You are here: Home » Cloud computing » Rackspace to roll out Asian cloud in 2010

Rackspace to roll out Asian cloud in 2010

Tony Chan | May 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

Rackspace Hosting, who recently launched a portfolio of cloud services in the US, is eyeing to bring its cloud platform out to other regions, including the Asia Pacific.

John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO, told CommsDay yesterday that the company is looking at plans to introduce cloud services in the UK and Asia as early as the end of this year.

“We are bringing to market cloud services to augment our existing hosting services, and we know that our customers like that model, they like to be able to buy IT as a service, on-demand, pay as you go. I think that would apply here as well, so we do have plans to be here (Hong Kong),” Engates said. “Today, our cloud is only in the US, only because it is early days, it is not because we don’t intend it to be elsewhere, it is just the first phase, to get it all available in the US, and then move on to the other regions once it is all solidify. So we plan to do that later this year, early next year, we’ll be in the UK and Hong Kong and the Asia region.”

The most likely location for Rackspace’s cloud service for Asia is Hong Kong.

“Our data centre is here, so we are going to serve as much of Asia out of Hong Kong and then look at the strategy long term where else we need to be. We do want to be here, we do want to have our publicly available, pay-as-you-go, type of cloud here.”

CLOUDS NOT THAT DIFFERENT
Despite the market interest in cloud services and its ability to provide on-demand, scalable resources, the experience for Rackspace’s cloud offering in the US so far has not been that different from the traditional managed hosting model, according to Engates.

“Most people use clouds like a dedicated server. Most people would start up a server and they would never shut it off. A lot of the smaller companies use it just like that. The more savvy you are, the more you are likely to use the dynamic aspect of the cloud to auto-scale and add resources dynamically in response to traffic patterns – that takes either a lot of work on the customers part to create the scripts to do that, or third party solutions,” he explained. “That is happening, but I think the vast majority of the people are looking at clouds and seeing it as a very low cost, very frictionless way to get a server, something that they can try out, if they don’t like it, they can dispose of it. I think people imagine all the ways that you could use cloud computing, but the practical ways that people are using it sometimes are the same ways they are using servers, they just want a server right now, and this is an easy way to get it.”

“It is not as elastic and I don’t mean that ours is not capable of that, it’s just how people are using it.”

A MATTER OF SCALE
Cloud platforms, he added, do offer elasticity in resource subscriptions, but today’s deployments are not engineered for that.

“I think the vision is that people would go from one to a thousand and back to one – nobody does that. The real world is that people might go from two to five and back to two,” he added. “Having said all that, I’ve had conversations recently with companies that have mentioned one thousand as a number that they want and it is for big, large scale, load-testing applications, big large-scale, infrastructure testing. And those are the numbers that they throw around, but I just think that it’s still early days. They are getting there. They are right on the cusp.”

For clouds to support those kinds of applications, it would have to take a lot of planning and coordination between the cloud provider and customers.

“Keeping a thousand servers sitting around is expensive. I really don’t think anyone has a thousand servers sitting around waiting for people to show up,” he asserted. “We certainly don’t have a thousand servers, but with the right conversations with enough customers and with the expectation that a customer will use that many during a certain time of day. If you can shape the way you use those servers, then it is very possible that we could get to that point, but I don’t think that anyone is doing that today.”

This article was first published in CommsDay International

Be Sociable, Share!