Rackspace Buys Jungledisk, Slicehost; Jumps on Cloud Computing Bandwagon

In its bid to take on Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting Inc. has announced to acquire two companies, JungleDisk and Slicehost, for around USD 11.5 million, to augment its “cloud computing” offerings.

JungleDisk provides online backup and file storage services that ensure secure environments for multiple users to share a huge volume of cloud storage.

As of now, JungleDisk largely relies on Simple Storage Services (S3) from Amazon, but with the new announcement, it will start offering its services using Cloud Files from Rackspace; however, the company will continue supporting storage using services from Amazon.

Slicehost, a Virtual Machine developer, provides “slices” in Xen-based virtual servers that are dubbed much economical and easier-to-use than the conventional dedicated servers, and it is recognized as an overt competitor to Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon.

Expressing the significance of the acquisitions, Lanham Napier, CEO Rackspace Hosting, said in a statement, “Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits to our customers that complement our traditional managed hosting services.”