more than 150 projects now using the company.

Rackspace has acquired multi-cloud managed service provider Datapipe, in what is considered to be the company's largest ever takeover deal.

Founded in 2000, New Jersey-based Datapipe employes 825 people and operates managed public cloud services across 29 data centres in nine countries.

Although no figures for the deal have been released, it is thought to be the largest Rackspace has signed, and once it closes, the managed cloud provider will count US multinational Johnson & Johnson and McDonald's among its new customers.

The acquisition will see a wealth of knowledge transfer over to Rackspace, including employees experienced with serving high-profile public bodies, including the US Departments of Defense, Energy, and Treasury, as well as the UK Cabinet Office, Department of Transport and Ministry of Justice.

Rackspace customers will be able to access managed services on the Alibaba Cloud, China's largest public cloud, and Rackspace will also have a footprint in countries where it previously had little or no presence, such as the US West Coast, Brazil, China and Russia.

"Our customers are looking for help as they spread their applications across public and private clouds, managed hosting, and colocation, depending on the blend of performance, agility, control, security, and cost-efficiency they're seeking," said Joe Eazor, CEO of Rackspace.

"With the acquisition of Datapipe, we're very pleased to expand the multi-cloud managed services we provide our customers, while also opening doors to new opportunities across the globe."

Rackspace faces regulatory approval processes before the deal can complete, but it anticipates getting sign-off before the end of the year.

Datapipe founder and CEO Robb Allen said: "The combination of complementary capabilities and resources from both of our companies will create the world's leading provider of multi-cloud managed services."

"We are very proud of the business we have built and the innovations and successful customer outcomes we have been recognised for," added Allen.

Abry Partners, the majority owner of Datapipe, will receive equity in Rackspace as part of the deal, though no additional terms have been disclosed.

When Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and IBM all reboot their clouds, or at least some of the virtualised servers within it, in the space of a few days then you know the collective global IT security eyebrow will raise.

Initially, that eyebrow arched to form a point that was clearly indicating the direction of the Bash/Shellshock revelations. However, we now know it was prompted by a vulnerability within the Xen hypervisor, which is extensively used within the cloud sphere.

The 'XSA-108' vulnerability, to give the flaw its cool and snazzy official name (irony alert, irony alert), was caused by a bug in the emulation code used when running HVM guests on x86 processors.

The bug lets an attacker with elevated guest OS privileges crash the host or to read up to three KiB of random memory that might not be assigned to the guest, according to the official advisory, which added "the memory could contain confidential information if it is assigned to a different guest or the hypervisor."

So far, so meh. I mean who really cares? It's just yet another vulnerability that has been caught and patched, something that sadly happens all the time. It's part of the software development circle of life, and as long as those bugs are spotted and squished efficiently and responsibly then all is well. Right?

Well, you'd think so, but here's the thing: responsible disclosure is a bitch. Off all the things that need to be done right when working with IT security, disclosure sits right at the top of a very shaky tree that threatens to topple over at the smallest gust of bad press and crush the reputation of whoever sits beneath it.

In the case of the Xen hypervisor problem, a patch was pretty quickly rolled out but only to those customers on a 'predisclosure list,' which effectively requires them to be party to a Non-Disclosure Agreement regarding the nature of the vulnerability.

In my view, this perfectly meets both the efficient and responsible requirements of disclosure. The patch itself was developed and made available as quickly as possible, and steps were taken to mitigate the window of opportunity opening that might allow the bad guys to exploit the vulnerability before that patch was applied. Yet still I hear complaints this was a case of private disclosure, and only by operating in public with 100 per cent transparency can the world be a safer place. What hogwash!

I understand there is some disquiet, shall we say, concerning the fact IBM SoftLayer took a few days longer than Amazon Web Services or Rackspace to apply the patch and reboot. This despite all being on the same Xen pre-disclosure list. The argument being if the vulnerability was publicly disclosed immediately then users of those services could have demanded an equally immediate response. Once again, hogwash!

If a vendor or supplier delays informing customers of the need to patch, then that's not a good thing and I'm not defending it. I am, however, defending Xen in this case as I think it did act responsibly by not disclosing the vulnerability until a patch was rolled out and deployed.

I am a huge transparency evangelist, but it has to be tempered by some real-world conditions that prevent the bad guys from being able to exploit vulnerabilities before a patch can be deployed.

The Xen security response document highlights this in some detail when dealing with a vulnerability that is not already in the public domain. Oh, and don't start rounding on me for being hypocritical here.

Regular readers of my output across the Dennis stable know I am very much in favour of responsible disclosure, and have argued for zero-day disclosure models to be adopted on more than one occasion.

However, the zero-day disclosure argument applies to breaches where customers need to be informed immediately to mitigate further knock-on data damage. What I'm talking about here is specifically vulnerability disclosure, and this comes with a need to heed the warning against speed as the only metric of responsibility.

Film and television charity BAFTA is set to move to the cloud as a way of handling its peak traffic. IaaS provider Rackspace is to power a number of BAFTA websites to enable the film and television organisation to respond more effectively to what they call the "significant" peaks in traffic received by its websites on Awards nights.

BAFTA now runs most of its online services via the Rackspace public cloud. The servers provided by the IaaS company provide 8GB of RAM and, it is claimed, higher performance than what was previously used.

According to the organisations it is anticipated that when BAFTA's central website, which is currently under redevelopment, relaunches in summer 2014, this will result in significant cost savings compared to the 24GB physical servicers it was running on previously.

Additionally, Rackspace is providing BAFTA with a dedicated cloud specialist, who will help with the deployments of its websites and ensure the on-boarding process is as smooth as possible.

Kevin Price, BAFTA COO, said: "After switching to Rackspace, busy periods such as during the 2014 [BAFTA] Film Awards and Games Awards were a great success.

Our dedicated Rackspace team manually monitored web traffic so capacity was scaled up and then back down again in real time. Where previously our site has occasionally underperformed during peaks in traffic, we're pleased to say that we received 100 percent uptime during our busiest season of the year and the excellent support we receive from the Rackspace team was a huge reassurance on awards night."

Jeff Cotten, managing director international at Rackspace added: "Working with a British institution like BAFTA has been a great experience and a real pleasure. As an independent charity BAFTA has some very specific cost saving goals to meet so it was great to be able to work so closely with them to help provide specialist approach and tailored product set they needed so they can focus on what they do best, promoting the arts in the UK."

Rackspace has launched a new big data solution that is available as both a managed or public cloud based service.

Dubbed the Hortonworks Data Platform, it is powered by the Apache Hadoop big data analytics platform and is available in two versions: Managed Big Data or Cloud Big Data Platform.

Managed Big Data offers customised configurations to address specific data processing requirements, reduces the amount of time required to deploy and maintain data processing environments and integrates the full range of tools in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, Rackspace claimed.

Cloud Big Data Platform, on the other hand, allows customers to rapidly deploy and scale in the public cloud with a simple pricing system and a comprehensive partner ecosystem, the company said.

The Managed Big Data version is available for data centres located in the UK and the US. However, the Cloud Big Data Platform can only be deployed from Rackspace's US data centre.

IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro was awaiting clarification as to why no public cloud option is available from the UK data centre at the time of publication.

"The volume of data being processed in businesses today is astounding. Companies need help analysing and extracting value from this vast amount of information, as Big Data solutions are difficult to deploy and harder to maintain," said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace.

"With Rackspace's Managed and Cloud Big Data Platform offerings, we're providing an open, hybrid Big Data solution for dedicated and cloud instances. Combining this technological expertise with enhanced support from Hortonworks allows us to bring a best-in-class Big Data solution to market."

Azlan SDG has signed a distribution agreement with Avaya to offer the vendor’s full range of telephony, unified communications and networking products.

As part of the agreement, Azlan will also provide channel development and support services across its UK partner community.

The partnership extends an existing European deal with Tech Data as Azlan SDG is the value-added distribution arm of Computer 2000, part of the Tech Data Group. Avaya also has distribution agreements with Scansource, Westcon and Imago, with the latter focusing on video conferencing solutions.

“The addition of Avaya to the Azlan SDG portfolio opens up new potential for the channel to address the business communications needs of customers,” explains Paul Eccleston, MD EMEA at Azlan SDG. “It will enable us to make use of both our specialist solution building capability and our un-paralleled partner network to develop new opportunities for growth.”

The distie is preparing an on-boarding programme and will be running a number of workshops and training sessions for both established and new Avaya partners.

Thomas Veit, senior director, EMEA distribution channel at Avaya, adds, “Azlan already have a proven track record of value added distribution for Avaya on an EMEA wide basis. The integration of the SDG business division into Azlan in the UK created an opportunity to extend Azlan into this territory. The joint Azlan SDG business has all the key skill sets we are looking for to drive the UK business into further growth.”

Cloud service provider Rackspace has been cleared by an advertising standards regulator to continue using its "100% Uptime Guarantee" slogan in its marketing materials.

A single complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) by an unnamed party regarding the sponsored search advert, which described Rackspace as "The World Leader in Cloud Computing & Hosting" and promised a "100% Uptime Guarantee!"

The complainant claimed the advert was misleading, as they did not think it was possible to provide 100 per cent uptime for that kind of service.

However, Rackspace successfully argued that consumers would understand the company was offering a guarantee of service and, if a customer did not receive 100 per cent uptime, they would be reimbursed.

The company also pointed to its service level agreement (SLA), which stated that, if it failed to ensure 100 per cent uptime, clients would be entitled to compensation proportionate to the downtime they had experienced.

In its adjudication, the ASA said: "We investigated the ad under the [Committees of Advertising Practice] Code ... but did not find a breach."

"The ASA considered that consumers would understand that the claim 100% Uptime Guarantee' meant they would be compensated if the Rackspace Cloud network was unavailable...and concluded the claim ... was not misleading."

Tiffany Lathe, vice president of legal international at Rackspace told IT Pro: "We are pleased with the ASA ruling today as Rackspace has industry leading SLAs and our goal is to deliver 100 per cent uptime to our customers."

For further coverage of cloud computing visit our sister site Cloud Pro.

Hackers have stolen digital currency worth a total of 54,000 ($87,000) from cloud servers belonging to Bitcoin exchange Bitcoinica.

Zhou Tong, the 17-year-old exchange founder, said on the company's blog that the site had been taken down following a suspicious transaction of 18,547.66 Bitcoins (54,000).

The overwhelming majority of our Bitcoin deposits were not stolen. The thief sole from us, not you.

The heist took place at 1pm GMT on 11 May, according to the Bitcoinica blog post. It said that, while only a small amount of its reserves were plundered, all withdrawal requests would be honoured once the exchange reopens.

"It is with much regret that we write to inform our users of a recent security breach at Bitcoinica," the post stated. "The overwhelming majority of our Bitcoin deposits were not stolen. The thief stole from us, not you. All withdrawal requests will be honoured."

It added that one of the website's databases was also compromised but, as Bitcoinica "uses the most stringent practices for password security", it would be "extremely unlikely" that full database access would give the attacker knowledge of user passwords.

In comments made by Zhou on online forum bitcointalk.org, the thieves struck at a server hosted by Rackspace.

Zhou said that he first noticed that something was wrong when he received several emails regarding a password reset for their Rackspace account. Afterwards he connected to the Bitcoin wallet server via SSH and "found that everything [had] gone."

After he contacted Rackspace, the company suspended all servers. But Zhou said that the hacker managed to recreate the server "using our database backup".

The hacker still had an open session on the server and the company has not found a way to shut out the hacker or hackers, he added.

In a further post, Zhou said he would "discontinue all involvement" in Bitcoin-related projects until the incident is resolved.

Rackspace declined to comment.

In March, hackers also made off with 141,000 of Bitcoins from Bitcoinica. That time the server was hosted by Linode.

Companies are increasingly using environmental credentials to choose between cloud providers, according to a study by hosting firm Rackspace.

The company quizzed 232 respondents from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil, and discovered that customers are focusing on sustainability during the selection process for cloud service providers.

Seventy-four per cent of respondents said sustainability would give a service provider an edge over another, even if the two choices are equal in other areas.

We see sustainability changing from a nice to have' to a need to have' for many end users.

The study found disparities between the attitudes of international companies and US ones to green issues.

For instance, when faced with the choice between two unequal providers, international companies would opt for the sustainable option 60 per cent more often than US firms.

When it comes to influencing purchasing decisions, 72 per cent of the US respondents said they believe sustainability is important when selecting a service provider and influencing a purchasing decision.

In the rest of the world, 91 per cent build sustainability into their purchasing decisions on either a periodic or standard basis.

"Looking at this year's results, we are seeing a clear correlation between service provider selection [and] sustainability factors," said Melissa Gray, Rackspace director of sustainability.

"We see sustainability expanding from a nice to have' to a need to have,' as companies understand that selecting solid partners as part of their supply chain translates into lower risk, more efficiency and more reward."

IT departments spend more than half their time fire-fighting with server issues, rather than dealing with strategic improvements issues.

This was the claim made by Rackspace today, whose latest research showed IT teams spending 56 per cent of their time on server management and troubleshooting, but only 28 per cent on strategic planning.

What's more, IT departments are burdened by poor decision making. According to the research, 63 per cent of organisations said they had either bought too many servers or not enough.

And the situation appears to be getting worse. A huge 79 percent of respondents said server management was a problem now, compared to the 59 percent who said the same in a 2009 survey.

CIOs are under mounting pressure to support business growth and change, whilst reducing IT spending.

UK departments are slightly better placed than their American counterparts. Whilst 59 per cent of UK companies experienced problems with server management, the number rose to 67 per cent across the Atlantic.

British companies are also spending less time on maintenance too, spending 50 per cent of their time troubleshooting, down from 57 per cent in 2009. However, that still means that IT departments are spending an estimated 912 hours a year just servicing servers.

Despite these conditions, CIOs are under mounting pressure to support business growth and change, whilst reducing IT spending. Some 89 per cent of respondents said they were being exhorted to grow the business and 87 per cent were facing demands to cut costs.

Fabio Torlini, vice president of cloud at Rackspace, said: "Problems associated with having to manage and maintain servers are often readily solved by cloud and managed hosting services."

"In 2009, one-third (33 per cent) of businesses surveyed expected to outsource their in-house servers in the next two to five years. However, over two years later, the new study suggests that many mid-sized businesses are still chained to their servers, and may be spending unnecessary time and money on them."

The research, which was carried out by Vanson Bourne, questioned 50 small and mid-sized businesses from the UK and US.

Rackspace has unveiled a platform specifically designed to host virtual desktops across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

The Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) platform will enable customers to run their virtual desktop in the public cloud or on dedicated infrastructure within Rackspace's data centres its solution known as RackConnect.

However, the choice of virtual desktop software customers can use will be limited by Rackspace to a selection of its "solution partners" at launch. Its major push at release is Citrix's XenDesktop product, but other options from Infosys, Point to Point, Centralis and Intrinsic Technology are also on the table.

A spokesperson from Rackspace told IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro HVD was "platform neutral" adding: "We have a roadmap in place to offer the service [for] Microsoft and VMware platforms in the near future."

David Kelly, managing director in the UK of Rackspace, also defended this decision, claiming the company had "tapped our community of partners and their networks to provide our European customers with a hosted virtual desktop platform that offers them choices."

However, VMware and Microsoft might take a different view at being left out in the early stages.

The company has teamed the platform with NetApp storage and Rackspace claims it is capable of running desktops across most portable devices, from tablets to smartphones.

"Hosting virtual desktops with Rackspace allows companies to reduce deployment times of upgrades and new desktop infrastructure while reducing capital expenditure," added Kelly.

"This will allow companies to free up IT resources for more critical internal business operations."

Rackspace has released its Critical Sites to help businesses host their most needed applications in the cloud.

Aimed at higher end customers, business can leave the running of their mission-critical applications to Rackspace with guaranteed uptime and tailored service level agreements.

This was the claim of Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer at Rackspace, who spoke to Cloud Pro this week at the product launch.

"Critical Sites is where we start to get into the application level and asked to guarantee the uptime of the application," he said.

"We get in there and really help you architect the exact solution."

The key to the product is it is not just a place to host an application, but somewhere with the staff to make it run to the best of its ability, leaving wage costs in the hands of Rackspace.

"We not only have sys admins but we have developer staff who really get into understanding how to optimise the application to run really, really well," Moorman added.

"It is really getting into taking over the operations of your application as well. We are not going to write your application, we are not going to code it but we can optimise it, we can help you configure it and make it more efficient."

No product in the cloud, or indeed in the data centre, can guarantee zero unplanned downtime, but Moorman claimed Critical Sites makes Rackspace take "accountability."

"When an application goes down, our people get buzzed," he said. "Even if it is not our infrastructure, even if it is not our stuff, we get buzzed, start troubleshooting and help you get that stuff up and running."

The real selling point of Critical Sites is this expert advice, according to Moorman, as customers are looking for this help already.

"When customers have downtime issues, even if it is their application, a lot of times they want us in there helping them because the application and the infrastructure interact with each other," he said. "If we can work with them to configure it all perfectly, it works much, much better."

"To run a modern web application, there are network issues, web server issues, database issues, security issues, performance issues, there are all sorts of different disciplines you need experts on so those companies want to tap into our expertise."

Although only launching this week in Europe, Critical Sites has been on offer to US customers since October, with sign-ups including Mazda and Hawaiian Airlines.

Rackspace launched its initial UK cloud offering back in January and has managed to secure over 5,000 customers since then. Although the pool of companies it is aiming for with Critical Sites is smaller, Moorman still claimed they had high figures in their heads for customer wins.

He concluded: "I think about it in terms of a compute cloud and an expert cloud, some companies just want to tap into compute others really want to tap into this set of expertise that they can buy for much cheaper than they could build on their own."

"We look forward to working with more customers in the UK."

OpenStack has come a long way since it went public just one year ago, as an open source collaboration between NASA where it started out as an internal cloud project and Rackspace. In effect, it is now a free operating system for clouds.

Although it is very much still a work in progress, it is already being used by corporations, service providers, researchers and global data centres to build standard and massively-scalable clouds on standard hardware. As well as Rackspace, commercial users include Internap and Korea Telecom.

It has also attracted a big community, with hundreds of developers and more than 50 organisations signed up, said Jonathan Bryce, who chairs OpenStack's project policy board.

Participating companies range from the likes of Cisco, Citrix and Intel to tiny start-ups. Even Microsoft has had some involvement, as even though OpenStack competes to some extent with Windows Azure (as well as with Amazon EC2 and VMware vSphere), the Redmond giant realised it needed OpenStack to have drivers for Hyper-V.

A big challenge, Bryce said, has been coordinating so many contributors, especially when they are all around the world. "Rackspace and Citrix have developers in the UK, and there are others - in Spain, for example," he said. There are user groups as far afield as Egypt, Indonesia and South Korea.

He said OpenStack revised its structure earlier this year to give each of its three main elements a named project technical lead (PTL) and a core team to back them up. Those three components are a cloud computing fabric controller called Nova, an object storage system called Swift, and Glance, which is a discovery, registration and delivery service for virtual disk images.

Bryce stressed the project will remain open to all, with anyone able to submit code as a 'merge request.' However, he added contributors are much more likely to get their code approved by the core team if they put it up for discussion first at one of the project's biannual meetings.

A year in, there have already been three releases of OpenStack, with the fourth Diablo due in September, and the fifth Essex coming in 2010 (the names come from places associated with OpenStack's meetings).

The plan for year two is to drive adoption and continue adding features, Bryce added. "OpenStack has taken on such momentum," he said. "There is still a lot of opportunity and a lot of work to do, though."

Citrix is preparing to release a version of the OpenStack cloud platform as it looks to become one of the major forces pushing the project.

Rackspace announced OpenStack last year, incorporating donated code from its own Cloud Files and Cloud Servers as well as technology from NASA's Nebula Cloud Platform.

It effectively introduced an open standard for cloud platforms and Citrix has decided to jump on board and bring a product to market.

Known as Project Olympus, Citrix will introduce its own platform based on OpenStack with added benefits on top of the original Rackspace offering.

It will essentially be a distribution of OpenStack optimised with XenServer, on which providers can build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or which companies can use to set up their own private cloud, Citrix chief executive (CEO) Mark Templeton said during a press event today.

"This will be the first step of maturity in OpenStack," Templeton said.

"I'm not saying we're going to be the leader [with OpenStack] but we'll be one of them... This should be good news for the OpenStack community."

To avoid vendor lock-in and further push the open aspect, Project Olympus will also support the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere hypervisors.

The Citrix Project Olympus Early Access Program has been made available today and the eventual product will start shipping in the second half of 2011.

"We're positioning Citrix to stand tall to support OpenStack," Templeton added.

Rackspace launched Cloud Builders earlier this year, offering customers the knowledge of a team of OpenStack experts to help deploy and support private or public OpenStack clouds in data centres.

"The momentum behind OpenStack is growing rapidly, and we are seeing enterprises and service providers hungry to deploy OpenStack-based clouds," said Jim Curry, general manager for Rackspace Cloud Builders.

"Having a certified, OpenStack distribution from an industry leader like Citrix will provide a further rallying point for the ecosystem and help drive adoption with service providers and enterprises looking for a trusted, commercial software provider to stand behind this mission-critical piece of infrastructure software."

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."

Rackspace has unveiled UK-based infrastructure to enable European companies to take advantage of cloud computing.

Already a popular choice in the US, Rackspace is set to offer its OpenStack Object Storage and cloud servers running its Cloud Files product, alongside its already established European hosting platform.

The company's chief executive (CEO), Lanham Napier, said the move was inspired by the difference in regulation laws in the European Union, where companies cannot store certain data in infrastructure based outside of the region.

"Due to storage regulations set out under European law, many UK companies are restricted from using cloud," he said.

"Our UK offering allows companies to avoid offshore data issues and weighty upfront capital investments which helps them become more strategically agile from a business perspective."

The servers offer a range of Linux operating systems or Windows, and give users a choice of using Rackspace's control panel or another from a third party provider.

The pay as you go model was key to the success of cloud computing, according to Lanham.

"Cloud computing enables this evolution in a cost effective way; if customers on the cloud no longer need resources, they stop using them and almost immediately stop paying for them," he said.

"This will be critical to companies still fighting to cut costs from their budgets, and will allow them to control spending more tightly than ever before."

Rackspace claimed to already have 500 customers in beta using its open source cloud technology and hopes to grow this significantly over 2011.

Rackspace is opening up its code in an attempt to encourage take up in the cloud market.

In a new platform offering, "OpenStack" will incorporate donated code from Rackspace's own Cloud Files and Cloud Servers as well as including technology from NASA's Nebula Cloud Platform.

"The market is crying out for an open standard at this point in time," Fabio Torlini, head of cloud at Rackspace in Europe, told IT PRO,

"When we talk to customers and analysts out there, they tend to be worried about the fact that the products are closed products. So by releasing our code and making an open standard, or trying to encourage it to be an open standard, it means there is a lot more flexibility in the market and people aren't tied down to one provider anymore."

Rackspace has worked with a number of partners, including AMD, Dell and Intel, to develop the code and enable open creativity to improve its use for customers, but the main thrust of the work has been from the company in partnership with NASA.

"Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand," said Chris Kemp, chief technology officer (CTO) for IT at NASA.

"To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source."

The fly in the ointment for adoption of cloud technology has often been security, but Torlini claimed this method will help quell those fears.

"We believe by making the platform open source in the long term it will be much more secure," he added. "By opening up the code, more and more people will be looking at that code for any potential holes. By making it open source really we are accelerating the development potential many times over."

"We have got some great products, primarily developed by us and by opening them up and getting more people to actually develop the code will become more and more secure overtime so it is a benefit for all."

OpenStack is aimed at internet service providers (ISPs) and hosting companies initially but Torlini also believes the large enterprise will be keen to get involved.

He concluded: "We are great believers in open source and in terms of the market itself, the more the market grows and the more cloud becomes acceptable, the more we will benefit of being a large provider of cloud services."

OpenStack.org goes live today with code available from Rackspace's cloud file products. However, the compute product code will not be available until later in the year.

A total of five National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trusts have announced plans to use a new e-catalogue and contract management platform.

The trusts will use the new platform to access 600 suppliers and more than one million items and ensure approved, filtered and secure product data in their purchasing systems for maximum accuracy and efficiency around procurement decisions.

Basingstoke and North Hampshire, Chelsea and Westminster, King's College Hospital, Royal Berkshire and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts will be able to use its validated electronic catalogue, contract and price data from leading NHS suppliers in exactly the format required from December.

The HL-hybris platform has been developed by Healthlogistics, the premium partner of e-commerce platform vendor, hybris. But these are the first Trusts to sign up to it.

It will also provide validation of data against NHS Trusts' requirements, including the standards of the NHS Procurement eEnablement Programme (NPEP), as well as encouraging more efficient contract creation and simplifying invoice reconciliation by using accurate descriptions, codes and net prices.

There is no requirement for any supplier membership and no charge to suppliers, so HL-hybris Trusts are not limited in their selection of them. The provision of common e-catalogue data is designed to be a "once-only" operation and offers suppliers secure visibility of contracts together with their items, net prices and validity, as well as the opportunity to reduce invoice queries.

Peter Elwin, Healthlogistics director, added that Tier 2 Consulting and hosting provider Rackspace had also been contracted to support the platform, as hybris UK's premium and technology partners.

While, from January, every NHS Trust in the UK will be able to subscribe to HL-hybris, which will give each one access to all of the common e-catalogue data in HL-hybris plus its own contract and net price data, which Healthlogistics would obtain from suppliers.

As cloud computing continues to take the IT world by storm, Rackspace has stepped up its cloud offering following two acquisitions.

The hosting firm is taking its services one step further with the purchase of Slicehost and Jungle Disk for $11.5 million (7.05 million), in order to offer new cloud hosting services, Rackspace said.

Slicehost offers Xen-based virtual machine hosting, while Jungle Disk provides cloud storage. Rackspace said it intends to roll their services up with its own to offer cloud solutions.

As part of Rackspace's cloud division Mosso, the new Cloud Servers' offers on-demand server capacity using Slicehost's tech from $20 a month. Rackspace also said it would be offering larger slices' of hosted servers for high performance computing.

Alongside this, Rackspace has rebranded its existing cloud site hosting to Cloud Sites' and dubbed its web-based storage Cloud Files.'

Rackspace's chief technology officer told IT PRO that his firm is looking to make cloud computing standards based, so firms aren't locked in. "One deterrent is that people feel like they get into one vendor or one type of technology," John Engates said.

He added that cloud computing has previously been too difficult to use without investing developer time, saying Rackspace is looking to simplify the technology and make it user friendly. "It's sort of designed for developers of those with computer science backgrounds," said Engates. "That's not accessible for business especially small businesses, but even large businesses."

Microsoft is set to detail its cloud OS Strata next week at the Professional Developers Conference in California IT PRO will be there, so check back for live coverage from the event.

It's been an interesting few months for Zend, the commercial company behind the open source programming language PHP.

In the past few weeks, Zend has teamed up with Rackspace, a leading web hosting provider. It's also signed an agreement with Ibuildings, an Anglo-Dutch software consultancy company, to provide training and support services in the UK. And last year, Zend partnered with Microsoft, despite the software giant offering a competing platform.

A closer look at these partnerships suggests the company - and PHP itself - may be ready for the big time.

Overcoming its roots

Partners such as Rackspace and Microsoft can help overcome one of the largest hurdles in moving into the enterprise arena: the record of PHP development and the strength of Java as the principle software language in enterprise consultancy - both of which stem back to the history of how PHP has evolved culturally within the software community.

With Java as the de facto academic choice, PHP has grown out of the "hobbyist" programmer, generally self-taught and with all of the issues that entails. Until only a few years ago, the concepts of best practice development, coding frameworks and even having a methodology were alien to the hackers of the PHP community, invariably spinning off from the Perl programmers of old.

While these developers were fine for creating the odd microsite, their lack of discipline and structure was akin to an unguided nuke on enterprise projects, while the maturity of the Java community was more like a tomahawk. And IT directors quite rightly didn't want huge fiery ends to their projects by geniuses who had no interest in collaborating when they could enjoy all the benefits from the cool, precise child of Sun.

But now that Zend Framework, the open source scaffold for PHP development, has passed through a troublesome puberty (version one was released last year to some acclaim), and that more and more companies with web sites in PHP are adopting the procedures and practices of a "grown-up" language, does this mean that PHP is going to be seen as a realistic alternative to Java in the enterprise?

Taking on Java

With Zend's star rising, is it enough to overcome the bias in large e-commerce firms? Zend have an uphill struggle on a cultural level: many blue-chip companies have a policy of only hiring developers with a 2:1 Computer Science degree, and the majority of UK universities are still teaching Java.

Even though both languages are object-oriented and have more then cursory similarities, does this mean that Java will continue to be the forerunner?

Vic Wyatt, business development manager for Leeds Metropolitan University, doesn't think so. "We've recently signed with Zend to provide our students a worthwhile group of modules in PHP," said Wyatt, speaking about the university's PHP academy, which helps students learn the language as well as get commercial accreditation via the Zend Certified Engineer exam.

"Java is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having had its day. We're simply responding to the market, and the market is clearly picking up on PHP," he said.

In addition, the university is working to place its students at companies using PHP. According to Wyatt, several large companies are involved, including network provider Orange. "We need to give our students opportunities that are real and meaningful," Wyatt said.

Rackspace turns to Zend

With more partnerships, PHP-trained students will have more opportunities to take their skills to the enterprise market.

The Rackspace offering - the hosting firm is keen to stress that it isn't a product - is a Red Hat environment running Zend Platform. This proprietary server technology provides a whole host of features for increasing performance, testing and debugging PHP applications - all key to making PHP friendlier for a business audience.

David Goulden, enterprise additions product manager for Zend, detailed the improvements the new partnership would offer for businesses. "When we initially worked together, it wasn't synchronized," he admitted. "We were working on a case-by-case basis [with Rackspace], with no official agreements in place. That's all changed, and for the better of our customers."

Doug Loewe, managing director for Rackspace in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, agreed. "We've been looking to expand our loose federation of partners, all of them fast-moving and able to stand shoulder to shoulder with us to provide our customers the support they want. Zend fit that criteria for us," he said.

Zend are now training key Rackspace tech personnel in Zend Platform, and a clear vendor escalation path has been drawn up between the companies. "It's a natural progression for us," said Loewe. "There is a massive overlap between our customer bases."

While Zend Platform is hardly new to the market, the acceptance of the architecture by Rackspace is an important step for Zend in moving into the enterprise market.

A bit of Microsoft maturity

There's no stronger mark of a technology's maturity than when Microsoft takes it seriously. Last year, Microsoft and Zend became partners to provide a better PHP offering on Windows 2003 Server - a much needed move to overcome the Unix bias of PHP's functionality.

"We want to make it so as many developers can run on Windows as possible," said Mark Quirk, Microsoft UK's head of technology for development and platform. "So it made perfect sense."

But does that mean Microsoft's .Net and PHP can co-exist within the enterprise market? "I don't think it changes the position of Zend in the enterprise," said Quirk. "We're not trying to make it work well in the enterprise or anything. ASP .Net works well in the enterprise."

Despite the defence of Microsoft's own programming framework, Quirk is far from belittling PHP's inclusion on Windows Server. "Which platform would I recommend: .Net," he said. "But as a platform provider, we want our platform to work for everyone."

He said that making the platform better means more applications will be running on windows. "Having people run it on Windows will benefit us," as well as Zend and developers, he said.

The verdict

This bodes well for the future of PHP in the enterprise, said Ivo Jansch, chief technology officer for the other recent Zend partner, Ibuildings. Jansch is currently writing a book for the well known PHP|Architect series, called Enterprise PHP Development - clearly a strong indicator of where he feels PHP will progress in the future.

Speaking before coming to the UK for the PHPLondon'08 conference, he said: "We're seeing more and more uptake in PHP for business applications. It's being taken more seriously."

Referring to a recent survey by Nexen that puts PHP adoption on the Web at 33 per cent, Jansch compared the uptake of PHP in commercial applications to the rise of Linux. "We're seeing the same pattern. There was a time when Linux was thought of as a hobby for enthusiasts only. Now look at the market. It's the same for PHP too."