Rackspace unveils cloud storage service

by Brian Fonseca

May 6, 2008 —

Rackspace Inc.
Monday unveiled a Web-services-based online storage service that will allow
software developers to store, backup and access files and content for their
applications. The new CloudFS service will be available later this year through
the company's Mosso hosting division.

CloudFS will support applications built using any of several programming languages,
including Java, Microsoft .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails, said John Engates,
chief technology officer at San Antonio-based Rackspace.

CloudFS is priced at 15 cents per gigabyte, along with undisclosed bandwidth
usage charges for customers not using other hosted Rackspace offerings. CloudFS
will also include transaction and storage fees based on counts of data writes
and reads per object stored online, added Engates. He declined to disclose the
amount of the fees.

Rackspace said it is in the process of signing up 100 companies to take part
in a limited beta-test program for the service. A second beta-test phase for
all comers will begin sometime during the third quarter.

CloudFS will be available as a stand-alone service or as part of other Mosso
services, which include e-mail hosting.

Engates said CloudFS is designed for customers building high-end enterprise
applications that require an unlimited storage pool. The offering is targeted
at developers and businesses building Web sites, portals, Web 2.0 applications,
social networking media and software-as-a-service applications, he noted.

Randall Minter, CTO and founder of Qrimp Inc. in Muskogee, Okla., said he is
beta-testing the service to determine whether it provides stronger performance
and data-transfer rates compared with Amazon.com Inc.'s S3 service, which is
his company is using now.

Computerworld