[..] Rackspace Acquires Jungledisk and Slicehost [..]
Image via CrunchBase
Rackspace had an event today at Austin, TX where they announced the acquisition of Jungledisk and Slicehost. In fact, they made it a big event with live streaming through the web. I watched the event with an anticipation for some big cloud related announcements. To be frank, I was a little disappointed. Well, they did have a few announcements but there was nothing ground shaking. However, their announcements are important in their own way. Let me offer an overview of their announcements and discuss what it means to cloud computing and also to consumers.
Rackspace has repackaged both its email and infrastructure offerings with a few additions and are offering it under the Cloud name. Rackspace now calls their combined Hosted Exchange Mailtrust and Noteworthy offerings as Cloud Applications. They will also use Sonian Networks to offer powerful email archiving services. In fact, Google offers similar archiving for the Google Apps users. The previous incarnation of Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure offering was called Mosso. It has been renamed as Cloud Sites so that it will fit well in their cloud themed package. Their cloud package also has Cloud Files and Cloud Servers as a part of their lineup.
Cloud Sites: Cloud Sites is nothing but Mosso, which offers a highly scalable multi platform stack. This will help people host their websites without worrying about any spikes in the traffic. Slashdot and Digg effect will not bring the sites down. They have more than 80,000 sites in this cloud.
Cloud Files: This is Rackspace’s response to Amazon S3. It is an infinitely scalable storage solution for consumers and small businesses. They charge 15 cents per gig. for storage and offer REST based APIs. They backup their service with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. They also offer CDN, powered by Limelight Networks, so that the files can be cached in different parts of the world. This will be available by the end of this year. The most interesting part of this announcement is their acquisition of Jungledisk, a company that makes multi-platform backup software for Amazon S3. The best part of Jungledisk is that they are built to support multiple providers and hence we can expect support for Cloud Files in the near future. But the most important question in the minds of Jungledisk users is whether the support for Amazon S3 will continue in the long run. There is no guarantee that Rackspace will continue supporting its competitor forever.
Cloud Servers: Rackspace has announced Cloud Servers, through its acquisition of Slicehost, to compete directly with Amazon EC2. But right now, Cloud Servers are just VPS instances running on Xen hosts. They are not part of the clouds and they do not offer utility pricing. However, Rackspace has announced that the Slicehost offerings will be integrated into Rackspace’s cloud in the future. The Slicehost acquisition should be a good news for its existing customer base, which includes a large chunk of small businesses. Slicehost under Rackspace will offer much more reliable service at a lower cost.
Rackspace is facing an unique dilemma. On one hand, they have a successful managed hosting business and, on the other side, cloud computing is going big and they had to jump in to be competent in the marketplace. Today’s cloud announcement is a result of this dilemma. Even though, I am excited to have a competitor for Amazon S3, I am still not convinced about Rackspace’s cloud architecture. Today’s event didn’t provide any insight into their cloud architecture. Hopefully, we will get a better idea once they integrate their offerings tightly into the cloud architecture.
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