Category Archives: Rackspace

Crowdstrike, Funding, Google, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Security as a service firm Crowdstrike bags $100 from Google, Rackspace

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

Security SaaS provider CrowdStrike completed a $100m round of funding led by Google and Rackspace this week, which the company said would be used to bolster its international expansion.

The funding round, in which Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated, brings the total investment secured by the firm to $156m.

CrowdStrike offers a range of threat intelligence, endpoint protections and cybersecurity services including a cloud-based software offering and a security operations centre -as-a-service.

The company, of which Rackspace is a customer, claims to have trebled billings revenue and employees year on year.

“It’s extremely gratifying to bring in a high-caliber investor like Google Capital which shares our passion for innovation and sees the opportunity to completely transform the security industry,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

“As we continue to experience hyper-growth, this capital injection will help us firmly establish our SaaS-based endpoint protection platform as the leading solution to address today’s sophisticated attacks and will allow CrowdStrike to further accelerate our domestic and international expansion.”

The cloud-based security services market is growing along with enterprise adoption of cloud services in part because they can be deployed more quickly and flexibly than on-premise solutions, and because the architectures tend to be quite complimentary. Large cloud providers also see value in funding them because security services are quite capitally and operationally expensive – they require huge investments in code, infrastructure, monitoring and support staff – which means it’s challenging for these large IaaS providers to offer these services themselves. According to MarketsandMarkets the cloud security market is forecast to grow nearly 16 per cent CAGR from $4.2bn in 2014 to $8.7bn in 2019.

Azure, Channel, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Scott Guthrie, Taylor Rhodes

Rackspace to offer support for, resell Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft's public and private cloud technology

Rackspace is set to offer support for Azure customers and resell Microsoft’s public and private cloud technology

In another move aimed at shifting its business towards managed (cloud) services Rackspace this week announced it will extend its ‘fanatical support’ services to Microsoft Azure public and private cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace said customers will be able to buy either bundled Azure infrastructure with support, or just support services. The offerings will be available first in the US, with plans for an international rollout “through early 2016.”

“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, chief executive at Rackspace.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack,” Rhodes said.

Rackspace already offers a range of Microsoft-based managed services and support but the latest move will see the company double down on the service component for the newly re-architected Azure Stack, including Microsoft’s own public cloud.

The move is also yet another step in Rackspace’s broader transformation from a pure-play hosting and cloud provider towards a managed services and managed cloud company.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group said: “Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace’s industry-leading support to Microsoft’s deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win-win for customers. With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”

CERN, Giri Fox, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Tim Bell

CERN, Rackspace to harden federated cloud reference architecture

CERN and Rackspace want to create standard templates for an OpenStack cloud of clouds

CERN and Rackspace want to create standard templates for an OpenStack cloud of clouds

Rackspace and CERN openlab announced plans to redouble their efforts to create a reference architecture for a federated cloud service model.

The earliest implementations of Keystone – the mechanism in OpenStack for OpenStack-to-OpenStack identity authentication and cloud federation – came out of a collaboration between CERN and Rackspace, and now the two organisations plan to extend those efforts and create standardised templates for cloud orchestration.

“More companies are now looking to use multiple clouds to effectively serve the range of workloads they run – blending low-cost, high-performance, enhanced security and optimised environments,” says Giri Fox, Rackspace’s director of customer technology services. “But, we are still seeing the complexity businesses are facing to integrate just one cloud into their business. Federation is an opportunity to re-use that initial integration for future clouds you want to run your business on, making multi-cloud a business benefit choice rather than a business cost one.”

For those of you that aren’t familiar with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, it operates the Large Hadron Collider which during its tests (which take place intermittently) spits out over 30 petabytes of raw data per year, which then needs to be processed and made available in near real-time for physicists around the world.

But CERN is like many research organisations resource constrained, so relying on federated set of infrastructure to get all of that processing accomplished can help it overcome the capacity limitations of its own datacentres. The organisation relies on multiple OpenStack clouds based in Europe that need to be accessed by thousands of researcher, so it has a strong incentive to develop a robust open model for cloud federation.

“Our CERN openlab mission is to work with industry partners to develop open, standard solutions to the challenges faced by the worldwide LHC community. “These solutions also often play a key role in addressing tomorrow’s business challenges,” said Tim Bell, infrastructure manager in the IT department at CERN.

“After our work on identity federation with Rackspace, this is a very important step forward. For CERN, being able to move compute workloads around the world is essential for ongoing collaboration and discovery,” Bell said.

Adrian Otto, Google, Mark Collier, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Sandeep Parikh

Google, OpenStack target containers as Project Magnum gets first glimpse

Otto, Collier and

Otto, Collier and Parikh demoing Magnum at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver this week

Google and OpenStack are working together to use Linux containers as a vehicle for integrating their respective cloud services and bolstering OpenStack’s appeal to hybrid cloud users.

The move follows a similar announcement made earlier this year by pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis and Google to commit to integrating Kubernetes with the OpenStack platform.

OpenStack chief operating officer Mark Collier said the platform needs to embrace heterogeneous workloads as it moves forward, with both containers and bare-metal solidly on the agenda for future iterations.

To that end, the company revealed Magnum, which in March became an official OpenStack project. Magnum builds on Heat to produce Nova instances on which to run application containers, and it basically creates native capabilities (like support for different scheduling techniques) that enable users and service providers to offer containers-as-a-service.

“As we think about Magnum and how that can take container support to the next level, you’ll hear more about all the different types of technologies available under one common set of APIs. And that’s what users are looking for,” Collier said. “You have a lot of workloads requiring a lot of different technologies to run them at their best, and putting them all together in one platform is a very powerful thing.”

Google’s technical solutions architect Sandeep Parikh and Magnum project leader Adrian Otto (an architect at Rackspace) were on hand to demo a kubernetes cluster deployment in both Google Compute Engine and the Rackspace public cloud using the exact same code and Keystone identity federation.

“We’ve had container support in OpenStack for some time now. Recently there’s been NovaDocker, which is for containers we treat as machines, and that’s fine if you just want a small place to put something,” Otto said.

Magnum uses the concept of a bay – where the orchestration layer goes – that Otto said can be used to manipulate pretty much any Linux container technology, whether its Docker, Kubernetes or Mesos.

“This gives us the ability to offer a hybrid approach. Not everything is great for private cloud, and not everything is great for public [cloud],” Parikh said. “If I want to run a highly available deployment, I can now run my workload in multiple places and if something were to go down the workload will still stay live.”

Acronis, Appointment, Crenshaw, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Red Hat, VeriSign

Rackspace taps former VeriSign, Red Hat exec to lead strategy, product engineering

Scott CrenshawRackspace has appointed Scott Crenshaw to the role of senior vice president of strategy and product. Crenshaw, who formerly hails from VeriSign, will oversee the company’s corporate strategy, business development and product and engineering portfolio.

Crenshaw most recently served as senior vice president of products at VeriSign, where he led the development of the company’s new products and services. Before that he served as vice president of strategy and chief marketing officer at Acronis, a data backup and recovery solutions provider, and spent a number of years at Red Hat, where he served as vice president and general manager of the cloud business unit.

He also holds a number of patents related to subscription service provision and monitoring.

“We are excited to have someone of Scott’s caliber and experience joining our team,” said Rackspace president and chief executive officer Taylor Rhodes.

“Throughout his career, Scott has established a strong track record of developing winning strategies, managing and growing unique product offerings and working collaboratively with colleagues and customers. Scott will work closely with our marketing, sales, support and other critical functions to drive compelling product offerings and the best customer experience in the industry.”

Crenshaw said: “I am thrilled to be a part of this talented team at such an exciting moment in the company’s history.”

 

Enterprise IT, Europe, Ian Pulsford, Infrastructure as a Service, Jeff Cotten, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Rackspace, The Entertainer

Toy retailer The Entertainer taps Rackspace for managed private cloud

The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace's managed private cloud platform

The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace’s managed private cloud platform

UK toy retailer The Entertainer has moved onto Rackspace’s managed private cloud platform in a bid to improve how the company’s site and databases handle traffic spikes.

Working with omni-channel retail consultancy Conexus, The Entertainer sought to enhance its website and databases in a bid to cope with rising seasonal demand.

The company, which has about 100 stores in the UK, said in the five weeks leading up to last Christmas last year it saw a 60 per cent sales increase from the same period in 2013 (it generates half of its annual revenues between November and December).

“In addition to the scalability that’s available through the Rackspace Private Cloud, the high performance it offers is also very important to us. It has allowed the business to deploy a Click and Collect service, which has improved the customer experience and boosted sales,” said Ian Pulsford, head of IT services, The Entertainer.

“A crucial aspect of Click and Collect is having an effective stock management system, which we also power by the cloud. Every evening between midnight and 4 a.m. we monitor the stock available in each store, collecting data on our 17,000 products. This ensures that the availability we offer our Click and Collect customers is accurate and updated in real time,” Pulsford said.

“However, as we’ve learned in the past with previous hosting providers, the technology alone is not enough if we don’t have access to a high level of support and expertise to keep it running smoothly,” he added.

Jeff Cotten, managing director of Rackspace International said: “Multi-channel retailing is highly competitive, which means both the in-store and online experiences have to be excellent to keep customers coming back. It’s been great working with The Entertainer and Conexus to build a Private Cloud environment that is high performing and highly scalable, so The Entertainer can focus on developing new services and increasing its presence across a growing number of ecommerce channels.”

Amazon Web Services, Guest Post, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

OpenStack’s Third Birthday – a Recap with a Look into the Future

Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces

OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.

Is it the fact that it’s an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn’t be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.

There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I’m happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.

OpenStack as an Open Movement

Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.

OpenStack1

Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn’t yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.

OpenStack2

As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.

OpenStack3

Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS

OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.

Only on OpenStack

We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.

The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:

  • Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.
  • Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
  • Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
  • Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.

All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.

Re-think the Cloud Layers

When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.

The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn’t reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.

Looking Into the Future

Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.

OpenStack Birthday Events

To mark OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.

For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.

Nati-GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom is the CTO and founder of GigaSpaces and founder of the Israeli cloud.org consortium.

 

Cloudify, GigaSpaces Technologies, GitHub, Open Source, OpenStack, OpsCode, Partnerships, Rackspace

Gigaspaces Cloudify Partners with OpSpaces for Chef Onboarding

GigaSpaces Technologies, with its new release of the open source Cloudify product, has partnered with OpsCode for a dedicated Chef integration that caters to diverse application stacks and systems.

“The concept of DevOps and recipes can go well beyond setup, to actually manage the entire lifecycle of your applications—from setup, to monitoring, through maintaining high availability, and auto-scaling when required.  This is where Cloudify and Chef come together,” says Bryan Hale, Director of Business Development for OpsCode. “By enabling users to leverage the power and variety of Chef recipes and cookbooks to deploy services, Cloudify supports comprehensive application level orchestration on any cloud.”

In addition to the integration with Chef, this new release also includes the following features:

  • Complete application-level orchestration, allowing automated provisioning, deployment, management and scaling of complex multi-tier apps to any cloud environment
  • Built-in, ready to use recipes for common big data components, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB.
  • Support for non-virtualized environments (AKA Bring Your Own Node), allowing you to treat an arbitrary set of server as your “Cloud” and have Cloudify deploy and manage applications on these servers.
  • Comprehensive REST API for easy integration with third-party tooling and programmatic access.
  • Support for all the common cloud infrastructures, including OpenStack, HPCloud, RackSpace, Windows Azure, Apache CloudStack, Amazon AWS and vCloud.

In addition, Cloudify now also simplifies the complexities involved with deploying big data applications to the cloud.  It is well-known that the massive computing and storage resources that are needed to support big data deployments make cloud environments, public and private, an ideal fit.  But managing big data application on the cloud is no easy feat – as these systems and applications often include other services such as relational and non-relational databases, stream processing tools, web front ends and more, where each framework comes with its own management, installation, configuration, and scaling mechanisms.  With its new built-in recipes, Cloudify provides consistent management and cloud portability for popular big data tools, exponentially reducing the operational and infrastructure costs involved with running these systems.

“We’re seeing a growing market trend for the need to migrate applications – not just in one-off processes anymore – but on a much larger scale, by enterprises, managed service providers, and ISVs alike, who are looking to take advantage of the cloud promise—while until now, only about 5% have actually been able to do so,” says Uri Cohen, Vice President of Product Management at GigaSpaces. “The beauty of Cloudify and its recipe-based model is that it enables you to simply and smoothly take both new and existing applications to the cloud by the tens and hundreds through Cloudify’s built-in recipes and the new integration with OpsCode’s Chef, in very short time frames.”

You can fork the Cloudify code from GitHub, or download the Cloudify GA release.

EMEA, Rackspace, Venture Funding

Rackspace Launches UK Startup Programme to Fuel New British Businesses

Rackspace the open cloud company, announced plans to launch its Rackspace Startup Programme in 2013 to provide cloud computing resources to new businesses driving growth in the UK economy. With a global track record of partnering with premiere startup accelerators and incubators in the USA and Australia, the firm now broadens its focus to include the EMEA region aiming to help power thousands of UK startups to success.

“Since launching in the US two years ago, we’ve helped over 850 startups through the programme. We’ve also worked with over 100 programme partners, including some of the top accelerators, universities, co-working spaces and VCs, and we are thrilled to launch the UK startup programme,” said Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director, International at Rackspace.

Given the cloud model’s inherent flexibility and elasticity, the fact that it requires minimal capital expenditure up front, and its unmatched ability to scale, it’s an essential differentiator for many fast growth businesses. In 2009, nearly 250,000 VAT registered businesses started in the UK*. This highlights the vast number of startups that could potentially benefit from cloud services, if they aren’t already.

Starting as a ten man entrepreneurial venture itself back in 1998, Rackspace recognises the need to provide fledgling businesses harbouring great potential the enabling technologies for growth and commercial success. The Rackspace Startup Programme therefore exists to provide low cost cloud hosting and support services to startup incubators who have identified cloud computing as a more efficient route to IT service delivery.

As a company that likes to refer to information technology as the “fifth business utility”, Rackspace views cloud computing as a means of democratising access to powerful IT resources at every tier of the business spectrum. As such, the Rackspace Startup Programme has been engineered from the outset to give incubators an unrivalled opportunity to drive startup firms towards development, expansion and commercial success.

“Cloud computing services are built around the principles of not only flexibility and scalability, but automation and self-service too as we serve customers’ needs from our local datacentres with additional service layers all backed up by our world-renowned Fanatical Support,” said Rhodes. “Bringing the power of our continuously available cloud services to the dynamic world of startup business is, to be quite honest, really exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

Rackspace unveiled its Startup Programme at a ‘Boost Your Start-Up’ networking event held in the heart of London’s Tech City on 20th November 2012. The event featured a panel discussion with some of the most prominent thought leaders in this space, moderated by Robert Scoble, the world’s pre-eminent blogger and evangelist on technology and start-ups. Moving forwards, Rackspace expects to work with high profile accelerators including DreamStake and Springboard, to ensure that businesses across the UK have access to its Startup Programme.

“With a multiplicity of extremely sensitive and highly fluid business factors to juggle, startups need an IT backbone built around maximum levels of elasticity, control and automation. We welcome Rackspace’s commitment to providing this through their cloud offering. The scalability in a pay-as-you-go model is essential for fast-growing businesses and will be a key business enabler for startups now and in the future,” said Sean Kane, Co-Founder, Springboard

Rackspace is also offering one start-up team the chance to win a trip to San Antonio, Texas, plus a 1-on-1 mentoring session with founder and Chairman, Graham Weston, while they’re there. Entrants must submit a pitch video for a start-up idea centred around cloud computing by December 14th for a chance to win. The winners will also receive £3,000.


Cloud Block Storage, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, Solid-state drive, Standards, Storage

Rackspace Launches High Performance OpenStack Cloud Block Storage

Today, Rackspace Hosting announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack®. This solution provides a superior approach to attached storage in the Cloud by addressing customer demand for consistent and affordable performance for file systems, databases and other input/output (I/O) intensive applications. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage offers a standard volume option for everyday storage with performance that has been tested to be at least 30 percent less variable than that of alternatives1. The new product’s Solid State Drive (SSD) volume option has also been tested to deliver even higher performance, 5x to 6x faster than competing solutions1. Both options feature a transparent, flat pricing structure with no charge for I/O, and are now available for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack.

“The Rackspace Cloud Block Storage solution is a crucial piece of our product portfolio,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “The explosion of data over the past few years has placed greater demands on our customers, presenting them with a variety of new storage related challenges. We developed Cloud Block Storage to deliver consistent performance in the cloud, with a very simple pricing model that gives customers the flexibility they require to meet their unique business needs.”

With Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, customers get:

A Full-Featured Attachable Storage Solution

  • Attach multiple volumes of up to 1 Terabyte each of block storage to
    Cloud Servers
  • Detach and re-attach storage between compute nodes in seconds
  • Choice of Standard Performance or SSD-based High-Performance storage

Enhanced Performance

  • SSD-based solution is more than 10 times faster than Standard drive
    performance1.
  • Rackspace’s Cloud Block Storage Standard drive delivers consistent
    performance with less variability than standard drive solutions
    offered by leading competitors1.
  • High performance can be achieved without the need to RAID0 (stripe)
    volumes together, providing significant savings in cost and complexity.
  • There is no cap on I/O and users do not have to specify IOPS numbers,
    as they do with competing solutions.

A Simple Pricing Model

  • Standard – $0.15 per gigabyte per month; SSD – $0.70 per gigabyte per
    month
  • $.10 per gigabyte per month for snapshot data stored
  • Competitive pricing structure also features I/O at no additional
    charge, no additional per-instance fee, no minimum instance size, and
    consistent pricing in all U.S. regions

No Vendor Lock-In

  • Using the OpenStack Cinder APIs will allow customers to avoid
    proprietary implementation
    Rackspace Cloud Block Storage

Standard volumes are aimed at customers that typically require large amounts of everyday storage. These customers can leverage the product for a broad range of applications, including those that require standard performance or those needing to scale storage without scaling compute nodes. In addition, the product provides dependable storage for archiving solutions, companies that access large quantities of large files, and small to medium size websites.

Rackspace Cloud Block Storage SSD volumes are ideally suited for customers that require even higher levels of performance than what is normally experienced with standard drives. With a faster and more reliable SSD-based storage solution, customers can be better equipped to use applications that are crucial to their business, such as self-managed MySQL databases, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Web caching and indexing, among others.

“Based on our internal benchmarks, we’ve been impressed with the ability of Rackspace Cloud Block Storage to steadily perform at a high level,” said Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian Inc. “For our customers, the capacity to effectively archive large amounts of email data is critical to their business. As a result, we look for storage solutions that give us maximum agility, scalability and enterprise readiness. We are excited that Rackspace is now providing a new block storage alternative service for running our large scale email archiving deployments.”

Cloud Block Storage joins Cloud Databases as a key solution in Rackspace’s expanding portfolio of storage products. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage is now available in the U.S. and UK. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/blockstorage/

1 The data provided results from performance benchmarking tests that were commissioned by Rackspace. More information is available at: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-block-storage/.