Rackspace Hosting and Akamai have announced a strategic partnership to boost the transfer speed of files stored on the tag archive service Rackspace consumers worldwide.
Rackspace will integrate Akamai’s services for secure socket layer (SSL), Canonical Name records (CNAME) and content delivery network (CDN) technology at Rackspace Cloud Files, the company said Wednesday.
“Having served separately from hundreds of Akamai customers, we are pleased to simplify the customer experience and dedicated platforms cloud with lead optimization services provider in the cloud,” said Lew Moorman, director of clouds and Rackspace strategy, in a statement.
Akamai Rackspace and anticipate demand in the next decade to cloud services around “feature-rich content, applications, SaaS [Software-as-a-service] and dynamic Web sites,” said Moorman.
A CDN uses servers near the edge of the network data from the cache, reducing network load and accelerate the delivery.
Rackspace Cloud Files customers in the United Kingdom may use Akamai CDN to place their files about their users from 18 January. Akamai has a distribution network of 77,000 servers in 71 countries.
CDN functionality is included as standard in charge of bandwidth out of Rackspace, which is 12p per GB per month, if customers use the CRC or not. File Storage in the Cloud Files is 11P per GB per month.
“The files marked as public (for customers) in the control panel Rackspace Cloud will automatically be made available to the CRC for users worldwide to download to your local Akamai server,” said a spokesman for Rackspace ZDNet UK Wednesday.
Akamai’s services will also be offered to Rackspace Managed Hosting clients “in due time, but not immediately,” said the spokesman, adding that details still being worked out.
SSL encryption source server to the edge of the server will run in the first quarter of 2011 together with “border bleed” which will allow customers to immediately remove the contents of the CRC. In the second quarter of 2011, CNAMES be completed, allowing long URL CDN assigned to shorter URLs brand, Rackspace said in a blog on Wednesday.
Rackspace also sell a range of sites Akamai and application acceleration services to its customers. The hosting company has not had to update any of its hardware infrastructure to be part of the association.
Rackspace cloud services are similar to those offered by competitors, including Amazon – lying Amazon Web Services – and Microsoft, which works with Windows Azure. Rackspace has nine data centers worldwide, including two in the UK.
Amazon Web Services now offers its own CDN called CloudFront, attached to its Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 has the same functionality as Rackspace Cloud Files.