cloud computing Archive

Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud hosting division has announced a new partnership with Limelight Networks today that allows Mosso customers to use Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN). Mosso notes that, "this union brings unlimited online storage, scalable content delivery, and application acceleration services, thereby allowing businesses to more easily and affordably distribute content to millions of end users around the world."

If you are new to CDN services, the simple concept is that servers are placed around the world and depending on where you are located, you get served via the closest or most appropriate server. CDNs cut down on the hops back and forth to handle a request.

Mosso’s pricing for Cloud Files with CDN starts at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 22 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth from any edge location around the globe. Stored files can be up to 5gb in size. Apparently you can activate the CDN service on any file by accessing it via the Mosso admin control panel. It makes sense for large video and audio files along with large volume sites.

As many of you know, we are hosted on Mosso. Mosso has continued to improve reliability and customer service since we joined back in March. However, when I see deals like this I get excited for the possibilities but wish that they would spend more time making Mosso work like a normal webhost. There are several items including IP addresses referrals (every user looks the same) that just don’t work right and cause big issues when trying to process users appropriately.

Last month Mosso/Rackspace announced their cloud computing strategy.

Yesterday I wrote about the issue of vendor lock-in regarding cloud-based services and how I think developers should think about it. In that discussion, I touched on the open source strategy of cloud computing company 10Gen. After thinking about it I begin to believe that such a strategy may be a serious liability for cloud-based services.

Then, this morning I read an article By Nick Carr where he discussed the significance of open source to buyers. His thesis is that what is most important are the meat and potatoes issues around reliability security, etc. Specifically, Carr says:

We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud’s development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it’s just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won’t blow up in their faces.

This is very much in line with my thinking from yesterday. Azure is a big deal. No one is going to care about the fact that it is not open source. Basic hosting is going to become a commodity business very quickly, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (MAG) competing in the game of creating highly scalable services that use traditional development methodologies. Microsoft is now ahead in that game from a technology perspective. Amazon is ahead in customers, and Google, for now, is left in the dust but can obviously catch up. But I don’t see any of these guys making any of their cloud technology open source, and I don’t think it matters.

I liken open source in this space to DRM in the music business. Its one of those things that a small number of people complain about but will later be proven totally irrelevant to the rank and file buyer. We now have statistics to prove that DRM was irrelevant in terms of sales, and we are beginning to see the outlines of the irrelevancy of openness in the cloud.

The real issue here is that small companies are not going to be able to compete selling basic “get your applications into the cloud” type services. MAG is going to own that business. I think that 10Gen and other companies providing baseline services are going to have a rough time playing that game.

Startups who wish to compete in the cloud business will have to provide great value added services that facilitate unique new application categories sitting on top of one or more of the MAG clouds. The services will have to be hard to copy and/or narrow enough to not attract the attention of MAG.

Given the need to innovate in some unique way, and the need to be interoperable with MAG clouds, I am not at all clear how you can create innovate cloud platform services using an open source business model in a money making way. Being open source in this space is akin to what it might be like if Apple made OSX open source and optimized it to run on standard Intel PCs. Good karma perhaps. Good profits, not so much.

Of course many open source businesses hang their hat on services, consulting and support. I personally hate time and materials type businesses masquerading as scalable software businesses, but my opinions aside, these are by and large tough businesses to succeed at.

In short, while being open source may be politically correct, I fear it may be a grave hindrance towards providing a defensible, unique, money-making offering in the cloud.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they have acquired Slicehost and Jungle Disk today. Rackspace also has launched their overall cloud computing strategy at an event in Austin. In addition, Mosso, our host, has been renamed to "Rackspace Cloud Hosting". Here are the details on the cloud computing strategy for Rackspace:

• Cloud Sites– Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, The Hosting Cloud, is now Cloud Sites. Developed by Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud division, it offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud Sites is a heterogeneous environment, supporting both Windows and Linux.
• Cloud Files — Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, CloudFS, is now Cloud Files. Cloud Files gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing infinite scalability. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB. Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses. While continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform, Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system in the coming months. Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
• Cloud Servers — This new hosting solution, which will deliver on-demand server capacity to businesses of all sizes, will leverage key technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualization software. Slicehost will remain as the company’s developer brand, creating innovative new features driven through shared intellectual property in conjunction with development initiatives from Rackspace. As part of the announcement, Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance computing, lower prices as well as IP sharing for high availability computing.

ReadWriteWeb has more information on Slicehost and Jungle Disk. Slicehost has more details on the transaction as well.

Last April Amazon reduced pricing on data transfer on their Amazon S3 online storage service. Yesterday Amazon announced plans to reduce the price for the storage portion of S3. Basic users won’t see a change as the base price remains 15 cents per TB.

For heavy users, the pricing moves to a tiered model. Over 50 TB of storage is 14 cents/TB and it gradually lowers to 12 cents/TB over 500 TB of storage. I wonder how many Amazon S3 clients are using over 500 TB of data storage. It’s like saying if you drive more than 30,000 miles in a month in your car, we will give you 20 cents off each gallon of gas.

We were using S3 for all static files on CN but I’ve found in my travels that the domain didn’t resolve correctly so images and CSS files would appear broken. I must have set something wrong in the DNS.

NY-based Send Word Now has announced a $14 million Series D round of funding today. peHUB reports that Send Word Now had previously raised $19 million. Palisade Capital Management led the round, and was joined by return backers Southpaw Asset Management and Ascend Venture Group.

Send Word Now makes SaaS (software-as-a-service) emergency notification, on-demand alerting and response services. They are heavy in the text messaging space and apparently can send hundreds-of-thousands of text messages in minutes when an emergency arises.

Send Word Now CEO Tony Schmitz noted that the new funding will be used for software development, infrastructure, sales and marketing.

Tonight I’d like to share with ya’all 9 things I am done with online. Rather than sharing them in text, check out the video below. Please add your suggestions to the list in the comments below.

Editor’s note: The story below was embargoed until this morning – but was broken last night. After speaking with Wuala founder Dominik Grolimund, he asked us to hold off posting until this morning.

When I interviewed Wuala founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund, I asked him how he defines the Wuala service. He replied, "Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."

The big news today out of the Wuala camp is that today marks their public opening. Previously the service was in a closed alpha for just under a year. The company is self-funded. The Wuala team is based in Switzerland and has worked on the product for three years.

I asked Dominik about the Wuala business plan as many online storage companies have tried a variety of models. Dominik noted, "At the moment, we’re experimenting with ads in the public (World) area. Since our costs are lower, this might work. However, there are also other possible business models such as photo finishing, buying additional storage (you can trade if you want, if you don’t, you could buy some additional online storage for a really low price), or also other forms of sponsoring that we’re working on."

Check out other Wuala reviews on Download Squad and Profy.