Rackspace launches European cloud infrastructure

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Web-hosting provider Rackspace Hosting recently announced it has launched a cloud computing infrastructure to make its services available to customers in Europe.

Following the success of its offering in the United States, Rackspace said it is expanding its services to the UK to provide customers with access to instantly scalable storage in the cloud.

The new UK services include Rackspace Cloud Files, running on OpenStack Object Storage and Cloud Servers, which are based on the Xen hypervisor.

Rackspace noted the new cloud offering joins a dedicated hosting platform previously established in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"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, CEO and president of Rackspace. "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."

Rackspace originally announced its intent to introduce a UK-based cloud in May last year, and launched a beta version on January 4. According to the company, it currently has more than 500 customers in beta.