Rackspace Hosting, maybe the last company to go public for God knows how long, is anteing up $12 million in cash and stock – with another $16 million in payouts possible – to buy Slicehost and Jungle Disk so it can chase the cloud and compete with Amazon.

It’s also established technology partnerships with content delivery house Limelight Networks and cloud mail archiving house Sonian Networks.

Slicehost does Xen-based virtual machine hosting claiming 15,000 “slices” in online production. Jungle Disk gives Rackspace cloud storage and backup currently written to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Rackspace figures it’ll take about six months to integrate their widgetry with its own hosting portfolio, but first it’s got to close the deals in the next 30 days.

CTO John Engates claims Rackspace’s proposition is a lot friendlier than Amazon’s which he describes as “not for the uninitiated.”

“You can’t expect Amazon to tell you you’re doing it all wrong,” he said. “Amazon won’t support you. You’re on your own.” Rackspace, on the other hand, prides itself on being “fanatical” about support.

The cloud side of Rackspace belongs to its Mosso unit, which is running its rebranded CloudSites flagship cloud offering, née the Hosting Cloud, its heterogeneous on-demand environment that supports both Windows and Linux.

It’s also got CloudFiles, née CloudFS, its scaleable, Internet-based enterprise-grade storage service that starts at 15 cents a gigabyte with price breaks above 30TB and boasts of an “industry-leading” SLA. Jungle Disk, which comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across Windows, Mac and Linux, will have to learn to support it and brings the company new backup and file-sharing capabilities.

Rackspace says its alliance with Limelight will let developers distribute content to hundreds of endpoints and “bring CDN to the masses.” Pricing should be the same as standard bandwidth.

Then there’s its new virtualized CloudServers on-demand hosting solution, leveraging Slicehost technology. The company says Slicehost will be its developer brand, creating new features through shared IP in conjunction with Rackspace development initiatives. Slicehost is expected to announce larger “slices” for high-performance computing, lower prices and IP sharing for high availability.

Sonian and Mailtrust, Rackspace’s e-mail hosting unit, are getting together to offer low-cost, fully compliant archiving to Mailtrust’s ~100,000 business domain. Sonian’s supposed to port its solution to the Rackspace cloud suite.

Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, November 19-20-21, 2008
SYS-CON Events announced today that Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels will deliver the opening keynote at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com), which will take place November 19-21, at the Fairmont Hotel at the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. The first International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo will be colocated with the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo (www.virtualizationconference.com)..

Register for the Cloud Computing Conference Today & Save!

Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice can be a complicated and expensive task, but it's essential in today's business landscape. This applies to an enterprise trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch.

There are many challenges when building a reliable, flexible architecture that can manage unpredictable behaviors of today's internet business. This presentation will review some of the lessons learned from building one of the world's largest distributed systems; Amazon.com. The focus will be on state management which is one of the dominating factors in the scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of the overall system.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems.

Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored close to 80 articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities
Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities Offered on a First-Come First-Served Basis. To inquire about sponsorship and exhibit opportunities please contact Carmen Gonzalez at 201-802-3021 or by email at events(at)sys-con.com. Currently, a limited number of sponsorship and exhibition packages with multiple sponsorship discounts are available for the upcoming events.