Rackspace brings cloud services to the UK

Rackspace expects to offer one of the first public cloud infrastructures sited in the UK

Hosting firm Rackspace is preparing to bring its cloud services into the UK with a Xen-based offering for the SMB market, and hybrid public-private services based on VMware for larger enterprise customers.

Due in the fourth quarter of 2010, the services will be similar to those already available in the US, but will be delivered from Rackspace datacentres in the UK.

The company expects to be one of the first major players to site public cloud infrastructure in the UK with this move.

Rackspace is offering enterprise customers the ability to build a private cloud based on VMware's vCloud platform, and expand it on demand using resources from the public cloud if necessary.

A private cloud in this instance means that a customer has its own dedicated servers protected behind a firewall within Rackspace's datacentre.

"A customer has a private cloud in the Rackspace datacentre, but they can 'bust out' into the public cloud if they want to," explained Brian Thomson, Rackspace managing director for EMEA.

This allows firms to expand capacity if and when required, for web hosting, test and development, or to meet seasonal peaks in demand for computer resources, according to Rackspace.

For smaller businesses, the firm is providing a public cloud infrastructure based on the Xen hypervisor, with Linux or Windows virtual machines which customers can pay to access by the hour.

This makes Rackspace a direct rival to Amazon's EC2 cloud service, which is likewise based on Xen virtual machines. But Thomson said that Rackspace intends to compete on the quality of support it can offer to customers.

Rackspace expects that many customers for the SMB offering will be application service providers such as KashFlow, whose online accountancy application for small businesses is already hosted by Rackspace.

Duane Jackson, chief executive of KashFlow, explained that the cloud service allowed his business to operate with resources it would struggle to manage with only a dozen staff, and praised Rackspace's reliability.

"Worries about uptime used to keep me awake at night, but now if I get a call from Rackspace it's to tell me there was a problem but they already fixed it," he said.

Prices for the two forthcoming services have yet to be set, according to Rackspace, but US customers of the SMB service are typically charged 1.5 cents (about 1p) per hour for each virtual machine.

Enterprise customers will typically be charged by the day for each virtual machine in the public cloud.