Cloud Block Storage Now In Unlimited Availability

Unless they're doing dedicated disks per user (which they aren't, it seems) and dedicated networking, there's really no reason to think they'll do better than AWS, once there are a significant number of users on the system.<p>The idea of pooling large numbers of drives, dividing it up by space, and then sharing it over a network (IP or not) will never get you the kind of performance you get from dedicated locally-attached drives.<p>For server storage, it just makes more sense (IMHO) to have local disks with unquestionably reliable performance characteristics. The flexibility of EBS-type solutions is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.

As difficult a time as EBS is having, it's good to see some other alternatives pop up. This will definitely put the pressure on the EBS team to clean up, if they weren't already under immense pressure to do so.<p>A word of caution, though: Rackspace is just getting into this ballgame of on-demand virtual block devices. There will probably be gaffes (though, hopefully not as bad as EBS of late), so, as per the virtualization commandments, build expecting failure.<p>Edit: Also, Rackspace had perfect timing for this announcement, the day after catastrophic EBS failure. Coincidence, or astute choice in launch dates? :)

This is perfect timing on their part, how many people are having their post-mortem meeting today and going back to their desk to look for options.

Definitely been waiting for this feature, was frustrating firing up a new instance every 300gb. We have 100+ instances in Rackspace and its been interesting to watch them over last couple years. They have had their own share of troubles of course but actually having support is huge when it happens.

I'd be curious about the practical durability. EBS claims a failure rate of 0.5% per 20 GB per year as per <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/</a> -- I wonder how an e.g. 200 GB volume on RS would be provisioned (how many drives are involved?). The cheap storage seems to be SATA disks

This looks like it is directly pointed towards AWS EBS and EBS PIOPS offerings so here some quick cost comparisons:<p>- Rackspace standard storage vs AWS EBS (for 1TB of storage with 100 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $126/month -- Rackspace USA = $150/month<p>- Rackspace SSD vs AWS PIOPS (for 1TB of storage with 1000 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $225/month -- Rackspace = $700/month<p><a href="http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspace-cloud-block.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspa...</a>