On May 21, 2010, at 8:51 PM, Bill Arnold wrote:
> Let me say first that I totally support this approach for where it fits, and
> I can see it being a useful offer to certain customers. I see cloud
> offerings as the pendelum swinging back to centralized computing, and that
> makes perfect sense. However:
>
> 1. If RackSpace's entry level offer is a physical server machine (perhaps
> supplied or the customer's own), how does a small businesses (who only
> needs, say, one virtual Windows 7 machine) to test with and get started?
> Stated diffently, what's the cheapest way for a small business to get
> started with RackSpace's cloud offer?
"Cloud" servers are virtual machines. You go to the web page, and after
opening an account (just a few clicks and a CC#), you can spin up as many
servers as you want, with your choice of several Linux distros, or several
Windows Server versions. In a few minutes they are up and running and ready for
you to work with. When you're done, you can delete the server with a few
clicks, and you only pay for the time that it's actually running. I did a demo
that created 2 web servers with a third server to be a load balancer, and
showed it all running as expected. When the demo was done, I deleted all 3
servers. Total cost for the 15 minutes or so for each server = $0.0.15/hour *
.25/hr * 3 servers = a little over a penny!
Windows servers run at double the price, due the Redmond tax, but are
still around $22/month for the basic server.
Check out: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers
> 2. In the interview, Lanham states that RackSpace will support the customer
> "with anything that goes wrong" on the server-side, but I don't see how
> that's possible if RackSpace's involvement is limited to building a server
> and turning it over to the customer or his/her tekkie to load with software
> and configure. How can RackSpace possibly provide support for what amounts
> to "black boxes" RackSpace would have no knowledge of? Take, for example,
> the customer installing my VFP app on his server. How would RackSpace handle
> problems with it?
First off, he means that Rackspace handles all the issues with power,
connectivity, hardware failures, cooling... all the physical stuff that can go
wrong. With a custom VFP app I doubt any of the tech support would be able to
help with code-related issues, but if there was some sort of system problem,
they can get access to the system and trouble-shoot it for you. We have lots of
the best Windows techs in the world on our support teams!
> Thanks for the explanation. I understand what you're saying and it makes
> sense. What I'm struggling to understand is how a VFP app that uses a LAN
> file server would work. I can imagine (as I did) the server running a bunch
> of virtual Windows machines, one for each connected user, all sharing the
> same file system, to mimic a LAN implementation.
File-server apps really only have one server and a bunch of
workstations, so to "cloudify" it, the file server would be replaced with a
cloud server, and the workstations would be unchanged; they would simply
connect to the cloud server via the IP address, and mount the server like you
would normally. In almost all cases this will be much, much slower.
Now if you had a true RDBMS running on a high-powered server, that
would be a lot more straightforward to move to a cloud arrangement, as you
would simply point the apps to that address rather than have to deal with
remote mounts.
-- Ed Leafe
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