Rackspace Inc. is upping the ante in the race to bring OpenStack into the enterprise mainstream with a new version of its private cloud offering that implements the latest release of the project with a production-grade uptime guarantee and value-added capabilities for large environments. The scope of the update should dispel any remaining doubts that the veteran hosting company isn’t in it for the long haul.

The new release of the Rackspace Private Cloud comes with an enhanced service-level agreement ensuring that the APIs used to access a deployment are available 99.99 percent of the time, which leaves about 52 minutes of downtime per year. That’s not quite as good as a four-nines application availability guarantee, which would also fully cover the services running on top of the platform, but it’s still better than what the majority of enterprises could pull off on their own.

The upgrade provides an apt response to SUSE Inc.’s addition of support for high-availability configurations to its flagship OpenStack solution back in August, which followed on the heels of rival Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. upgrading its own version of the cloud framework. Rackspace says it’s going even further with a new iteration of the platform that’s not only sturdier but also more elastic than the previous release thanks to the use of Linux containers.

Instead of setting up OpenStack the traditional way, the platform deploys each individual component of the project as a self-contained service that can be scaled and upgraded without impacting the other pieces of the management puzzle. Rackspace didn’t say which technology it’s using to facilitate that level of isolation, but based on the description provided it appears to be Docker, the Red Hat-backed container engine that is making waves in the industry for its ability to seamlessly transport workloads between on- and off-premise infrastructure.

And it just so happens that hybrid computing, to which such interoperability is essential, lies at the core of the hosting giant’s value proposition. But establishing consistency across clouds is just the first step towards making the model viable for enterprise use. Because of that, the newest version of the Rackspace Private Cloud also includes support for the Heat orchestration component of the project and comes with optional DevOps Automation Services that together take much of the hassle historically involved in running apps on geographically distributed infrastructure.