Amazon and Rackspace appear ready to duke it out in the cloud-services space.
Amazon Web Services has rolled out Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that extends on-demand pay-as-you-go pricing. Web services customers now can make a one-time payment to reserve capacity and reduce hourly usage charges.
On the other side of the ring, Rackspace took its Cloud Files out of beta. Cloud Files provides storage and fast content delivery through Limelight Networks. Prices start at 22 cents a gigabyte.
Whether the two companies can run neck and neck in the cloud-services arena is too soon to tell, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. “Frankly, every time the IT industry gets its teeth into a new idea, we see the same thing happen,” he said. “In this case, every vendor and their brother and sister is coming up with their own definition of cloud, and it just happens to be a very close connection with that vendor’s traditional software and hardware strengths.”
Amazon Versus Rackspace
Amazon is betting on its reputation and very aggressive prices, King said, while Rackspace is betting on its big footprint in hosted services. Amazon’s Reserved Instances aims to offer businesses more flexibility in computing costs.
“Customers of all sizes enjoy the pay-as-you-go flexibility of Amazon EC2, but many have told us they are ready to reserve capacity in order to achieve even lower costs,” said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2. “Now customers can choose to reserve capacity as if they owned the hardware, but unlike traditional infrastructure, with Reserved Instances customers do not pay to maintain and operate idle hardware and instead pay usage charges only when actually utilizing the instances.”
Rackspace addressed the competitive-pricing issue head-on. E.J. Johnson, a manager of software development at Rackspace, said Cloud Files is in many cases less…