Rackspace Launches Product Certification for Private Cloud Partners

Provides Partners with Validation to Help Them Thrive in the Open Cloud Ecosystem

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, announced product certifications for Rackspace Private Cloud partners.

“Running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task”

“We have seen great demand from companies to certify their products, hardware or software, against Rackspace Private Cloud,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy, Rackspace Private Cloud. “We want to continue to foster adoption of open clouds and make it easier for our customers and partners to deploy Rackspace Private Cloud in their data centers.“

Rackspace makes deploying and managing private clouds easy. In less than an hour, a Rackspace Private Cloud, dubbed “Alamo,” can be downloaded and deployed in a customer’s data center and supported by the open cloud experts at Rackspace. Thousands of companies, organizations and individuals from around the world have downloaded the Rackspace Private Cloud software and are using it today. Rackspace is now extending the capabilities of this offer by providing programs to help its technology partners validate their offerings against Rackspace Private Cloud, and thereby making those solutions more attractive to customers using Rackspace Private Cloud solutions.

Product Certifications for Rackspace Private Cloud

Building hardware, applications and other platforms that power or run on private clouds based on OpenStack requires deep expertise and knowledge. Rackspace is helping to solve this problem by offering a product certification program for Rackspace Private Cloud. As a consistent, supportable and tested platform, Rackspace Private Cloud is quickly becoming the gold standard to test products for compatibility with open private clouds. There are two types of Rackspace product certifications available:

• Technology Alliance Program - Designed for hardware and platform vendors that provide products and solutions in conjunction with Rackspace Private Cloud. Technology Alliance Partners would include compute, hardware, storage hardware, networking, operating systems and management tools. Rackspace engineers work with partner teams to provide detailed testing criteria in QA and validation labs to validate compatibility.
• "Built For" Program – Designed for software vendors building applications that run in the guest virtual machines or manage the application workloads on a Rackspace Private Cloud. Rackspace provides a testing suite and a hosted validation environment that confirms the compatibility of the application with Rackspace Private Cloud.

“Running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task,” Paul Rad, vice president, private cloud, Rackspace. “Our goal is to help enterprise IT to deploy private clouds that have the efficiency and robustness of Rackspace’s public cloud, which runs thousands of virtual machines. The product certification program opens the door for IT executives to choose a certified stack that has been validated and supported by Rackspace and its certification partners.”

For more information on the product certifications for Rackspace Private Cloud visit: www.rackspace.com/cloud/private/partners/

Partner Quotes:

“AMD is excited to be at the forefront of building a robust Rackspace Private Cloud partner ecosystem. Certifying the industry’s highest density, most energy efficient server platform will allow customers to realize the benefits of the open cloud while drastically reducing energy consumption and operating expenses. This is a huge step forward for the industry and we look forward to being one of the leading partners in the program for standards-based, interoperable data center computing.” Andrew Feldman, general manager, Data Center Server Solutions, AMD

"AppFog strongly supports the product certification program for Rackspace Private Cloud. By addressing enterprise compatibility concerns in deploying OpenStack-powered private cloud, it accelerates the growing adoption of our enterprise-class, polyglot PaaS product.” John Purrier, chief technology officer, AppFog

"The power and extensibility of Arista's EOS (Extensible Operating System) software is a natural match for integration into Rackspace's Private Cloud Certification Program. The Arista 7150 Series is the first next generation SDN switch for virtualized data centers and will be the initial platform we certify with Rackspace's new program." Tom Black, vice president, SDN Engineering, Arista Networks.

“We believe cloud computing is changing every organization’s strategy for data protection and recovery and requires enterprises to move beyond backup to compete and thrive in this new model for IT. The Rackspace Private Cloud program will help our customers dedicate more time on innovation that adds value to their organization instead of on maintaining infrastructure.” David West, senior vice president of marketing and business development, CommVault

"Dell is committed to enabling our customer's cloud environments with the industry's best servers from our PowerEdge portfolio, including the PowerEdge C6220, which is purpose-built for hyperscale data centers. We have had an intense focus on bringing OpenStack-based solutions to market since the community's inception, to help drive leading open source-based cloud and big data solutions for our customers. We think the Rackspace product certification program will provide customers with a great opportunity to choose a certified cloud environment." Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Server Solutions, Dell

“EMC is pleased to extend our industry-leading storage solutions and capabilities for Rackspace Private Cloud Software. Customers deploying OpenStack-powered private clouds with Rackspace can be confident of EMC’s innovation and support for their underlying storage and cloud solutions, as certified by EMC’s industry proven eLab infrastructure.” John Roese, chief technology officer, EMC Corporation

“As an early adopter of OpenStack and a key proponent of open source, Intel welcomes the leadership of Rackspace in helping evolve this open source project into a robust enterprise cloud operating system. Intel looks forward to working with the Rackspace Private Cloud certification partner community to help enterprises deploy open, trusted clouds.” Billy Cox, director, Cloud Software, Intel

“Private clouds are enabling organizations to pool and abstract resources, automate operations and optimize application management. This IT transformation is freeing up IT staff for business-critical functions as well as driving further efficiency and higher utilization across the enterprise. NetApp is continuing to collaborate with Rackspace, most recently on the Rackspace Private Cloud Software product certification program to drive private cloud adoption through OpenStack.” Jeffrey O'Neal, senior director, Solutions Incubation, NetApp

About Rackspace

Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 190,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support® across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. The company offers choice; flexibility and freedom from vendor lock in. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting.” Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with the Rackspace Private Cloud, support services and certification programs; anticipated operational and financial benefits from the Rackspace Private Cloud, support services and certification programs; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include including the possibility that expected benefits from the Rackspace Private Cloud, support services and certifications may not materialize because these products and services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the products and services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the products and services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the products and services, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the products and services, and (vi) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2012, filed with the SEC on August 9, 2012. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.