We did some pretty thorough research, quizzed their engineers, etc., and from what we can tell it’s true cloud hosting, not just a VPS. Apparently they build a new state-of-the-art data center (in Chicago iirc) for their cloud setup.
If anyone knows otherwise though, please provide some sources. We’d be very interested in hearing that we aren’t getting what we thought we were getting (we have no mission-critical servers on their, but are transitioning to put a few on their and HA is very important for those).
Well, I contacted them and he said that is correct. So, it is essentially a VPS. Kind of disappointing, though it doesn’t change our adoption (at this point, though we may be rethinking mission-critical servers… we’ll probably keep those within our colo).
To their credit though, they were very upfront with it. No trying to worm or twist words.
No worries, I’d be interested to know what they tell you. I’m on a one man crusade against people abusing the term “cloud” (poor choice of buzzword that it is).
They’re in 3U cynix boxes, and the RAID is generally pretty resilient (8 drives, Raid 10)
And then asked if that meant it’s basically stand-alone and there is no real fail-over for physical server outages.
He replied:
<snip greeting>
That’s correct. If you’re looking to set-up a HA configuration for failover, you’d need to create additional web & DB servers using the Rackspace loadbalancer or install a software loadbalancer on a server itself. You’d also need to rsync for replication.
Yep, full credit to them for being honest when asked - I personally think they should be up front from the off though, seen as the term “cloud” has a NIST definition and a VPS doesn’t fit in to that and neither does all the PR Rackspace does around being involved in OpenStack - which would tend to give people the impression that their cloud offering is based on OpenStack and has the redundancy etc.
I agree with that as well. It really is annoying trying to separate the marketing from the technical stuff. For example, Microsoft’s “to the cloud” commercials drive me nuts for the same reason…
Yeah i recently benchmarked the single quad core opteron 2374 he 4gb/160gb disk centos 5.5 rackspace cloud server and it’s pretty much vps like performance Rackpace.com Cloud Server - CentOS 5.5 64bit install and setup my local virtualbox server with 2 cores is 2.5x times faster but intel xeon w3550 @3.4ghz.
An Intel Xeon 3.4ghz is pretty powerful, even with two cores I’d expect it to test higher. It also depends exactly what type of benchmark you’re using. It’s possible the benchmark software only uses one core anyways.
