According to Brandon Butler at Network World, Rackspace updated its OpenStack-powered private cloud framework.  Today’s updated version includes a variety of feature enhancements, most notably the addition of Open Center, which Rackspace is calling the ‘fabric” for private cloud operations.

Open Center “is the API layer, complete with a dashboard that shows the user all of the operations running in the private cloud. It also orchestrates various services together — compute, storage and networking, for example — while providing additional tools to automate tasks, such as creating high availability.”

The focus on private cloud computing from the public cloud computing providers is a bit perplexing to some.  However, all public cloud computing providers have some sort of private cloud offering, including Microsoft, Rackspace, and even AWS with it’s virtual private cloud (VPC) public/private hybrid.

Clearly, the investment is being made on the private cloud side of things as larger enterprises and government agencies take baby steps toward cloud computing technology.  However, the ultimate business case for cloud computing is more likely to be found in the public cloud providers.

The trend here seems to be synergy with public and private cloud providers, offering the same sets of services in both the private and public clouds.  Perhaps even the same code tree, with the ultimate objective; the use of the hybrid cloud model.