Since Jungle Disk was started our plan has been to support multiple online storage providers and give users a choice of where they want to store their data. However until recently there haven’t been any viable alternatives to Amazon S3. We’re pleased to announce that in the next release of Jungle Disk (2.6), we’ll be adding support for Rackspace Cloud Files as an option alongside Amazon S3. Like Amazon S3, Cloud Files is a distributed, replicated, Internet-scale storage service. Rackspace is the world leader in hosting and operates data centers across the US as well as in Europe and Asia.

We’re also excited to announce the pricing for Cloud Files with Jungle Disk. Cloud Files storage will cost $0.15 per gigabyte per month with no additional charges for requests or bandwidth in either direction. You only pay for the storage you use. We expect that this simplified pricing along with Rackspace’s reputation for quality and service will make Cloud Files a great option for many users.

As you may know, Rackspace is also the parent company of Jungle Disk. We’ve heard concerns from some users that supporting Cloud Files would mean dropping support for Amazon S3. That is not the case! In fact, we’re expanding our support for Amazon S3 in Jungle Disk 2.6 with support for optional integrated billing which we announced last October. Cloud Files will support integrated billing as well of course. Both services will be supported with full feature parity in Jungle Disk. In the future we also plan to allow replication between services for the ultimate level of redundancy.

More information about Jungle Disk 2.6 along with the planned release schedule will be available soon.