Rackspace on Thursday announced a new service to allow companies to run fully managed private clouds in any data center in the world.

"OpenStack everywhere" integrates software, hardware and services and can run on customer premises, in a Rackspace facility or at a third-party facility, the company said in a blog post.

The service is designed to combine the flexibility and convenience of public clouds with the control of on-premises computing, including compliance with national data sovereignty and data residence regulations.

That's what private cloud is supposed to do. This new category, "managed private cloud," is another shading on the cloud spectrum, like the different varieties of white paint you can buy at the hardware store: ivory, eggshell, ecru...

Customers deploy the OpenStack private cloud in any data center anywhere in the world using an integrated modular rack. The cloud is managed by RackSpace.

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RackSpace and NASA co-founded OpenStack as an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services Inc. .

The Rackspace launch follows the introduction of a similar Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) Cloud at Customer offering, which debuted late last month, allowing network operators to locate Oracle public cloud services on their own premises. Oracle provides compute, storage, networking, messaging and identity management for its own and third-party workloads, in addition to database, applications, enterprise integration and management.

And Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) launched a technical preview of Azure Stack in January, providing a cloud stack that can run on hyperscale data centers or on premises.

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— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading.