Hosting provider Rackspace Cloud has announced an update to their still-in-beta Cloud Servers for Windows offering, bringing snapshots and backups as well as enhanced scalability to the Microsoft-enabled cloud instance platform. Here’s the skinny.
With this new update, Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows gives administrators the capability to take a snapshot image of your cloud instance for later retrieval and backup in the case of disaster. Moreover, users can schedule when snapshots are taken, helping to make sure any backup is as close to current as possible. Snapshotting is a feature common to cloud platforms, but its until-now absence can be forgiven seeing as how it’s still in beta.
The other major new feature is what Rackspace Cloud called “Resize Up,” where users can increase the size of their cloud server as needed. More memory or disk space is but a click away, says their official blog entry. Ironically, Rackspace doesn’t yet offer the ability to scale an instance down when a usage peak has passed, but they say it’s coming soon.
It’s clear that Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows is still very much a work in progress. But it’s an intriguing one, nonetheless.
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Looks promising, but I really wish Microsoft would change its licensing policies to allow customers to bring their own Microsoft software licenses to the cloud; the possibilities for MSP-managed cloud-based IaaS would really open up. I also wish they’d quit tying Windows licenses to physical processors, but I think I might die of shock if that happened