Posted 10/27/08 at 09:16:00 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Rackspace Hosting has made two acquisitions in a bid to establish itself as a major player in the lucrative cloud computing market. It has acquired Slicehost and Jungle Disk to bolster its Mosso cloud service. The acquisitions are said to be worth $28 million. Rackspace’s Cloud Files, scalable file storage service, will most probably be integrated into Slicehost, according to the Slicehost website.

Jungle Disk, which offers a cloud storage solution for multiple users, uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, but will begin offering Rackspace’s Mosso service as well. The two acquisitions will help Rackspace Hosting compete more fiercely with its more accomplished rival Amazon Web Services.

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Posted 10/03/08 at 09:42:30 AM by Mark Edward Soper

Amazon's much more than the "world's biggest bookstore" - its Amazon Web Services division has been offering flexible hosted application development for some time. And this week, Amazon Web Services launched what ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley calls a "pre-emptive strike" against Microsoft's forthcoming "Windows Cloud" operating system by adding Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server to its product portfolio.

Amazon's move to provide access to Windows Server and SQL Server is significant because it enables developers to have their choice of Linux-based or Windows-based development resources on what Amazon calls its "cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model." Essentially, Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud service (also known as Amazon EC2) lets developers rent a virtual machine with varying amounts of disk space and transfer capabilities on an as-needed basis without the need to carve out space in a crowded server room or spend long-term dollars on a short-term requirement.

To learn more about why Amazon Web Services has added Microsoft vehicles to its "rental fleet," join us after the jump.

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