Rackspace Re-architects Public Cloud with Performance Cloud Servers

Rackspace (News - Alert) Hosting recently announced an improved public cloud which has been redesigned with Performance Cloud Servers. Designed to improve application performance levels, the new servers will provide the public cloud with increased speed, reliability, and throughput. Rackspace Hosting's (News - Alert) public cloud offering will serve as a robust hosting platform capable of managing different workloads; it will be able to handle anything from basic web hosting to NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB.

In a release, Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Rackspace said, “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. Our mission is to provide our customers with the best-fit infrastructure to optimize 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 have been designed with a number of robust features. These include 100 percent data center-grade, RAID 10-protected solid-state disks (SSDs), robust Intel Xeon E5 processors, 120 Gigabytes of RAM (News - Alert) that offer 40 Gigabits per second of highly available network throughput to the host and more total performance compared to existing Cloud Servers . They offer 4 times more RAM, twice the total CPU performance, 132 times additional total disk I/O (input/output), 8.3 times additional total network bandwidth and 2.6 times the total overall performance.

Matthew Swanson, chief software architect of Commissions Inc. said, “In the old world, we were limited by the number of transactions per second SQL Server could handle, 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.”

Because Performance Cloud Servers are based on OpenStack they offer easy programmatic and on-demand access. By connecting the new cloud servers with selected bare metal servers within the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud, customers will benefit from optimized level of application performance. Rackspace offers a combination support of hybrid, open and fanatical support to its customers and provides them with comprehensive and improved management support.