Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world leader in the hosting cloud computing industry, today announced the launch of its cloud infrastructure to provide customers with a European-based infrastructure for their cloud-based data footprint.
“Our US-based Rackspace cloud has already been hugely successful, with over 100 000 customers globally now taking advantage of our hosted cloud services,” said Lanham Napier, President and CEO, Rackspace.
“Due to storage regulations set out under European law, many UK companies are restricted from using cloud. Our UK offering allows companies to avoid offshore data issues and weighty upfront capital investments, which helps them become more strategically agile from a business perspective. We're delighted to launch our UK cloud today and we already have over 500 customers in beta.”
The new UK cloud offerings include Rackspace Cloud Files running on OpenStack Object Storage, and Cloud Servers based on the Xen hypervisor. The new cloud platform joins the dedicated hosting platform already offered in EMEA.
Rackspace Cloud Files provides instantly scalable cloud-based storage, which is ideal for electronically storing items like backups, video files, or static user content. Rackspace opened its source code for Cloud Files to the public through OpenStack, an open source cloud computing project founded by Rackspace in July 2010. The OpenStack project was initiated to drive open cloud standards, so customers would not be locked into proprietary cloud software.
Rackspace Cloud Servers provide instant computing power, allowing customers to serve applications with flexibility and efficiency. Customers are able to deploy one or even dozens of cloud servers instantly, for as long or as little as they are required. Available in Windows and a variety of Linux distributions, Cloud Servers give users full root access and control over their servers through either the Rackspace Cloud control panel, the Application Programming Interface (API), third party tools or Rackspace's newly acquired Cloudkick subsidiary. Rackspace has already fully integrated the Cloudkick panel into the UK cloud offering so users can manage both US and UK cloud servers from one panel.
“Some industry analysts have stated that by 2012, 20% of organisations will no longer own an in-house IT infrastructure,” continued Napier. “Cloud computing enables this evolution in a cost-effective way; if customers on the cloud no longer need resources, they stop using them and almost immediately stop paying for them. This will be critical to companies still fighting to cut costs from their budgets, and will allow them to control spending more tightly than ever before. It is as a result of direct feedback from our existing and prospective customer base in Europe that we have brought the Rackspace cloud to Europe and built it out in our UK data centre. The Rackspace European cloud brings with it reduced latency for those customers and helps eradicate concerns over currency fluctuations and European data legislation compliance.”
“Running our own servers proved inefficient and costly. With Rackspace, our resources are freed up from managing hardware and we are now better equipped to cater to spikes in demand online,” said Ivan Retzignac, Founder at MedicAnimal.com. “We are also saving in excess of £100 000 a year, which can be invested in better services and solutions for our customers.”
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