Big News in Cloud Hosting: Slicehost and Jungle Disk join the Rackspace family

by David Mitzenmacher on October 22, 2008

As I mentioned in a previous post, today we unveiled some big news about our cloud hosting offering. You can watch the rebroadcast at RackspaceCloudEvent.com, but the big news is that we have acquired two companies that are doing great things in the cloud: Slicehost and Jungle Disk.

Slicehost is a leader in Xen-based virtual machine hosting with more than 15,000 “slices” online today. Jungle Disk offers reliable cloud storage solutions that allow users to easily share an unlimited amount of cloud storage between multiple users through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup.

With these two companies joining the Rackspace family, Rackspace now offers a comprehensive portfolio of Cloud offerings to go alongside with our Managed and Platform hosting services.

Rackspace’s cloud strategy is supported by three core offerings, all part of Mosso (Rackspace’s cloud hosting division). The three core offerings are:

Cloud Sites — Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, The Hosting Cloud, is now Cloud Sites. Cloud Sites offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud Sites is a heterogeneous environment, supporting both Windows and Linux.

Cloud Files — Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, CloudFS, is now Cloud Files. Cloud Files gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing infinite scalability. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB. Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses. While continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform, Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system in the coming months. Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Cloud Servers — This new hosting solution, which will deliver on-demand server capacity to businesses of all sizes, will leverage key technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualization software. Slicehost will remain as the company’s developer brand, creating innovative new features driven through shared intellectual property in conjunction with development initiatives from Rackspace. As part of the announcement, Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance computing, lower prices as well as IP sharing for high availability computing.

A wide set of cloud tool companies have expressed intent to support the Rackspace cloud. The list of companies includes RightScale, CohesiveFT, rPath, SOASTA and Vertica. In addition, Sonian Networks, the leader in cloud mail archiving solutions, and Mailtrust, the Email Hosting division of Rackspace announced they had reached an agreement to offer low cost archiving to Mailtrust’s 100,000+ business domains. Through this agreement, Sonian Networks will also port their solution to the Rackspace cloud suite.

You can find out more about our Cloud offerings by visiting cloud.rackspace.com

Hosting Solutions

Why Rackspace

Partner Network

Information Center

Blog