Rackspace has bragging rights for co-creating OpenStack, along with NASA, back in 2010. Since then, the company has carved a name for itself offering private clouds to enterprises. Now Rackspace says it will resell PLUMgrid’s software-defined networking (SDN) for its Rackspace Private Cloud.

Rackspace deploys and manages its OpenStack-based clouds with the Ansible tool, and it has been using OpenStack SDN capabilities via Neutron for networking in private clouds.

“[Neutron] works for many use cases,” says Bryan Thompson, senior director of product management with Rackspace. But he says its larger enterprise customers have needs that Neutron can’t fill: for security, tenant isolation, scale, and performance, as well as a level of specific monitoring at the network level.

“PLUMgrid’s SDN provides that capability within an OpenStack environment,” he says. “We configure an OpenStack private cloud and then deploy PLUMgrid for the SDN components."

The arrangement with PLUMgrid makes advanced SDN available for large enterprises that need more scale.

“We’ve implemented our own way to make up for the shortcomings of [Neutron’s] generic codes,” says PLUMgrid CEO Larry Lang. “When you first start experimenting, you may not care about scalability or availability.”

But with Rackspace’s success, scalability becomes an issue. PLUMgrid’s SDN is designed to support larger enterprise customers with hundreds of physical nodes.

PLUMgrid provides a programmable data plane, and it offers security by enabling virtual domains via micro-segmentation and firewall insertion. Its CloudApex provides real-time SDN visualization and monitoring.

PLUMgrid also supports Mirantis OpenStack, Red Hat OpenStack, and Ubuntu OpenStack by Canonical.