ENKI versus Rackspace Cloud

Please note that this section is still under construction.  Look to this space for updated information over time.  ENKI creates its competitive profiles from a combination of publicly available information and information given to us by customers of Rackspace who have switched to ENKI.

What's the difference between ENKI and the Rackspace Cloud?

While we are accustomed to competing with Rackspace, we also understand that the two systems (ours and theirs) are quite different and comparison isn’t straightforward.  Rackspace aims to provide virtual hardware, while we focus on providing virtual information technology solutions. Ultimately, we want to offer overall value to our customers that ensures their business success rather than exactly matching a particular resource rate which may not offer them overall value in the long term. Our offering is designed for customers who want the infrastructure transparency and reliability that VMWare or AppLogic offers, while receiving that service in the context of an available fully-managed enterprise class IT operations solution, even if they may not use full management at first.  Our PrimaCloud and Computing Utility solutions are clearly not for everyone just as Rackspace isn't, and we’re not attempting to only be the low price lead, but rather provide a guaranteed-to-work solution for business critical applications at leading total cost of operations (TCO). Perhaps most importantly of all, in ENKI you have a personal connection with a partner interested in your success, and flexible enough to find ways to help you when you need help, or provide an excellent alternative to building your own IT capability.

ENKI's strength is not just technology, but relationship.

If price is a concern to you, we have discovered that for our current customer base with medium to large scale deployments, our rates are competitive with Rackspace: these customers have reported an overall decrease in spend with ENKI, in part because they are getting more CPU power per GB of RAM ordered.  We understand that comparing apples-to-apples is difficult since Rackspace doesn't actually tell you how much compute power you are getting for your dollar.   A recent study showed that Rackspace's compute allocation is not proportional to RAM purchased, dropping off at larger RAM values, so ENKI's services become more cost-effective the more CPU you need.   A big difference between us is that ENKI breaks out storage costs so you only buy what you need.  Also, ENKI offers tiered discounts on CPU/Memory, storage, and bandwidth that reward you handsomely as you scale up, and bring our prices well below those of Rackspace.

For smaller scale deployments, don't miss ENKI's virtual private servers, which are offered at a 40% discount over our Computing Utility, while still offering the advantages of AppLogic's reliability and guaranteed performance as well as being upgradable to a full virtual private data center.

What's the difference between an ENKI "core" and a Rackspace "core"?

Unfortunately, Rackspace is mum about how much CPU you get with each GB of RAM.  ENKI offers 1/4 of a 2.8GHz core with each GB of RAM.  You will find that you can use this number to predict accurately how fast your application will run compared to a physical server.

Can you compare ENKI's PrimaCloud and Rackspace Cloud Servers with respect to technology?

ENKI was designed from the ground up to eliminate the type of performance problems that have been documented with Rackspace and other cut-rate cloud computing solutions.   In particular, storage speed and interconnect speed are critical to high-performance cloud computing.  ENKI has addressed storage speed with high-speed SAN systems that are monitored to prevent oversubscription and have optional SSD acceleration for database-intensive loads.   Our interconnect is Infiniband, which offers 80 times the performance of Rackspace's 1Gb/s connections, allowing servers and storage to work together without bottlenecks during peak loads.   Think of Rackspace's technology as a slice of a dedicated server, with slow (GbE) access to shared resources.  ENKI's approach is to provide fully virtualized high-performance storage, compute and interconnect, and let you decide how much of each you need for your instances.

Can you compare ENKI's PrimaCloud and Rackspace Cloud Servers in detail?

 

	Rackspace CloudServers	ENKI PrimaCloud
Reliability	SLA compensation for downtime over 1 hour requires user request and documentation.  This corresponds to a 99.85% uptime guarantee - if you document your downtime.  Fine print says that certain server hardware failure is not covered.  Credits past 1 hour amount to 5% of the monthly bill per hour. Rackspace has been generally reliable but has experienced several severe failures in the past.	10x money-back guarantee for unplanned outages affecting your site exceeding 99.99% uptime per month.  Guarantee is paid automatically, based on our automatic monitoring (if deployed), and is applied at month-end.  We also measure uptime as whether your operating system is up, not just the virtual machine.  The intention is to assure you that we have skin in your game.  "We're up when you're down."  ENKI has generally achieved 99.99% uptime at the operating system level, with a few quarters over the last two years in which we missed the mark only achieving 99.975% for some customers.
Security	Rackspace instances are open to a variety of attacks, since they are not behind a firewall that can offer port restrictions and NAT.  Advanced protection requires installation of firewall and antivirus software on each instance, which soaks up significant CPU time, which is charged for.	All instances have multiple layers of protection including a hardware firewall.  Active Intrusion Detection/ Intrusion Prevention firewalls with antivirus available to protect against hacking, viruses and DDOS attacks.  ENKI's Virtual Private Data Center paradigm means that your instances communicate with each other on secure private networks that are not visible to other customers or from the Internet, setting you free to choose whatever security is appropriate, applied at the gateway to your VPDC.
Performance	According to independent studies, Rackspace allocates a lower ratio of CPU to RAM as the size of your instances increases, causing large instances to perform poorly.  Unfortunately, there is no documentation about the amount of CPU you get with your Rackspace instances.  ENKI's customers have reported that Rackspace is "unusably slow" for their compute-intensive applications.  1GbE interconnect produces I/O wait that wastes your computing power, effectively costing you up to 10 times more than the listed price per unit of compute power.	PrimaCloud and Computing utility both offer a fixed 2.8Ghz core per 4GB of RAM purchased, which is the standard in Enterprise deployments, so you know how much performance you're going to get. PrimaCloud attacks the two main sources of performance problems with high-performance architecture.  I/O congestion, in which virtual machines compete for access to interconnect, is addressed with dual Infiniband interconnects to each server for a total of 80Gbit/second bandwidth to other servers and storage.   Storage oversubscription, in which mulitiple tasks compete for storage throughput, is managed by using dedicated SANs for each cluster, with optional SSD acceleration to reduce access times to under a millisecond.  Monitoring measures storage access times to ensure they don't slow your application down.
Pricing	Pricing starts at $0.015 per hour for the smallest instance (with Linux only). Price per GB RAM is $0.06 with an unknown amount of CPU.   RAM includes a proportional amount of disk storage.	$0.086/GB-Hr per GB of RAM at 8GB of usage, which includes two 2.8GHz cores.  Steep discounts off of base price up to and beyond 60% for increasing usage levels over a term period or for prepayment. Increasing discount levels are applied automatically as your usage goes up so you know you're getting the best discounts.  You don't have to pay in advance - ever!   Storage and bandwidth prices also drop automatically with increasing usage. Automatic workload management can save you up to 80% over purchasing static resources by scaling your application automatically to match the load from users/customers - without having to manage your application or use complicated APIs. Significant savings are available on reserved resources (paid for monthly instead of in advance.)
Instance configuration	Fixed (but unknown) ratio of RAM to CPU, with user-selectable amounts of RAM per instance.	User-defined ratio of RAM to CPU on a per-instance basis.  Charges are made only on total resource allocations allowing balancing different CPU/ RAM ratios across multiple instances resulting in overall cost savings.  You can change this ratio on each instance as your needs change.
Persistence	Instances are persistent due to local RAID10 storage.  However, because the storage is local, Rackspace has to "migrate" your instance if the server fails.	Instances are guaranteed to be persistent.  PrimaCloud and The Computing Utility closely model a highly reliable physical data center using VMWare technology or Xen technology.  VMWare or AppLogic handle server and application failover automatically, restarting failed instances on new hardware without data loss - guaranteeing persistence, automatically and quickly.  This is accomplished by storing all data off of the server so that none is lost on failure.
Granularity/Scalability	You can set the amount of RAM your instance will consume and with a restart, adjust it after deployment.	ENKI instances can be adjusted to any resource allocation from 1% to 100% of the physical server.   Instance size can be changed without a restart in PrimaCloud (subject operating system and application limitations.) ENKI instances are guaranteed to be available either if customer reserves them with a small monthly fee equal to 1/6th list price, or if ENKI is notified at least two weeks in advance of peak loads.
Compute Power	Unknown.	ENKI measures resources in terms of cores equivalent to a 2.8GHz processor.
IP addresses	One static IP address included with each Cloud Server.	Static.  5 IP addresses are included with each VPDC.  IP addresses beyond 5 cost $1/mo.
Controllability	Instances and storage are allocated by API call or Rackspace's UI. Your application is responsible for scaling itself.	ENKI adjusts your VPDC for you based on your requests or self service via our online portal which makes configuring virtual servers or virtual datacenters easy. We offer root logins to virtual servers in your VPDC, as well as management plans that eliminate the need to log in or know anything about how to manage the server. Your VPDC can scale automatically in response to changing load conditions - according to your rules.
Observability	You provide your own monitoring if you want to go beyond just reporting on server status to measure application status.	ENKI offers and supports enterprise-grade monitoring at the application and server levels, as well as remote user-experience monitoring
Locality/Predictability	We don't have enough information to answer this at this time.  Rackspace does claim that it has "low-latency" interconnect.	ENKI manages its own data centers and controls locality of data and compute functions.  Large scale storage is available at enterprise-style direct-connect speeds, and all instances of your VPDC are on a local network with microsecond latencies, perfect for transaction oriented or telecommunications applications.  (Not applicable to geographically distributed applications.)
Bandwidth Pricing	You are charged for output bandwidth only at $0.18/GB	ENKI charges only the max of input and output bandwidth, resulting in significant savings for storage-intensive applications.  Prices start at $0.17/GB and drop rapidly with increased usage.
Bandwidth Quality	No specification.  Highly variable due to random distribution of Rackspace's data centers	ENKI's data centers are located at carrier meet-me points such as MAE West, with carefully selected carrier mix to ensure minimum ping and transit times.  You may find that with one running instance at ENKI, you are getting equivalent latency to many instances running in different Rackspace data centers.
Deployment	You figure out how to deploy, architect, and manage your application.  You have to understand Rackspace's architecture to deploy and manage your application.  Many users hire additional staff to do this, negating most of their cloud savings.	Do it yourself through our GUI or our API, or let ENKI's experienced staff of IT professionals deploy a virtual private data center of your design, with your software in it, using our available full management services.
Vendor Lock-In	Images can be moved to other vendors with some conversion.	Running applications including an entire VPDC can be moved to another provider's datacenter since ENKI's services are based on industry standards of VMWare or AppLogic.  In addition, our portal can schedule automatic conversion of other hypervisor images (V2V conversion).
Support	Paid support plans available a fixed cost of $0.12/hr/instance but only for the operating system and standard software, not your applications and deployment, so you still need cloud administrators on-staff. ENKI's customers report to use that Rackspace's support is neither "fanatical" nor very useful, and have bad bad experiences in which they were abandoned or had long response times or variable quality.  This makes sense, given that your monthly fee only pays one hour of someone's time per month.	You call the phone and we answer, with guaranteed service response times.   Optionally, our system admin experts take responsibility for keeping your application up and running at a fixed per-instance-month charge.  We will support almost any software running on your machines, even your own software (with suitable training.)  ENKI's high-context support, which we call "Operations Services" acts like your own IT department, with a dedicated representative that can execute longer-term projects on your infrastructure for you, or understand ongoing problems.
Relationship	Rackspace's business model is a hands-off vending machine for virtual hardware.  Relationship is not important to Rackspace, so you don't have an IT partner, just a compute vendor.	ENKI offers Virtual IT services, necessitating a collaborative partnership with its customers that allows it to serve as its customers' IT department.  Relationship is a core value at ENKI and we get 50% of our business through referrals as a result.
Intended Audience	Do-it-yourself IT professionals, short-term resource consumers, deployments without performance requirements, organizations that have more free personnel time than cash.	Organizations requiring enterprise-grade guaranteed performance and service levels without staffing investment, wishing to take advantage of ENKI's extensive data center design expertise including creating the infrastructure for NetSuite.  Startups/entrepreneurs, Enterprise business units/intrapreneurs, ISVs, lean/agile organizations, companies requiring enterprise virtual IT services.