 | |
| Company type | Division |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cloud computing |
| Founded | March 4, 2006 |
| Parent | Rackspace |
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage ("Cloud Files"), virtual private server ("Cloud Servers"), load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
Rackspace Cloud announced Mosso LLC in March, 2006, as a wholly owned subsidiary billed as a utility computing offering. [1] [2] Mosso offered PaaS web hosting on LAMP and IIS infrastructure. As it pre-dated mainstream adoption of the term cloud computing, it was "retooled" and relaunched on February 19, 2008, adopting the tagline "Mosso: The Hosting Cloud". [3] The "Mosso" branding (including the mosso.com domain) was then dropped on June 17, 2009, in favour of "The Rackspace Cloud" branding (including the rackspacecloud.com domain name). [4] [5] Since then, customer contracts were executed with Rackspace US, Inc. d/b/a The Rackspace Cloud rather than with the Mosso LLC subsidiary. [6]
Other companies (such as EMC Corporation with its "Decho" subsidiary) also use alternative branding for their cloud computing offerings.
In 2011, the "Rackspace Cloud" brand merged with Rackspace.com. In 2012, Rackspace rebranded as "Rackspace, the open cloud company". In 2014, Rackspace rebranded as "Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company".
Cloud files is a cloud hosting service that provides "unlimited online storage and CDN" for media (examples given include backups, video files, user content) on a utility computing basis. [7] It was originally launched as Mosso CloudFS as a private beta release on May 5, 2008, and is similar to Amazon Simple Storage Service. [8] Unlimited files of up to 5 GB can be uploaded, managed via the online control panel or RESTful API and optionally served out via Akamai Technologies' content delivery network. [9]
In addition to the online control panel, the service can be accessed over a RESTful API with open source client code available in C#/.NET, Python, PHP, Java, and Ruby. Jungle Disk, previously also owned by Rackspace, allows Cloud Files to be mounted as a local drive within supported operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows).
Redundancy is achieved by replicating three full copies of data across multiple computers in multiple "zones" within the same data center, where "zones" are physically (though not geographically) separate and supplied separate power and Internet services. Uploaded files can be distributed via Akamai Technologies to "hundreds of endpoints across the world" which provides an additional layer of data redundancy. [9]
The control panel and API are protected by SSL and the requests themselves are signed and can be safely delivered to untrusted clients. Deleted data is zeroed out immediately. [9] [10]
Use cases considered as "well suited" include backing up or archiving data, serving images and videos (which are streamed directly to the users' browsers), serving content over content delivery networks, storing secondary static web-accessible data, developing data storage applications, storing fluctuating and/or unpredictable amounts of data and reducing costs. [9] [ citation needed ]
There is no native operating system support for the Cloud Files API so it is not yet possible to "map" or "mount" it as a virtual drive without third-party software like JungleDisk that translates to a supported standard such as WebDAV. There are no concepts of "appending" or "locking" data within Cloud Files (which may affect some disk mirroring or backup solutions), nor support for permissions or transcoding. Data is organised into "containers" but it is not possible to create nested folders without a translation layer. [9] [11]
Cloud Servers is a cloud infrastructure service that allows users to deploy "one to hundreds of cloud servers instantly" and create "advanced, high availability architectures" similar to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. [12] The "cloud servers" are virtual machines running on the Xen hypervisor for Linux-based instances, and Citrix XenServer for Windows and Linux instances. Each quad core hardware node has between 16 and 32 GB of RAM, allowing for allocations between 256 MB and 30 GB. Disk and CPU allocations scale up with memory, with disk sizes ranging from 10 GB to 620 GB. [13] Various distributions of Linux are supported, including Arch, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu.
The technology behind the service was purchased in Rackspace's October 22, 2008, acquisition of Slicehost and the servers were formerly known as "slices". These are "much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server", though it is still necessary to maintain the operating system and solution stack which is not required for the Cloud Sites product. [14] This is one of the main differentiators between the two services; where Cloud Servers includes full root access and thus allows for more customisation, the Cloud Sites product is less flexible but requires less maintenance.
On December 14, 2010, Rackspace began offering a managed service level on the Cloud Servers product, which added additional support for the operating system and common applications as well as patching and other routine services. [15] This additional support level does come at an increased cost, however.
During 2014, Rackspace ceased to advertise the First Generation Cloud Servers and the Standard Next Generation Cloud Servers on its main Cloud Servers product page, opting to only disclose the Next Generation Performance 1 and Performance 2 products that require a minimum US$50 per month service charge per account for support service. The First Generation and Standard Next Generation platforms are now referred to as "Legacy Infrastructure" buried in the pricing page for the old products. [16] The minimum charge for the lowest product on the First Generation platform is $10.95 per month for the 256 MB instance while the minimum charge on the Standard Next Generation platform is $16.06 per month for the 512 MB instance. [16] On the Performance platform, the minimum charge for one server is $23.36 for the 1 GB instance plus $50 minimum service charge, for a total of $73.36 per month. [17] Rackspace is quietly phasing out its older, less expensive products in transition to a managed platform where mandatory support charges are incorporated into the cost of the services.
Cloud Tools are applications and infrastructure software built to run on the RackSpace cloud. [18] Applications listed include Zend, a PHP stack, Cloudkick, a cloud performance testing services, CopperEgg, a real-time cloud server and application monitoring service, Xeround, a MySQL cloud database, and MongoLab, the cloud version of the popular NoSQL database MongoDB.
The Cloud Servers API launched on July 14, 2009, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license allows clients to create, configure and control virtual servers. [19] In addition to issuing basic management commands this "enables elastic scenarios" whereby servers are instantiated and destroyed in response to fluctuating load (one of the key characteristics of cloud computing). [20] RightScale is among third-party providers to have announced support for this API. [21]
Cloud Sites is a platform as a service offering now owned by Liquid Web, similar to traditional web hosting only built on horizontally scalable hardware infrastructure. A fixed monthly credit card payment gives users access to the service with an allocation of compute, storage and bandwidth resources. Should this allocation be exhausted then subsequent usage is billed on a utility computing basis. It allows an "unlimited" number of sites, databases and email accounts and includes reseller options such as client billing and support. [22] Touted as "the fastest way to put sites on the cloud", it runs Windows or Linux applications across "hundreds of servers". [12]
Cloud Sites supports the PHP 5, Perl, Python, MySQL, .NET 2.0+, ASP and Microsoft SQL Server 2014 application frameworks. [23]
In 2016, the Cloud Sites division was sold to Liquid Web LLC. [24]
The service includes up to 10,000 "compute cycles" per month which "is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time" (with additional cycles priced at $0.01). This non-standard unit of measurement primarily reflects CPU processing time but also includes I/O operations so pages with many database queries will consume more "compute cycles". [25] It can however be difficult to compare services between providers without standard units of measurement.
Cloud Sites does not support Java, Tomcat, ColdFusion, SSH, RDP, API access, Microsoft Exchange or custom server-side components at this time. [23] It is also not possible to set up multiple top level domains to point to the same web root directory. [26] The .NET environment dropped support for "full trust" in favour of "modified medium trust" despite having previously announced on their blog that they had been able to work directly with Microsoft to engineer a system that could accommodate Full Trust without compromising the security, scalability, and performance of other users. [27] [28]
Cloud servers and most other cloud products are physically located in any of six data centers: [29] Chicago, Northern Virginia, Dallas, London, Sydney, or Hong Kong. A separate "UK" account is required to access the London-based cloud products, however a single "US" Rackspace cloud account can access all US data centers along with the Sydney and Hong Kong regions. Cloud Sites are available in the Dallas and Chicago data centers only.
The online control panel was custom built by and for the Rackspace Cloud service (as opposed to using control panel software like cPanel). [30]
The control panel includes management interfaces for the Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Cloud Files services. There was once a web based file manager, but this was removed for undisclosed reasons. It also allows users to manage multiple clients and the plans and products (e.g. databases, 24 x 7 support) that apply to them, with white label branding options for messaging. The clients themselves have access to a restricted version of the control panel that allows them to conduct administrative tasks such as managing mail accounts. [31]
The control panel is also home to the billing and reporting functions and provides access to support materials including developer resources, a knowledge base, forums and live chat. [31]
In 2010, RackSpace contributed the source code of its Cloud Files product to the OpenStack project under the Apache License to become the OpenStack Object Storage component. [32] [33]
In April 2012, Rackspace announced it would implement OpenStack Compute as the underlying technology for their Cloud Servers product. The change will come a new control panel as well as add-on cloud services offering databases, server monitoring, block storage, and virtual networking. [34]
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
In computing, a solution stack or software stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications. Applications are said to "run on" or "run on top of" the resulting platform.
IBM Storage Protect is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect family.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. It also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Mexico and Hong Kong. Its data centers are located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Virginia (USA), Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Hong Kong (China), Kansas City (USA), New York City (USA), San Jose (USA), Shanghai (China), Queenstown (Singapore) and Sydney (Australia).
Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network. Microsoft markets at least a dozen different editions of Microsoft SQL Server, aimed at different audiences and for workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications with many concurrent users.
An embedded database system is a database management system (DBMS) which is tightly integrated with an application software; it is embedded in the application. It is a broad technology category that includes:
This is a comparison of online backup services.
Jungle Disk is both the name of an online backup software service and a privately held data security company. It was one of the first backup services to use cloud storage and Amazon S3. In 2009 after being acquired by Rackspace the service added Rackspace Cloud Files. The name is a word association as the Amazon rainforest is a Jungle and Disk is a common shorthand for a hard disk drive.
ElasticHosts was a computer service provider based in London, England. It was founded in March 2008, and closed on 30 June 2020. It provided a cloud computing service, which used ten data centres; in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia.
Linode, LLC was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.
Kaavo is a cloud computing management company. Kaavo was founded in November 2007 in the U.S. Kaavo pioneered top-down application-centric management of cloud infrastructure across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Zmanda Inc. is an open-source software and Cloud backup software company. It is headquartered in the United States. In partnership with open source companies such as Sun and MySQL, the company contributed to open source projects. Zmanda was acquired by Betsol in May, 2018.
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.
A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machine image, or they can purchase access to a database service, maintained by a cloud database provider. Of the databases available on the cloud, some are SQL-based and some use a NoSQL data model.
FUJITSU Cloud IaaS Trusted Public S5 is a Fujitsu cloud computing platform that aims to deliver standardized enterprise-class public cloud services globally. It offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from Fujitsu's data centres to provide computing resources that can be employed on-demand and suited to customers needs.
CloudStack is open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing hypervisor platforms for virtualization, such as KVM, VMware vSphere, including ESXi and vCenter, XenServer/XCP and XCP-ng. In addition to its own API, CloudStack also supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API and the Open Cloud Computing Interface from the Open Grid Forum.
Yandex.Disk is a cloud service created by Yandex that lets users store files on “cloud” servers and share them with others online. The service is based on syncing data between different devices. Yandex.Disk was launched in English in June 2012.
HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 to 2016.
MSP360, formerly CloudBerry Lab, is a software and application service provider company that develops online backup, remote desktop and file management products integrated with more than 20 cloud storage providers.
