Very nice! The improved performance in the reworked architecture is impressive.<p>> <i>Pick a language framework, pick a web framework, heck, pick a web server or entire application we can throw apachebench at with one of the 120GB monsters we have and we’ll put it together</i><p>We've asked Rackspace to run our suite and the introduction [1] still contains the following sentence: "How does EC2 compare to, say, Rackspace Cloud? We don't have the data now, but if you have a Rackspace Cloud account and are willing to run the full test suite, we'd like to be able to render that here."<p>We'd love to see Rackspace <i>Performance</i> Cloud as another hardware tab alongside our current i7 and EC2 results.<p>Separately, we had a contributor who put together some Windows Azure scripts but we've not heard from him for a while and I think we need someone else to volunteer to pick that up.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro" rel="nofollow">http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro</a>
As much as I love to see Rackspace roll out more highly-performing cloud servers, as a customer I'd rather see stability improvements to their core systems.<p>Their current ("next-gen") cloud offering has had serious noisy-neighbor issues with networking performance, and the maintenance to attempt and resolve these issues architecturally caused some serious pain during two consecutive maintenance windows. ( Hour+ downtime for dozens of nodes. )<p>Management API availability and reliability also leaves a lot to be desired.
This is definitely a nice improvement, but it's hard for me to get excited about it since it isn't available on the lower end. I'd be all over this if I could get a 1-2GB VM with the extra speed, though I understand that Rackspace is probably more interested in the larger customers first.<p>Something I think that Linode has done really well with is making these next-gen type upgrades available across their entire range of instance sizes. EC2 and Rackspace both created a separate (expensive) tier that you have to buy into, whereas with Linode I just woke up one morning and had 2x the RAM, 2xThe cores, better disk speed, etc.<p>Different companies, different strategies, but I do wish some of these new instance types would trickle down.
I'll be around all day to answer questions, or better yet - merge things into the repo to run, execute more tests, etc. I have to hand it to plot.ly - they definitely make charting... addictive.
"... completely re-engineered from the ground up to deliver..." has to be one of the most overused marketing phrases in technology. As if redoing everything is always a good thing.<p>That aside, I'll have to give them a test run. I was happy with rackspace cloud servers before I switched to linode and now digital ocean. The only thing that has had me switching is pricing, but if these perform well, I may use them for certain applications. I'd love for a 3rd party to benchmark these vs digital ocean so we can compare price and performance.
My tests with rackspace old servers showed that they are slow as hell, if compared with my Euro4/month Xen server at Ingate. I dont know how they managed to cripple Xen, to be worse the VZ, but they did.<p>The new so called performance cloud servers are in a price range, that calls for a dedicated server at Hetzner or OVH.<p>Sorry, no bounty: Xen should be cheaper then dedicated, and not crippled. I wont recommend Rackspace. Not even to my competition.
Not sure if it's just me, however the new servers are not appearing in `nova flavor-list` as described in the article (only standard servers are).
I have a next gen server and am in the control panel - I can't see anywhere to create a new performance server or convert my existing next gen to performance. Am I missing something?<p>My current server is Win 2008 1GB.
Your pricing is insane, especially considering you provide vCPUs. I don't see why I would choose your servers over, let's say, Hetzner or Linode.