Windows Will Be Big In The Cloud, Says Rackspace

Though the majority of servers offered in public clouds are Linux-based, hosting company Rackspace has launched Windows cloud servers, while announcing a big boost in its revenue from the cloud.

Rackspace’s Cloud Servers for Windows have been developed with Microsoft, using images for various versions of 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and 2008. They are intended for small to medium businesses for hosting in-house IT, as well as testing and launching online services.

Windows could be big in the cloud

“There’s a relatively small amount of Windows in the cloud – it was originally all around Linux,” said Fabio Torlini, head of Cloud EMEA at Rackspace. “But we think that Windows will be as strong in the cloud as Linux.”

Early Windows offerings in the cloud were based on brand-new I/Os said Torlini: “but this is Windows 2008 as people know and love it … with all the scalability of a cloud service.” The Windows servers can be scaled up on-demand, with servers added or deleted on the fly, and paid for on a utility model, by the hour, with back-up and snapshots, and no contracts or up-front costs, according to Torlini.

The need to pay for a licence means that Windows cloud servers are more expensive than Linux, but the premium starts at about 20 percent, and falls to ten percent when larger volumes are rented, amounting to only pennies per hour, said Torlini.

“There is a premium for the Windows offering, but Microsoft realises the whole world is going hosted- and we have been working with Microsoft to develop this offering,” said Torlini – indeed Microsoft has beent talking up cloud lately.

While the cheapest cloud Linux server Rackspace offers starts at $10 (£6.40) per month, Windows servers start higher up the scale with a $50 (£32) per month server that Torlini reckons is about 20 percent more expensive than the comparable Linux server: “It’s eight cents per hour, compared with six cents per hour on a like-for-like Windows product”

Since customers will be choosing their servers based on what operating system their loads require, the real comparison is with a physical Windows server owned by the company, not a Linux server in the cloud, said Torlini, arguing that the comparison here is clear, and agreeing with analysts who predict a wholesale move to cloud services, partly driven by the recession.

“You can get a cloud server for the price of buying the hardware, and that also gets you all the support and power,” he said. “People often forget about the additional expense of running IT in-house, including space in the office, proper power supplies, air conditioning and backup. It can cost an absolute fortune – even excluding the personnel you need.”

Carbon reduction

Also, the UK now has carbon reduction laws, under which it will become more advantageous to run servers in the cloud, he said. “We have economies of scale, and can run data centres efficiently, using external air cooling, and our hardware is utilised at a much higher rate. The overall efficiency gain is massive compared to people doing it themselves.”

These Windows servers will eventually be available on Rackspace’s recently announced open source cloud platform OpenStack, and offered in the UK through Rackspace’s local organisation, launched this year.

Overall, cloud is growing massively in Rackspace’s business: the company posted results for the second quarter, with cloud computing making up around $23.2 million (£14.8m) of a total revenue of $187 million (£119m). Over the last year, hosting revenue has grown by 28 percent, while cloud has grown by 78 percent at Rackspace, said Torlini.