Rackspace Enhances Hybrid Cloud With New Performance Cloud Servers
London – 5 November 2013 - Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, today announced its architecturally redesigned public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers. These new servers are designed to deliver enhanced levels of application performance with greater speed, throughput and reliability. This public cloud offering creates a powerful hosting platform for a variety of workloads, ranging from basic web hosting to large scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra.
"In today’s world of instant demand, applications must be capable of scaling fast, and performing at scale without compromise. As a cloud provider, our role is to enable that without customers having to over-provision and constantly re-architect their applications,” said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Rackspace. “Our mission is to provide our customers with the best-fit infrastructure to optimise the performance of their applications, and today we are redefining the benchmark for performance in a public cloud offering as part of our hybrid cloud portfolio."
The new Performance Cloud Servers are designed with 100 percent data centre-grade, RAID 10-protected solid-state disks (SSDs), powerful Intel® Xeon® E5 processors, up to 120 Gigabytes of RAM, and 40 Gigabits per second of highly available network throughput to the host. These servers deliver more total performance over existing Cloud Servers as follows*:
- 4x more total RAM
- 2x more total CPU performance
- 132x more total disk I/O (input/output)
- 8.3x more total network bandwidth
- 2.6x more total overall performance
In addition, the new Performance Cloud Servers’ high throughput network has been specifically designed to work with Cloud Block Storage, delivering up to 1.5X more disk I/O performance for Standard volumes and 2.5X more disk I/O performance for SSD volumes**.
"In the old world, we were limited by the number of transactions per second SQL Server could handle," said Matthew Swanson, chief software architect, Commissions Inc. "With Performance Cloud, we saw upwards of 3,500 peak transactions per second. In less than 15 minutes I was able to parse through more than 6 Gigabytes of log files and put just over 1.5M rows in our SQL Server database. Performance cloud servers are fast, very fast."
Performance Cloud Servers are powered by OpenStack enabling programmatic and on-demand access. Customers can connect the new cloud servers to dedicated bare metal servers as part of the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud, which can provide an unparalleled level of application performance. With the unique combination of hybrid, open and Fanatical Support®, Rackspace provides expert help through all aspects of the customer’s experience from planning and architecting to day-to-day proactive management.
"Customers of cloud computing services are increasingly looking for higher performance offerings," said Jason Waxman, vice president of Intel’s Cloud Platforms Group. "Our work with Rackspace to deliver world class performance in the cloud using Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel SSDs and Intel 10Gb Ethernet enables us both to serve today’s most demanding cloud applications. By making this powerful technology available to run the world’s largest OpenStack-based cloud platform, the Intel and Rackspace combination makes for a compelling cloud solution."
Performance Cloud Servers are immediately available in the Rackspace Northern Virginia region. The new cloud servers will come online in the Dallas, Chicago and London regions later in November, and Sydney and Hong Kong regions will follow in the first half of 2014.
For more information on Performance Cloud Servers visit: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud/servers/
*Benchmarks compare a 30GB Standard Cloud Server to a 120GB Performance Cloud Server, the largest available in each class. Multiple tests were run for each benchmark and the average score taken. Linux kernel compile time was used to measure CPU performance, fio to measure disk I/O, iperf to measure network bandwidth and unixbench to measure overall performance.
** Benchmarks use fio to compare Cloud Block Storage Standard and SSD volume performance on a 15GB Standard Cloud Server and 15GB Performance Cloud Server. Multiple tests were run and the average score taken.
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to run their workloads where they run most effectively — whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialise or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with the Performance Cloud Servers; anticipated operational and financial benefits from the Performance Cloud Servers; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the Performance Cloud Servers may not materialise because the services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the products or services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products and services or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the products or services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the product, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the products and services, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2013, filed with the SEC on August 9, 2013. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
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