It's open, it's cloud, it's new, it's got NASA involved! So how does this help me move 20 terrabytes of data and a range of web services and customer facing applications from my current cloud provider to a new provider?

The theory is that I can take a data snapshot of my 20 terabytes, move it to the new provider's network by driving it across town (still the fastest way to move data), "drop it in", switch over DNS and excluding a few lost transactions during switch-over everything should work fine.

The reality is that this removes the pain of proprietary configuration from a data center migration but it's still a painful process to switch cloud providers that involves a lot of work, some risk and down-time. So while this is a great marketing play from Rackspace there is still a level of lock-in when you commit to using a provider and so the risk to Rackspace to go 'open' is minimal but the benefits of being the leader are huge.