Cloud Competition Heats Up: A March 11, 2009 blog by Emil Sayegh made a series of Rackspace cloud computing announcements:  

• Cloud Servers available Monday: Cloud Servers, pay-as-you go server instances, goes live on March 16th, marking the formal availability of a complete cloud suite: Cloud Sites + Cloud Files + Cloud Servers. 

Rackspace claims to be the only cloud provider with a comprehensive offering combining a server and storage on-demand service as well as a .NET and LAMP platform-as-a-service offer.  The control panel enables instant re-sizing of compute capacity, adding a site, consuming storage, and paying only for what you use.  Pricing starts at $0.015/hour or $10.95/month.  Check out the details here.

• Cloud Files – out of beta: Cloud Files, the Rackspace online storage service and CDN-enabled static content serving engine, is officially out of the beta phase, and ready for prime time, making its debut with several new features.  See details here.
• Jungle Disk on Cloud Files: Rackspace’s sister company, Jungle Disk, providing online backup software, now offers the option to store data on Cloud Files, paving the way for a unified buying experience and new simple pricing.

“Cloud Servers billing is calculated on an hourly basis – not monthly – so you pay only for what you use”, said Sayegh. “On March 16, you can start your virtual instance for less than two cents per hour.”

Will Rackspace’s announcements generate competitive responses from other cloud computing providers like Amazon.com?  In these times of shrinking revenue and margins, nothing is more certain.

 Recession Chokes Server Sales: Servers have joined printers and PCs on the growing list of hardware sectors suffering double-digit decline, says Doug Woodburn, writing for channelweb.co.uk on March 14, 2009.

A collapse in high-end Unix sales dragged the EMEA server market to its worst quarter since 2002, according to data from analyst Gartner. Some 705,000 servers were shipped during the final quarter of 2008, down 9.2 per cent year on year, while revenues plunged 20 per cent.

Gartner highlighted weaknesses in the high-end Unix server market, as RISC and Itanium Unix revenues fell by about 25 per cent. HP drew praise from Gartner for extending its lead in the market, while IBM and FSC saw server revenues plummet by more than 30 per cent.

For once, those outside the top five saw both their revenue and unit shipment share grow, indicating a relatively healthy quarter for local system builders. Those falling into Gartner’s “Others” category boasted a 17.5 per cent share of the market in unit terms.

Errol Rasit, senior research analyst at Gartner, said: “In a declining market, share growth is a key measure of vendor performance. HP’s share growth shows that it is managing the decline in demand better than its closest competitors Dell and IBM.”

Tags: Amazon, cloud computing, cloud-based platform, cost cutting, Dell, FSC, Gartner, global economic recession, HP, IBM, SaaS, software-as-a-service

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