Rackspace is continuing its cloud computing momentum this year with an update to its Private Cloud Software, adding a combined user interface and orchestration to the free-to-download platform.

The Rackspace Private Cloud Software, first launched last year, is a version of the OpenStack cloud framework, packaged up by Rackspace and offered as an open-source solution for organisations to get started with a private cloud, hosted in their own datacentre, by Rackspace or another provider.

This new version updates the OpenStack components to those in the most current “Fulsom” release, and also broadens the operating system support, allowing users to choose Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS as the host platform.

However, the major new feature is OpenCenter, a tool that provides a graphical user interface for provisioning of the cloud infrastructure plus deployment and management of cloud services to run on it.

“Rackspace Private Cloud’s powerful new OpenCenter platform is a user interface and orchestration tool built to deploy, operate and scale on-premise private clouds,” said Jim Curry, Rackspace’s general manager of the Private Cloud business.

OpenCenter is also open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 licence, and provides administrators with the ability to deploy the OpenStack controller and compute services across the infrastructure, as well as delivering high availability support.

Although the Private Cloud Software is free to download, Rackspace makes money by providing technical support and services to customers.

The move follows a busy start to 2013 for Rackspace, which has already announced plans to double its datacentre capacity in the UK and acquired cloud services firm ObjectRocket for its MongoDB NoSQL cloud database technology.

You can hear more about Rackspace’s OpenCloud and OpenStack technology, and how it worked with Nasa to develop it, below: