Rackspace enhances Hybrid Cloud

Rackspace® Hosting has 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.