IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

IBM Cloud Object Storage is well suited for businesses that require scalable and cost-effective data storage solutions. It excels in scenarios involving massive unstructured data, like multimedia content, backups, and archives. However, it may be less appropriate for organizations with minimal storage needs or those requiring high-performance, low-latency access to data, as it's optimized for durability and data integrity rather than real-time data retrieval.

Incentivized

Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.

Incentivized

• Cloud storage allows you to save data and files in an off-site location that you access either through the public internet or a dedicated private network connection.
• Cloud storage delivers a cost-effective, scalable alternative to storing files on on-premise hard drives or storage networks.
• Cloud storage services provide elasticity, which means you can scale capacity as your data volumes increase or dial down capacity if necessary.
• Business continuity of Storing data offsite supports business continuity in the event that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cuts access to your premises.

Incentivized

• Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
• Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.

Incentivized

• Unexpected errors are known to occur when downloading/uploading files.
• Not easy to get started. In order to take full advantage of the platform and its features, additional training and reading documentation is needed.
• The UI of the platform can get a bit confusing and it's easy to get lost.

Incentivized

• Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned.
• Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers
• In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace.
• In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services

because it is a robust, safe and flexible product

Incentivized

If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!

Incentivized

For my use cases, it has been a very smooth experience. Even my new colleagues have been able to get on top of things very quickly. This shows how easy it is to work with

Incentivized

The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability

Incentivized

I have been working in IT sector for more than 15 years. I have worked with various vendors. IBM's sales team, support team have been really helpful. After we start to use their product, their UX design team also contacted us to get feedback from us. They are really interested about our experience.

Incentivized

In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!

Incentivized

I just researching and applying the tools on their platforms to ensure a good learning path, based on my needs. Reading the documentation related with resources, tools. Is too big, but I am trying to know more about it every day. It is a good way to know more about their resources. A new way to attract new customers. At the end of the day, we are all involved in improvement and automation of our tasks and resources for customers and end-users.

Incentivized

IBM's professional service for migrating data and implementing new cloud environment was perfect. They started to help us before we begin to bring together all data such as how can it could be best to transfer all data without problems. During the migration they watched all the process closely to prevent any failure. Lastly, after the migration, they gave us trainings on implementation.

Incentivized

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely back up your data where redundancy is guaranteed, and the cost is fair. In the past I have used Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access, but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command, we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Amazon S3 service is a good option, but based on the features it provides compared with IBM Cloud Object Storage, it is less suitable. IBM Cloud Object Storage is also integrated with more services, like IBM Cloud SQL and IBM Aspera, which AWS does not provide to transfer files at maximum speed in the world.

Incentivized

LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.

Incentivized

• This allows us to recommend a platform to our clients that will quickly help them create new, efficient business processes with very little development.
• This saves clients hours and days of manual analysis of images, allowing the system to do the work when attaching Object Storage to models.
• There is a learning curve in utilizing the storage and the modeling, but once up and running, it works well during deployment.

Incentivized

• We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
• We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
• A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.

Incentivized