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Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS

Posted by Mike Fratto
August 02, 2012

Rackspace is replacing its existing cloud service, Rackspace Cloud, with Open Cloud.

Like other IaaS cloud providers, it has an uphill battle against Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon is such a well-known cloud brand that it helped popularize the term cloud computing, and it continues to expand its customer base as well as feature sets. To compete against Amazon, providers need to make their cloud experiences not only just as easy, but also better, all while charging a comparable price. That's tough, considering Amazon's products run the gamut from basic cloud services to SQL and NoSQL databases, object and block storage, and identity and access management.

OpenStack provides a solid basis for Rackspace to build a product that competes well with Amazon, but Open Cloud isn't as full featured--it lacks multiple database services, payment services, block storage and workflow services. Cloud Server also costs approximately 66% more than competing AWS EC2 instances--but it includes around-the-clock telephone support, which is an extra charge with AWS.

HP also recently launched HP Cloud, its OpenStack-based cloud service, which is in public beta. On Wednesday, HP's Cloud Object Storage and Content Delivery Network moved to general availability, while HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Relational Database for My SQL remain in public beta. HP Cloud offers similar features to Rackspace Open Cloud, since both are based on OpenStack, but Rackspace is able to use its existing Cloud Backup and Cloud Load Balancing services.

Rackspace Cloud isn't being discontinued and customers won't be forced to migrate to Cloud Servers--but development on it won't continue. Rackspace is developing new features for only Open Cloud. Migrating from the old service to Open Cloud is currently a manual process--Rackspace says the automated version will be available by year's end. Existing customers can provision new VMs on Cloud Servers, and they'll work seamlessly with the VMs on Rackspace Cloud.

VM Import/Export Coming

Rackspace claims Cloud Servers helps users avoid lock in. Normally with IaaS, VM images are created within the cloud service and can't be exported to competing services, locking the customer in. While it's true that the open source Xen hypervisor underpins OpenStack, on the initial release customers won't be able to import or export Xen-based VMs into or out of Cloud Servers. According to Rackspace CTO John Engates "there are other issues, like number of partitions, number of interfaces, Xen Tools, version, etc., that make it [migrating Xen Server images] challenging," but the company is developing a tool that will automate importing existing VMs created by hypervisors like VMware's vSphere or Microsoft's Hyper-V into Cloud Servers, as well as a tool to export VMs.

By comparison, Amazon does have an import and export service that converts imported VM images from VMware's ESX, Microsoft's Hyper-V and XenServer to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Amazon currently doesn't offer a way to export an AMI VM image that was created in AWS, but you can export previously imported VMs.

While a VM import/export capability seems useful, customers are probably better off creating new VMs in the cloud service, configuring the runtime environment, and then importing and exporting the applications and data rather than moving the entire VM images. Doing so saves the cost of transporting the VM over the WAN as well as storing them in the cloud service. However, being able to export VMs and store them in a local data center provides a certain comfort factor for organizations concerned with lock-in and could help with migrating applications from one public cloud service to another.

Next: The OpenStack Ecosystem

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