Cloud storage, in particular, tops the list of storage options available, according to an IDC report released in late December 2007 that analyzes the near-term future of the storage market.

And while Amazon S3 Storage Service has largely led this field since it launched in March 2006, Rackspace Hosting (rackspace.com) subsidiary, Mosso (mosso.com), is now looking to challenge this market share with today's launch of its new online storage offering, CloudFS (mosso.com/cloudfs).

"[CloudFS] sits in between Rackspace's high-performance enterprise storage offerings that are also very costly, and local storage which is only susceptible to a single server," says Jonathan Bryce, Mosso co-founder. "This system enables you to access from all over your servers, applications, inside the data center, in the home office, but it's a much lower cost."

Developed in collaboration with Rackspace's R&D division, Racklabs, the service enables developers to securely store almost an unlimited amount of data on the web connected through Rackspace's infrastructure.

The offering combines the scalable and low-cost CloudFS storage service with Mosso's flagship service, The Hosting Cloud, and Rackspace's customized managed hosting environment. The storage service also complements Rackspace's complete portfolio of hosting product, which includes Mailtrust email hosting solution and managed hosting services.

"This is innovation within the company that created this product specifically for customer needs that we've seen within our customer base," says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. "We have the ability to take it where we want to take it - we're not really relying on a vendor or partner. We can build this to the specs we need to work with our customers."

CloudFS will be available to a limited number of customers in a free private beta until the third quarter this year. The company says it is currently looking for applicants to participate in the private beta program, and is also encouraging developers to build tools and services around CloudFS.

After this initial private beta program ends, the service will open for public beta and be offered as a stand-alone service or as part of Mosso's The Hosting Cloud solution, where Rackspace customers will be able to receive free local transfers between CloudFS and their managed hosting servers.

CloudFS takes Mosso's The Hosting Cloud one step further by enabling developers to harness cloud computing technology, and freeing them of the complexities of any underlying technology such as servers, virtual private servers or operating systems.
 
"This solution is going to run inside of Rackspace's data centers on Rackspace's network, so if you are already hosting at Rackspace and you have several servers, there are big advantages to that," says Bryce. "You don't have to transit public Internet space, you get performance benefits, less latency, and from a business standpoint, it's going to be already SAS-73 certified data center which is important for compliance reasons."

The service is based on a pay-for-what-you-use pricing structure, with plans to start at $0.15 per gigabyte, which includes replicated copies for data protection. Mosso says this competitive rate will enable developers to scale their storage-related projects both seamlessly and affordably.
 
The storage platform will be accessed via a ReSTful web services API and language-specific API's, such as .NET, Java and PHP, assuring customers they can quickly store data and run applications in a business-class, standards-based environment.

"This is the first item to come out of Racklabs, but they have other things they're working on," says Bryce. "Rackspace is very committed to these emerging technologies and cloud services, and this is not going to be the last cloud product offering that is going to be announced."

"While CloudFS is good as a standalone product," adds Engates, "but it's even better when you put it together with hosting infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. The real power of this storage offering is the ability to combine it with Rackspace's dedicated service offering and more traditional hosting platforms, and also to combine it with Mosso hosting cloud."