Dimension Data vs. Rackspace, Amazon in Cloud Storage Market?

Dimension Data appears to be on a cloud computing collission course with Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Rackspace (NYSE: RAX). The reason: Dimension Data is introducing a tiered storage options capability, which will be part of the company’s public compute-as-a-service (CaaS) offering.

The company’s offering is based on the EMC (NYSE: EMC) VNX storage platform, which provides a unified storage platform for virtual applications in the cloud. Options can be selected and provisioned through a web-based user interface or API. To accelerate performance, the company leverages solid state drives (SSD).

“Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high performance databases as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long term data retention,” said Dimension Data Cloud Services General Manager Dave Hanrahan in a prepared statement.

Pricing is based on the level of performance desired. Tier 3 starts at 0.01 cents per GB of data per hour; Tier 2 starts at 0.03 cents per GB of data per hour; and Tier 3 starts at 0.06 cents per GB of data per hour.

The offering is available to clients of Dimension Data Managed Cloud Platforms (MCPs) in the United States West Coast, Australia, and Europe, and will be rolled out to other public CaaS environments in the coming months.

“Dimension Data is committed to providing a high performance cloud that is easy to use and customize,” Hanrahan added. 

Dimension Data recently released a survey that revealed that 78 percent of IT decision-makers have both a current strategic plan and a budget for some components of a unified communications and collaboration system (UCC).