Rackspace says it's gussied up its free Private Cloud Software, a k a Alamo, boosting remote support capabilities for on premise OpenStack-powered clouds, helping companies to monitor their private clouds, and providing more storage capabilities.

It claims that since Alamo launched in April thousands of organizations in 125 countries - from Fortune 100s to colleges and research centers - have downloaded the product.

Some of the new features of the Private Cloud Software include highly scalable block storage, which turns external storage into an additional storage volume for a private cloud environment based on OpenStack Cinder;  object storage powered by OpenStack Swift, which lets users create massively scalable storage resource pools that can be used by a Rackspace Private Cloud environment for storing files as well as server images, taking advantage of commodity hardware to reduce costs; and monitoring apps, Graphite and Collectd, to extend the monitoring and alerting capabilities available to private cloud environments.

According to Mike Aeschliman, head of engineering and product for Rackspace Private Cloud, "With the new release, we can now offer Fanatical Support to customers' cloud software using our remote access tools. This is a huge step in our mission to enable organizations to start realizing the benefits of clouds and trust them for mission-critical workloads."

As part of the new release, Rackspace has extended its service portfolio for Rackspace Private Cloud. The new support level, Core Software Support, now includes 24x7x365 remote access support for the Rackspace Private Cloud Software stack.

Rackspace is offering this new service level in addition to the Software Escalation Support that already exists.

With Core Software Support, Rackspace engineers will now remotely log into customers' Private Cloud environments to provide services such as installation, configuration, patching and troubleshooting.

The latest feature release of Rackspace Private Cloud Software incorporates the latest release of the OpenStack Cloud Software platform, Folsom, released to the public in September and the same platform that powers the Rackspace Cloud supporting thousands of customers. The Folsom release was developed by the OpenStack community which implemented about 185 new features.