Rackspace added Windows to its Cloud

Rackspace Cloud platfrom, which, due to affordable pricing and ease of administration, attracted a lot of customers from Amazon, has added Windows Cloud Server to it's pool of services. Previously, it was possible to create only Linux-instances. However, unlike Linux-servers, Rackspace's pricing for Windows-instances is not so attractive and is higher than at Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure. Minimal instance configuration (1 GB of memory, 40 GB storage and 30 Mb/s bandwidth) costs $0.08/hour (about $58/month). Amazon's small Windows-server 1.7Gb/140Gb (i.e. about 2 times higher) costs $ 0.12/hour. In addition, Windows-server at Rackspace can only be scaled up and there is no way to scale down. Much more interesting is Rackspace recent initiative to create open-source cloud platform Openstack.