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Rackspace elastic cloud goes live in Australia

Premium pricing for new region

Rackspace has commenced offering its elastic cloud products in Australia.

The company splashed down down under last year, offering only traditional hosting from the Digital Realty bit barn its rented in western suburbs of Sydney.

The cloud contender has now switched on its full array of Open-Stack-powered elastic cloud goodness, allowing either complete cloudiness or bursting into elastic mode from either conventionally-hosted servers or on-premises kit that needs an occasional boost. Rackspace is calling all such arrangements “hybrid cloud”, regardless of whether a user's own on-premises kit is part of the eventual combination.

The company's not saying how many servers it has ready to roll in Australia, other than to say it is provisioned with capacity for “thousands” of customers and has spent “tens of millions” of Australian dollars and over a year getting ready to thrown the switch.

Rackspace's hope is that Australians take advantage of the new facility for some low-latency fun, but will also make the Sydney shed an option for any of its cloudy customers.

Pricing for the services has just emerged, but are more expensive than Rackspace's US offerings.

There are two important things to consider as you assess the data below.

The first is that Rackspace is charging for services delivered from Australian in US Dollars.

The second is that the Australian prices listed below get an extra ten per cent added, thanks to Australia's goods and services tax (GST).

Servers AU cloud server AU managed cloud server US cloud server US managed cloud server
512MB RAM, 20GB Disk $0.026/hr ($18.98/mo) $0.170/hr, ($124.10/mo) $0.022/hr, ($16.06/mo) $0.142/hr, $103.66/mo
1GB, 40GB Disk $0.072/hr ($52.56/mo) $0.216/hr, ($157.68/mo) $0.06/hr, $43.80/mo $0.18/hr, $131.40/mo
2GB, 80GB Disk $0.144/hr ($105.12/mo) $0.288/hr, ($210.24/mo) $0.12/hr, $87.60/mo $0.24/hr, $175.20/mo
4GB, 160GB Disk $0.288/hr ($210.24/mo) $0.432/hr, ($315.36/mo) $0.24/hr, $175.20/mo $0.36/hr,$262.80/mo
8GB, 320GB Disk $0.576/hr ($420.48/mo) $0.720/hr, ($525.60/mo) $0.48/hr, $350.40/mo $0.60/hr,$438.00/mo
15GB, 620GB Disk $1.08/hr ($788.40/mo) $1.224/hr, ($893.52/mo) $0.90/hr, $657.00/mo $1.02/hr,$744.60/mo
30GB, 1200GB Disk $1.44/hr ($1,051.20/mo) $1.584/hr, ($1,156.32/mo) $1.20/hr, $876.60/mo $1.30/hr,$963.60/mo

Next, let's have a look at file storage prices. Again, Australians or those who choose to locate their data down under will pay a premium.

File storage AU Price US price
First 1TB $0.110/GB/mo $0.100/GB/mo
Next 49TB $0.100/GB/mo $0.090/GB/mo
Next 150TB $0.095/GB/mo $0.085/GB/mo
Next 300TB $0.085/GB/mo $0.080/GB/mo
Next 524TB $0.080/GB/mo $0.075/GB/mo
Over 1,024TB $0.075/GB/mo Variable

Again, let's remember that there's another ten per cent to add to those Australian prices, taking them quite a bit beyond Rackspace's US offerings.

At this point, Australian cloud users might be getting out their slide rules to calculate the cost latency as it impacts the customer experience versus a few extra bucks a month for Australian hosting. Those considering Australia as a cloud disaster recovery destination or follow-the-moon computing option may wish to look at other nations where prices are lower.

Before they do so, it's worth noting that Amazon Web Services Australia is also a little more expensive, for some services, than its other locations.

Australia has experienced a surge in power prices over the last decade. It's also dodged a recession, which has made it possible for business to charge more than it has been possible to do in the USA and Europe. That attitude was recently on display when Microsoft and Adobe struggled to explain their Australian pricing, stopping just short of saying "we price high because we can get away with it". ®

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