The world's largest server hosting firm
Rackspace is making a big
play for a big slice of the cloud computing market.
At 6pm GMT it announced the acquisition of virtualisation
experts Slicehost
and distributed storage king
Jungle Disk . It also
announced partnership deals with
Limelight Networks
and Sonian Networks to provide
more robust content distribution and archiving offerings
respectively in the cloud.
It has also rebranded its offerings to boost its appeal to small
and medium enterprises as well as consumers.
John Engate, Rackspace's CTO, speaking from Austin, Texas, told
Computer Weekly that the deals will increase Rackspace's capacity
to offer "secure computing on demand via the internet" to all
levels of company and consumer.
Customers could hire as many "slices" of a virtual server as
they needed for as long as they needed, or archive their favourite
photographs securely "in the cloud", he said. New user interfaces
made it as easy as drag and drop, he said.
"Today's announcement means we can offer reduced cost and risk
to all levels of IT users," he said. Engate said the new services
would launch in the UK within the next two quarters.
Rackspace's re-organisation of its brands gives it three cloud
computing offers: sites, storage and servers.
Cloud Sites is its scalable web-hosting platform for handling
huge traffic spikes with a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud
Sites supports both Windows and Linux.
Cloud Files is its internet-based storage service. Targeting
Amazon's storage product, this gives developers instant access to
an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure with infinite
scalability with replicated storage starting at $0.15/Gb.
Later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to
allow developers to distribute content easily to millions of
end-users around the world. This will bring scalable content
delivery and application acceleration services to everyone, he
said.
Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace's Cloud Files system in the
coming months while continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform.
Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the
Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
Cloud Servers is a new hosting solution to deliver on-demand
server capacity to businesses of all sizes. It will leverage key
technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualisation
software. Slicehost will remain as the company's developer brand.
Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance
computing, lower prices as well as IP-sharing for high availability
computing.