Rackspace Cloud Servers Versus Amazon EC2: Performance Analysis Results

This morning, Encoding.com put out a press release with Rackspace talking about how Encoding.com is using Rackspace's cloud service to enable them to scale their transcoding platform. But the really interesting part of the Encoding.com release is that Rackspace Encoding.com commissioned Bitsource to compare Amazon's EC2 performance versus their own cloud offering and is sharing the results.

While most companies put out statements all the time about company A being better than company B, they usually don't provide any details. But in this case, Bitsource has published all of their performance findings along with their methodology for anyone to review.

I don't know much about performance when it comes to cloud computing so I'll let someone else analyze the results, but kudos to both companies for not simply delivering a bunch of marketing terms and actually showing us, in detail, what they compared and how they did the comparison. You can check out the results here.

Comments

[Jim Wrubel]

Dan - your article says that Encoding.com commissioned Bitsource, but the last paragraph of the results says, "The Bitsource conducted an independent, third-party performance analysis of Rackspace CloudServers and Amazon EC2 on behalf of Rackspace Inc. "

While I think the results are accurate based on the detail provided, If Rackspace did commission the survey themselves that's worth knowing. Can you confirm one way or the other?

[Dan Rayburn]

Thanks for the catch Jim. You are correct, Rackspace commissioned the report, not Encoding.com - I have made that change.

[Dennis Lundin]

Good report, like to see more of this

[preetam mukherjee]

Please- this is such a joke. I need to blog about this sometime.
These are basically data points that are created to make the balance tilt towards Rackspace.

We're on the Amazon Cloud, and Rackspace doesn't compare in the least, if you're talking cloud vs. cloud.

To be continued...

[GreenField]

Preetam - I am holding my breath - do tell!

[drszoke]

Amazon is really a joke when it comes to invoicing. They cannot provide an official EC type of invoice. :-(

[Chris Armer]

I'm not sure Amazon has their act together completely. I've heard a lot of complaints from customers and rackspace is good for some applications but not all.

[Servando]

In my experience, you should NOT use rackspacecloud for anything more than small workhorse-type servers that will require little setup work and keep no valuable information. I was running a server and somehow they lost my server images and were not able to recover it from the backup file in their own cloud files storage after 5 days. No way to upload a backup copy of your server images and techically unknowledgeable tech support so in case of what they called a "bug" you're out of anything you had in your servers