Rackspace today announced they are purchasing Jungle Disk and Slice Host in an event that’s going on now.
What does this mean?
Rackspace is competing with Amazon’s Web services. Microsoft is expected to launch other similar services next week at its PDC event. Rackspace will announce several new services both today and over the next few months.
Rackspace’s employees tell me they are making their services open so that their customers can leave and go to other company’s services.
Who is Jungle Disk? They are a service that’s wholly on Amazon’s Web services right now and offer their customers backup and storage. You pay per gigabyte per month to back up your hard drive. They will announce new storage services and will give their customers a choice of using either Rackspace data centers or Amazon’s. Or both. Now you will have access to your data even if Amazon’s servers are unavailable for some reason.
Who is Slice Host? They have thousands of VPS Hosting customers who are mostly web developers who want access to super fast and super reliable cloud services. They compete pretty directly with Amazon’s EC2 services.
More as I live blog the event, keep refreshing to see more over the next hour, or watch the live event.
Earlier this year I got a tour of Rackspace’s new headquarters and met several of its leaders in a video.
DISCLAIMER: Rackspace is one of the sponsors of my blog and FastCompany.tv.
UPDATES: They just announced that Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud services, will be renamed “Cloud Sites.”
We’ll do more live blogging on FriendFeed here because that lets me interact with people a lot faster than my blog does.
Scobleizer 
Perhaps too many people are trying to watch the live event, but it won’t buffer the video at our office. Guess we’ll have to wait until it’s done to learn the details.
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Perhaps too many people are trying to watch the live event, but it won’t buffer the video at our office. Guess we’ll have to wait until it’s done to learn the details.
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Lets hope they keep up the great service offered by slicehost – congratulations to both companies.
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Lets hope they keep up the great service offered by slicehost – congratulations to both companies.
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As long as the service stays the same, we’ll stick with Slicehost.
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As long as the service stays the same, we’ll stick with Slicehost.
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hmmm now I have to reevaluate using dropbox for my offsite backup backing up to 2 datacenters might be a tipping point
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hmmm now I have to reevaluate using dropbox for my offsite backup backing up to 2 datacenters might be a tipping point
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Hey
sory to write to you like this, but i could now find the contact form. I really like your blog and i was wondering if you would maybe like a link exchange with my website http://www.sayeconomy.com . It is not really that big yet as yours, since is not up so long yet, but it is gaining visitors soon and i am putting in some advertising campaign soon.
Well let me know on info@sayeconomy.com . I would really like a link exchange.
Thank you in advance for your reply.
Cheers
Matt
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Hey
sory to write to you like this, but i could now find the contact form. I really like your blog and i was wondering if you would maybe like a link exchange with my website http://www.sayeconomy.com . It is not really that big yet as yours, since is not up so long yet, but it is gaining visitors soon and i am putting in some advertising campaign soon.
Well let me know on info@sayeconomy.com . I would really like a link exchange.
Thank you in advance for your reply.
Cheers
Matt
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Rob,
your search engine optimization is slipping. What’s good on that?
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Rob,
your search engine optimization is slipping. What’s good on that?
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Microsoft’s Online service (BPOS) is already in beta. The announcement at the PDC will most likely be the official launch date.
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Microsoft’s Online service (BPOS) is already in beta. The announcement at the PDC will most likely be the official launch date.
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As a customer of Slicehost (very happy), I just have to warn Rackspace not to f*ck it up. They are by far the best hosting company I have *ever* dealt with.
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As a customer of Slicehost (very happy), I just have to warn Rackspace not to f*ck it up. They are by far the best hosting company I have *ever* dealt with.
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Kind of scary to think of a cloud computing price war because Amazon EC2 just seems so damn cheap. I’m excited to see what Microsoft will announce. What I’m excited about is what this means for companies selling server products. Adobe has a ton of servers that do things like enalbe real time collaboration or streaming video. Layering those on top of the various VPS options would (seem to) be an easy way to get more customer using our stuff and only paying for what they use. Makes buying our servers cheaper (in general) and gives more people more access to them at a lower, pay-as-you go price point.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
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Kind of scary to think of a cloud computing price war because Amazon EC2 just seems so damn cheap. I’m excited to see what Microsoft will announce. What I’m excited about is what this means for companies selling server products. Adobe has a ton of servers that do things like enalbe real time collaboration or streaming video. Layering those on top of the various VPS options would (seem to) be an easy way to get more customer using our stuff and only paying for what they use. Makes buying our servers cheaper (in general) and gives more people more access to them at a lower, pay-as-you go price point.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
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Stop it with the technical posts! This is a political blog!
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Stop it with the technical posts! This is a political blog!
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I saw you there at the event.
From what I can gather from the various employees I talked to, the “slice” hosting is basically shared hosting, only it sounds like they’re more careful to protect you from other customers on the box. According to Rackspace, memory is the bottleneck in a shared environment, so you’re paying for a block of memory. If you have a popular site you can pay for a larger block. To me, that doesn’t sound like cloud computing, there’s only one server involved. From those employees I talked to there’s not really any virtualization/abstraction going on w/ the “slice” . I think this only adds to the confusion of what “cloud” computing is, I think part of the point of this event was to clear up some of that confusion.
Anyway, it sounds like Mosso is their actual cloud offering, I was told it’s $100/month. I don’t know how they came up with that price, I asked but didn’t get a clear answer. How does Mosso compare to MT’s grid service which is only $20? Well, they told me Mosso has a reseller interface. I personally wouldn’t use a reseller interface, I do my own billing. I talked to several Rackspace employees, none of them could guess how Mosso compares to MT’s grid, in terms of performance, price, technology. That surprised me because of MT’s popularity. At times different employees gave me conflicting answers. I think Rackspace said Mosso has a free trial, that might be a good way to compare performance, but because I can serve a million visitors/month for $20 at MT, I see no reason to spend $80 more to satisfy my curiosity.
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I saw you there at the event.
From what I can gather from the various employees I talked to, the “slice” hosting is basically shared hosting, only it sounds like they’re more careful to protect you from other customers on the box. According to Rackspace, memory is the bottleneck in a shared environment, so you’re paying for a block of memory. If you have a popular site you can pay for a larger block. To me, that doesn’t sound like cloud computing, there’s only one server involved. From those employees I talked to there’s not really any virtualization/abstraction going on w/ the “slice” . I think this only adds to the confusion of what “cloud” computing is, I think part of the point of this event was to clear up some of that confusion.
Anyway, it sounds like Mosso is their actual cloud offering, I was told it’s $100/month. I don’t know how they came up with that price, I asked but didn’t get a clear answer. How does Mosso compare to MT’s grid service which is only $20? Well, they told me Mosso has a reseller interface. I personally wouldn’t use a reseller interface, I do my own billing. I talked to several Rackspace employees, none of them could guess how Mosso compares to MT’s grid, in terms of performance, price, technology. That surprised me because of MT’s popularity. At times different employees gave me conflicting answers. I think Rackspace said Mosso has a free trial, that might be a good way to compare performance, but because I can serve a million visitors/month for $20 at MT, I see no reason to spend $80 more to satisfy my curiosity.
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They are begin to create a web-version of ms. office right?
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They are begin to create a web-version of ms. office right?
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I guess I will have to check out Slice Host…I mean Rackspace now…Let the wars begin…
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I guess I will have to check out Slice Host…I mean Rackspace now…Let the wars begin…
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cloud computing or “puters ptuin” ?
lol
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cloud computing or “puters ptuin” ?
lol
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I’ve had the chance to experiment with both Media Temple and Mosso. From a performance (grid vs. cloud file) standpoint they’ve both been perfect solutions for low traffic web sites and I haven’t had any down time issues with either company that hasn’t been scheduled maintenance. If your reselling I’d go with Mosso, they have chat available to your clients via the control panel 24/7 but if your using it to host just your sites I’d agree with PJ getting the same value with (MT).
One thing is, both of these companies tech support rock – “You can’t go wrong with either company”.
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I’ve had the chance to experiment with both Media Temple and Mosso. From a performance (grid vs. cloud file) standpoint they’ve both been perfect solutions for low traffic web sites and I haven’t had any down time issues with either company that hasn’t been scheduled maintenance. If your reselling I’d go with Mosso, they have chat available to your clients via the control panel 24/7 but if your using it to host just your sites I’d agree with PJ getting the same value with (MT).
One thing is, both of these companies tech support rock – “You can’t go wrong with either company”.
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Cloud computing, the dynamic data center.Cloud computing helps to increase the speed at which applications are deployed, helping to increase the pace of innovated networked computing. Service deployed applications; Cloud computing can be provided using an enterprise data center’s own servers, or it can be provided by a cloud provider that takes all of the capital risk of owning the infrastructure.Cloud computing incorporates virtualization, data and application on-demand deployment, internet delivery of services, and open source software. Virtualization enables a dynamic data center where servers provide resources that are utilized as needed with resources changing dynamically in order to meet the needed workload. The combination of virtual machines and virtual appliances used for server deployment objects is one of the key features of cloud computing. Additionally, company’s can merge a storage cloud that provides a virtualized storage platform and is managed through an API, or Web-based interfaces for file management, and application data deployments. Layered Service providers offering pay-by-use cloud computing solutions can be adjacent to company’s equipment leases. Public clouds are run by third party service providers and applications from different customers are likely to be mixed together on the cloud’s servers, storage systems, and networks. Private clouds are built for the exclusive use of one client, providing the utmost control over data, security, and quality of service. Private clouds can also be built and managed by a company’s own IT administrator. Hybrid clouds combine both public and private cloud models which may be used to handle planned workload spikes, or storage clouds configuration. Dedicated audits for security policies are a must.The benefits of deploying applications using cloud computing include reducing run time and response time, minimizing the purchasing and deployment of physical infrastructure. Considerations for Energy efficiency, flexibility, simplified systems administration, pricing based on consumption, and most of all limiting the footprint of the data center. Virtualized solutions: http://www.shopricom.com
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Cloud computing, the dynamic data center.Cloud computing helps to increase the speed at which applications are deployed, helping to increase the pace of innovated networked computing. Service deployed applications; Cloud computing can be provided using an enterprise data center’s own servers, or it can be provided by a cloud provider that takes all of the capital risk of owning the infrastructure.Cloud computing incorporates virtualization, data and application on-demand deployment, internet delivery of services, and open source software. Virtualization enables a dynamic data center where servers provide resources that are utilized as needed with resources changing dynamically in order to meet the needed workload. The combination of virtual machines and virtual appliances used for server deployment objects is one of the key features of cloud computing. Additionally, company’s can merge a storage cloud that provides a virtualized storage platform and is managed through an API, or Web-based interfaces for file management, and application data deployments. Layered Service providers offering pay-by-use cloud computing solutions can be adjacent to company’s equipment leases. Public clouds are run by third party service providers and applications from different customers are likely to be mixed together on the cloud’s servers, storage systems, and networks. Private clouds are built for the exclusive use of one client, providing the utmost control over data, security, and quality of service. Private clouds can also be built and managed by a company’s own IT administrator. Hybrid clouds combine both public and private cloud models which may be used to handle planned workload spikes, or storage clouds configuration. Dedicated audits for security policies are a must.The benefits of deploying applications using cloud computing include reducing run time and response time, minimizing the purchasing and deployment of physical infrastructure. Considerations for Energy efficiency, flexibility, simplified systems administration, pricing based on consumption, and most of all limiting the footprint of the data center. Virtualized solutions: http://www.shopricom.com
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