RackSpace Cloud Block Storage

Rackspace has a set of DPCs to the USA and considerable presence in Great Britain, Australia and Hong Kong.

Strengths: Rackspace market share in a segment of the managed hosting means big base of customers to whom she can sell cloud services, and its philosophy of "fanatical support" within the general sight for sale of complete solutions is attractive to customers.

What should be considered: A set of purchases which were made by Rackspace in recent years are not quite integrated into the smooth offer, Gartner considers in 2014. All these components integrated under a roof of the company well position it for multicloud administration, but do not create the irresistible offer on value to use its IaaS. "Though Rackspace offers a good set of basic functions now, it did not manage to be equal to the rate of innovations of leaders of this market, as well as to support competitive prices", - comes to conclusion of Gartner.

The Rackspace company, the supplier of cloud services on the basis of open source solutions, announced in October, 2012 start of Cloud Block Storage service which is offered as the new approach providing flexibility during creation of data arrays within a cloud and independent interaction with them. The solution Cloud Block Storage is constructed on the OpenStack platform and supplements a series of basic cloud products of the company.

John Ingeyts, the chief technology specialist of Rackspace, explained that using Cloud Block Storage service it is possible to move data arrays from the basic server on the selected memory devices that users could work with them independently. Ingeyts also added that they can select necessary amount of memory on external memory devices for computing applications which they want to use.

As the Cloud Block Storage service functions based on OpenStack, open OS for clouds, in it the commonly accepted user interface is used to interaction with memory devices. Therefore users can work with this service as within a cloud from Rackspace, and using other clouds for creation and management of the data warehouse.

'It just that key property which the OpenStack platform has' — John Ingeyts added, having noted that the provided means give the chance to use different clouds without modification of applications.

At the same time Ingeyts recognized that a popular problem of data storage in a cloud often is the poor performance of work with such data. And therefore the Rackspace company tries to eliminate this defect by means of use of two-level structure of services for data access.

Users can select either standard drives, or SSD devices for fall forward of work and performance at hard work with data. John Ingeyts reported, that the Rackspace company considers SSD drives already today as the best method to meet user requirements during the work with data in cloud infrastructure.

Having confirmed that the Cloud Block Storage service undoubtedly meets needs of the companies from small and medium business, Ingeyts added that this solution can find application and for the applications used in the large companies, especially in those which had earlier no opportunity to unroll the systems within the cloud infrastructure offered by Rackspace company.

As explained to Ingeyts, the key moment at transfer of the large application on other Wednesday is transfer of the database. Respectively, many potential customers resist placement of a DB in a cloud environment of Rackspace company in view of the fact that they have no means for fast movement of the stored data.

But using Cloud Block Storage service as approves Ingeyts, Rackspace will be able to offer a suitable product to those customers who had a need for data movement, but which had no corresponding opportunity.

What is offered now stands up 0.15 dollars for 1 GB a month on standard drives and 0.70 dollars for 1 GB a month on SSD devices. In both options users are exempted from additional fee for data transfer.