AWS, Rackspace cloud pricing battle: The red herring of IaaS
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.
Infrastructure as a Service providers continue to cut cloud pricing in an effort to lure new customers, but many corporate cloud customers see this race to the bottom as a marketing stunt — and they won’t take the bait. Amazon Web Services cut dedicated instance prices in mid-July, which was quickly followed by a Rackspace Inc. blog post that questioned whether AWS’ dedicated instances are truly dedicated at all, and claimed a price and performance advantage.
Into this fray then stepped another Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, Cambridge, Mass.-based ProfitBricks Inc., whose executives accused both AWS and Rackspace of being less than truthful about gross margins for cloud services. ProfitBricks also cut its own IaaS prices by 50%…
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Oracle introduced its first converged infrastructure system Tuesday – a one-rack integrated solution that includes servers, networking and storage, virtualized on Oracle VM. This is a major step for Oracle, whose hardware play to date has been focused on "engineered systems," or appliances the company designs specifically to support its software solutions. The converged-infrastructure market is a busy one, with major players like HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC, NetApp and Microsoft, among others, fighting tooth-and-nail for raised-floor space in enterprise and provider data centers.
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