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Rackspace is investing an undisclosed sum in upgrading its server capabilities to meet a change in the way businesses are starting to use resources on the service. This involves the extensive use of new server hardware that makes use of Solid State, chip-based data storage facilities rather than hard disks. Although there are other performance enhancements it is this one development which lies at the heart of the investment.
According to the company’s Technology VP, Nigel Beighton, the investment has come about because of recent changes in the way cloud services are used.
“Until even six months ago the accepted wisdom suggested that the right model for cloud computing revolved around providing many small servers across which workloads could be spread,” he said, “but this has proved to not be the case.”
It would appear that Big Data, and all that is associated with it, is having a significant effect on how services get used.
“Over the last six months or so we have seen a shift amongst users towards having dedicated servers rather that sharing resources. This is because of the growing size of the datasets they are using. They are finding a need to `own’ all of the available memory and, in particular, all of the available I/O. In addition, users are looking for new ways to get higher performance, and Solid State Drives help here. They allow users, and in particular those running trading services over the web such as retailers, to provide large and very high speed cache storage, which can service a customer enquiry much faster. ”
Known as Performance Cloud Servers, the new equipment is designed with 100 percent data centre-grade, RAID 10-protected Solid-State Disks (SSDs),Intel Xeon E5 processors, up to 120 Gigabytes of RAM, and 40 Gigabits/sec network bandwidth to the host.
Compared to the company’s existing cloud servers the performance enhancements include four times more total RAM available, twice the total CPU performance, over eight times the network bandwidth and a significant 132 times more total disk I/O capacity. That, according to Beighton, is the one performance marker that many users are now looking for.
In addition, the new Performance Cloud Servers’ high throughput network has been specifically designed to work with Cloud Block Storage, delivering up to one and a half times more disk I/O performance for Standard volumes and two and half times more disk I/O performance for SSD volumes.
Taken together, these enhancements give over two and a half times more overall performance.
The Performance Cloud Servers are powered by OpenStack, enabling programmatic and on-demand access. Customers can connect the new cloud servers to dedicated bare metal servers as part of the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud, which can provide an unparalleled level of application performance.
“Customers of cloud computing services are increasingly looking for higher performance offerings,” said Jason Waxman, vice president of Intel’s Cloud Platforms Group. “Our work with Rackspace to deliver world class performance in the cloud using Xeon processors, Intel SSDs and Intel 10Gb Ethernet enables us both to serve today’s most demanding cloud applications.”
Performance Cloud Servers are immediately available in the Rackspace Northern Virginia region. The new cloud servers will come online in the Dallas, Chicago and London regions later in November, and Sydney and Hong Kong regions will follow in the first half of 2014.
