Rackspace brings the cloud to the UK

Rackspace today officially announced the extension of its cloud computing infrastructure into the UK, with several services provided from datacentres in the country designed to reassure organisations with strict data protection and service level requirements.

The hosting firm, which is Amazon Web Services' main rival in the cloud computing space, will be offering its cloud-based storage service called Cloud Files.

Similar to Amazon's S3 offering, Cloud Files runs on Object Storage from Open Stack, the cloud computing project backed by Rackspace to drive open cloud standards and innovation in the industry.

Also available to UK customers is Cloud Servers, Rackspace's answer to Amazon EC2, which is based on the Xen hypervisor and is designed to provide instant computing power by offering the provision of virtual servers in as little as 60 seconds, according to Lanham Napier, chief executive at Rackspace.

Napier explained that offering the services from the firm's UK datacentres will help UK customers satisfy any strict data protection compliance issues, as well as appeal to those looking for "familiarity" in a global market by offering billing in pounds and British support staff.

"As much as we talk about a global marketplace, there is a distinct US market, a China market and a UK market," he told V3.co.uk. "Customers want services delivered in a familiar way."

Perhaps recognising Amazon's recent slashing of pricing for cloud services, Napier added that Rackspace is trying to differentiate by offering superior service levels and the ability to use its dedicated hosting services to offer greater choice.

Among these offerings includes the ability for customers to build a private cloud, with dedicated servers protected behind a firewall within Rackspace's datacentre, which can then be expanded on demand using resources from the public cloud if necessary.

"We have the ability to combine dedicated and cloud infrastructure," he said. "It's an emerging architecture because you get the best of both worlds."