Rackspace has been helping enterprise customers set up private OpenStack clouds for quite a while. But now, it’s streamlining the process with pre-engineered cabinets that can be deployed at a customer’s location of choice, whether at one of Rackspace’s nine global data centers, a third-party data center, or a customer’s data center.

In the past when a customer hired Rackspace to help it set up an OpenStack cloud, the process would begin with a design session, and then the customer would be given a bill of materials that it had to obtain, says Darrin Hanson, general manager of OpenStack private cloud at Rackspace.

“Now we can provide the entire service and manage that as if it were in a Rackspace data center,” says Hanson.

The vendor claims the new offering solves three issues for customers: They are off the hook for dealing with all the complexities of OpenStack; they don’t have to hire hard-to-find talent to deploy and operate it themselves; and they don’t have to own the hardware, but can instead sign a hosting services agreement.

Rackspace isn’t the first company to conceive of this idea. Cisco’s Metapod and BlueBox’s hosted private OpenStack-cloud-as-a-service are similar.

“The distinction is there’s a lot of shared responsibility on behalf of the customer with those solutions,” says Ryan Yard, director of solution engineering at Rackspace. “Also, ours is based on a pure OpenStack distribution rather than a forked or modified version, compared to those two.”

With Rackspace’s new offering, the client is assigned a program manager, an account manager, and dedicated technical staff. After the location survey and design process, the racks with the software are delivered and powered up, and the customer is provided with ongoing monitoring and operational support.