Wow, there was a shakeup in the online backup space today. Rackspace, a well-known web hosting provider has bought Jungle Disk, an online backup provider. The cloud backup space is heating up.
Jungle Disk provides an interface to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, which makes this deal a little strange.
Many people think that Rackspace is making this move because they want to better compete against Amazon Web Services, which makes sense, but that is exactly what Jungle Disk uses to store users’ files.
For its part, Jungle Disk says that Amazon S3 will continue to be supported:
Does this mean you will discontinue support for Amazon S3?
Absolutely not. Although Jungle Disk will now also be supporting Rackspace’s Cloud Files, we are still committed to supporting Amazon S3 and other potentially cloud storage providers in both current and future products. Being able to support multiple cloud storage providers is one of the unique differentiators for Jungle Disk and a big reason why Rackspace was interested in acquiring the company.
Even though S3 will continue to be supported (and it would be pretty brutal for their clients if it was not), you have to think that much of the focus is going on be on supporting Rackspace’s cloud offerings.
We will see how this shakes out. Now that Mozy has been bought by EMC and Jungle Disk by Rackspace, I wonder if Carbonite will be next.