Rackspace Hosting has architecturally redesigned its public cloud with Performance Cloud Servers.
These new servers are designed to deliver enhanced levels of application performance with greater speed, throughput and reliability.
This public cloud offering creates a powerful hosting platform for a variety of workloads, ranging from basic web hosting to large scale NoSQL data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra.
"In today’s world of instant demand, applications must be capable of scaling fast, and performing at scale without compromise. As a cloud provider, our role is to enable that without customers having to over-provision and constantly re-architect their applications," said Rick Jackson, CMO at Rackspace.
"Our mission is to provide our customers with the best-fit infrastructure to optimise the performance of their applications, and today we are redefining the benchmark for performance in a public cloud offering as part of our hybrid cloud portfolio."
The new Performance Cloud Servers are designed with 100% data centre-grade, RAID 10-protected solid-state disks (SSDs), powerful Intel Xeon E5 processors, up to 120 Gigabytes of RAM, and 40 Gigabits per second of highly available network throughput to the host.
Nigel Beighton, VP of technology at Rackspace, said: "Our customers have been demanding performance over and above anything else, and by offering them these new servers it should have a massive impact on their businesses. They will see websites loading noticeably faster, databases processing higher IOPs for all transactions, and applications streaming video and media content experiencing lower latency."
"In the old world, we were limited by the number of transactions per second SQL Server could handle," said Matthew Swanson, chief software architect, Commissions Inc. "With Performance Cloud, we saw upwards of 3,500 peak transactions per second. In less than 15 minutes I was able to parse through more than 6 Gigabytes of log files and put just over 1.5M rows in our SQL Server database. Performance cloud servers are fast, very fast."
Performance Cloud Servers are powered by OpenStack enabling programmatic and on-demand access. Customers can connect the new cloud servers to dedicated bare metal servers as part of the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud, which can provide an unparalleled level of application performance.
With the unique combination of hybrid, open and Fanatical Support, Rackspace provides expert help through all aspects of the customer’s experience from planning and architecting to day-to-day proactive management.
Beighton said: "We are offering two times better raw performance as well as twice the value of our closest competitors. Our top-end Performance Server will cost £2 per hour in the UK, whilst our 4GB version will cost 25% less than our Standard equivalent at 12p per hour. This is a hugely competitive offering for our customers and we expect most to look at migrating, although it’s not in any way compulsory.
"Right now, our customers are demanding performance above anything else and we are keeping ahead of the market and addressing these demands along with a very competitive pricing offer," he added.
Performance Cloud Servers are immediately available in the Rackspace Northern Virginia region. The new cloud servers will come online in the Dallas, Chicago and London regions later in November, and Sydney and Hong Kong regions will follow in the first half of 2014.
