Peer 1 and Rackspace offer UK customers global clouds

Rackspace is to introduce cloud-based services for Windows users

A range of new cloud services will be made available to UK-based IT departments as US providers Peer 1 and Rackspace expand their services overseas.

The companies in question have datacentres located around the globe and said businesses would benefit from not having to use different hosting companies to cover different regions of the world.

Peer 1 Network Enterprises, a US online IT business hosting provider, launched its CloudXcelerator programme, which will allow its UK partner ElasticHosts to offer customers cloud applications housed in the Peer 1 infrastructure. ElasticHosts provides flexible server capacity for scalable web hosting.

“ElasticHosts’ new capacity with Peer 1 will make the company the first cloud infrastructure provider to offer dual redundant availability zones in Europe,” the firm said.

Meanwhile, Peer 1 competitor Rackspace will also begin offering its cloud services to the UK market.

Although previously Rackspace allowed UK businesses to host their private clouds in its datacentres, it did not have the capabilities to manage their cloud for them.

“The new public cloud will give organisations the ability to scale up and down as they need,” said Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates.

Rackspace has nine datacentres globally and three in the UK offering web site hosting and storage services.

“Having applications hosted in a cloud in a location unknown is not for everyone. That is why we have datacentres all over the world so that elements of critical applications can be hosted physically nearby an organisation,” said Engates.

“A big barrier to organisations adopting the technology is that IT groups often feel threatened by cloud services because 80 per cent of their work is spent on maintenance, and this is what we take care of. But we are allowing IT to spend more time on innovation for the customer."

Rackspace will also add Microsoft Windows support to its cloud platform by the end of this year. The platform currently only supports Linux applications.