SAN ANTONIO, Texas, Oct. 23 — Today, Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, 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 alternatives[1]. 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 solutions[1]. 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 performance.
• 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.

^[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/.

About Rackspace

Rackspace Hosting is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 190,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. The company offers choice, flexibility and freedom from vendor lock in. 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. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting." Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world.

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Source: Rackspace Hosting