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Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS: Page 4 of 4

Comparing pricing among cloud services is difficult because each service offers different-sized VMs. We selected a common-sized VM from Amazon, HP's Open Cloud and Rackspace. The only significant variance is the attached disk size. Since HP Cloud Compute is still in beta, the service price is discounted, but we used the full price for the comparison. Amazon and HP Cloud pricing are matched at 16 cents per hour or $115.20 per 30-day period, while Rackspace's price is 24 cents per hour, or $172.80 per 30-day period. That's a significant price difference.

Rackspace charges 18 cents per gigabyte per month for network transmission pricing, which is higher than either Amazon or HP--both start at 12 cents per gigabyte per month, up to 1 terabyte. After 1TB, Amazon's usage pricing drops. HP simply matches Amazon's prices.

Rackspace is quick to point in its comparison of Cloud Servers and Amazon EC2 that its higher price includes premium support such as 24/7 telephone help and fast response times. Premium support is an extra service charge for AWS customers. Amazon's Business support package, which includes around-the-clock support with a one- hour response time, costs $100 per month or 10% of the AWS monthly usage for the first $10,000 spent, whichever is greater. What Rackspace fails to mention is that the point where Amazon EC2 with Premium support and Rackspace Cloud with the included support costs the same occurs at 1,250 compute hours per month. That's less than two compute instances running for 30 days. We asked Rackspace representatives about the price difference. "We continually evaluate our pricing as we strive to be market competitive, but we expect to be at a premium to the market due to our emphasis on fanatical support," was the reply.

HP Cloud comes with around-the-clock telephone, email and chat support. Given HP's price matching with Amazon, it looks like the best offering for basic cloud. The pricing and support charges may change when HP Cloud becomes generally available.

Be aware that the 10% of AWS usages is a combined total of all of the AWS services used by a single account. Amazon doesn't offer support contracts for individual services because it says since its "customers are using multiple infrastructure Web services together within the same application, we've designed AWS Support with this in mind." Customers could end up paying for premium support costs that they don't want.

Conclusion: Rackspace Open Cloud's chances vs. AWS

Rackspace is making the right moves with Open Cloud, but it must maintain API compatibility with OpenStack to successfully challenge AWS. If the APIs diverge too much from OpenStack distribution, Rackspace loses the third-party support that comes with OpenStack. Amazon has successfully nurtured a rich third-party ecosystem, to the point that some analysts point to the company's API as the de facto standard that every other cloud vendor should emulate. Any competing public cloud service needs its own broad set of partners to be successful.

Given the pricing differences for compute and networking compared with Amazon, Rackspace is going to have to convince customers that it provides better value than AWS.

Cloud Services
Vendor Strengths Weaknesses
Amazon Web Services The market leader. Offers a diverse set of services, from cloud to payment processing. Fosters a rich ecosystem of integration partners. Perceived as a closed platform. Has had a number of public outages caused by a range of factors, from thunderstorms to lightning. It suffered an extended failure in April 2011 that was exacerbated by automated recovery procedures.
GoGrid Has run cloud services since 2008. Offers a complete set of services, including dedicated servers and delegated management. Offers fewer services and partners than Amazon.
Google Compute Engine Nice integration with Google App Engine PaaS. Can leverage Google Storage service. Still in limited preview. Linux VMs only. Focused on batch processing.
HP Cloud OpenStack-based cloud. A large number of established partners signed up for the program. Still in limited preview. No runtime history. No support for database services like noSQL. No support for Microsoft Windows Server VMs.
Microsoft Azure Supports PaaS and IaaS services within Azure. Offers a range of services, including a big data service and media encoding and streaming. Relatively new IaaS service offering. Still building the partner ecosystem. Has had some recent outages.
Rackspace Open Cloud Based on OpenStack. Offers integration with its dedicated services. Potential to leverage third-party OpenStack integration efforts. Migration strategy is manual. No import/export of VMs. Support for advanced networking and block storage not yet available. Only way to manage a private OpenStack cloud and Rackspace's is via third-party management systems.
Pricing
  Instance Size Linux Per Hour Windows Per Hour
Amazon Standard On-Demand Medium Instance, 3.75GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 410 GB disk space 16 cents 23 cents
HP Cloud Medium Instance 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 120 GB disk space 16 cents N/A
Rackspace 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 160GB disk space 24 cents 32 cents