Rackspace, HPE unveil consumption pricing for private cloud

HPE and Rackspace have announced a partnership to deliver a new payment model for private cloud the two vendors are calling the industry's first “pay-as-you-go Openstack private cloud”.

According to HPE, Openstack Private Cloud with pay-per-use infrastructure offers customers the benefits of a public cloud – such as utility pricing, elastic infrastructure and simplified IT – in a private cloud environment.

The solution can run in the customer’s on-premises data centre, in a co-location facility or a Rackspace data centre.

Rackspace Australia and New Zealand managing director Angus Dorney said the pay-as-you-use model follows the vendor's private cloud-as-a-service offering, which it also offered in partnership with HPE.

“In our previous iteration, as with all managed hosting, there are fixed costs for the customer on a monthly basis, including allocations of hardware, hypervisors, storage and switches,” Dorney said.

“We’re now announcing that you literally don't pay for anything until you use it. With the traditional version you have some charges on a monthly bases, a utility charge, but with this model you’re not actually paying for anything you don't use, it acquires that public cloud utility model.”

Dorney said Rackspace will continue to offer its previously flat-fee monthly pricing plan, as it may be suitable for business with predictably steady workloads, but that pay-as-you-use was ideal for growing businesses.

Rackspace and HPE will also deliver pay-as-you-use private cloud on Azure Stack and VMware-based solutions in 2018.

Pay-as-you-go pricing will enable private cloud customers to handle burst capacity and traffic spikes without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity, according to the vendors, which say the flexible capacity model delivers public-cloud like functionality at 40 percent of the cost of public cloud.

HPE president Antonio Neri said the partnership and announcement marked a pivotal moment in the private cloud market.

“This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds and we fully expect this simpler pay per use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions,” he said.

Rackspace will go direct with its Openstack on HPE offering, though the company said it did work with larger system integrators for some financial services and government customers. The solution will enter general availability on 28 November.