Rackspace Launches Cloud Block Storage Powered by OpenStack

Rackspace US, Inc. 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 I/O intensive applications.

Cloud Block Storage offers a standard volume option for everyday
storage with performance that has been tested to be at least 30% less variable
than that of alternatives [1]. The new product 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 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 1TB each of block storage to cloud
  servers
• Detach and re-attach storage between compute nodes in seconds
• Choice of Standard Performance or SSD-based storage

Performance:

• SSD-based solution is more than 10 times faster than standard drive
  performance [1]
• Cloud Block Storage Standard drive delivers consistent
  performance with less variability than standard drive solutions offered by  competitors [1].
• Performance can be achieved without the need to RAID-0 (stripe)
  volumes together, providing 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.

Simple Pricing Model:

• Standard – $0.15 per GB/month; SSD – $0.70 per GB/month
• $.10 per GB/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 require large amounts of everyday storage. They can
leverage the product for a 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 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 solution in
Rackspace’s expanding portfolio of storage products. Rackspace Cloud Block
Storage is available in the U.S and UK.

[1] Performance benchmarking tests by Rackspaceere.