Computerworld - Rackspace Hosting Inc. said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire two companies that will expand and improve its cloud computing services, giving customers more options and incentive to move or expand from dedicated servers to low-cost cloud services.
On the face of it, making it easier for customers to switch from a dedicated server to a cloud service may seem dumb for a company that rents dedicated servers. A typical dedicated server at Rackspace can cost $375 a month. However, those same resources, delivered in a virtualized physical server, can start at $20 a month, said John Engates, Rackspace's CTO. "Sometimes a dedicated server is overkill," Engates said.
The overall trend is clear: Cloud-based services, because of their cost and ability to scale up and down with use, are attractive to Web 2.0-type firms, start-ups of all sorts and companies with Web-facing applications. Amazon.com Inc.'s computing and storage cloud-based services are an example of this model, and one of the companies that Rackspace is buying, Jungle Disk Inc., makes a tool that is used with Amazon's storage service.
Jungle Disk built its business on top of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with a management tool that allows users to essentially treat Amazon S3 as a network drive. "It makes the cloud accessible to normal people," Engates said. Rackspace announced its cloud storage service earlier this year.
Rackspace also said that it has agreed to buy Slicehost LLC, a virtual server hosting company that uses Xen virtualization and sells its servers with full root access and reserved amounts of RAM. The cost of the acquisitions weren't disclosed.
Engates said Slicehost services are similar to Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), but he said he believes Slicehost makes using a cloud-based services simpler. Slicehost is managing approximately 15,000 virtual instances in its cloud today, he said.
"The cloud really brings a capability that is more dynamic -- you can add and remove infrastructure on a more real-time basis," Engates said. Dedicated infrastructure takes time, is costly and requires a contract, something that isn't required for cloud services, he said.
Although cloud services may appear as an attractive alternative to dedicated hosting, there will still be plenty of business for dedicated systems. Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said companies that have invested millions of dollars in ERP systems, for instance, and which run applications that have to meet legal compliance rules, will likely remain in corporate data centers.
Eunice said that as a general rule, customers have to have a great deal of confidence in cloud providers. "They may not go down that often, but when they go down, they take out everyone," Eunice said.
But the price of cloud computing is a strong selling point. Eunice cited his own experience with Amazon's storage service to illustrate how economically compelling cloud-based services can be. His firm recently moved over what he described as 15 years' worth of graphics files to Amazon's service and is paying about 14 cents a month to store them.
Rackspace also said on Wednesday that it had recently established new partnerships with Limelight Networks Inc., which specializes in content delivery, and Sonian Inc., a hosted services company.
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