Rackspace Adds SSDs To Cloud Servers

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Rackspace is raising the ante on what constitutes a standard cloud server by boosting the capabilities of what will soon become its standard, enterprise server offering. All new customers initiating accounts at its Herndon, Va., data center will be assigned a new Performance server, and Rackspace expects established customers will eventually transfer to the new type due to their higher cost/benefit ratio.

It’s equipping its "Performance" servers with solid state disks, a component that heretofore has been considered too pricey an option by most cloud suppliers. The SSD has a big impact on one of the perpetual drags on cloud server performance, I/O speeds. Multiple tenants communicating frequently with storage or outside networks can choke I/O points. A Performance server can improve total disk I/O throughput by a factor of 132X, said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer, in one of the boldest claims for the new type…

A cloud service newcomer, Digital Ocean in N.J., and Colt in Europe have lead the major U.S. cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine in initiating SSDs as a standard component…

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