(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Rackspace Hosting (www.rackspace.com) announced on Wednesday it plans to bring two cloud infrastructures including SMB public cloud services and VMware-based enterprise private cloud to the UK by the end of the year.
The company will offer a Xen-based cloud service for the SMB market, and VMware-based hybrid public-private services for enterprise customers.
Due in the fourth quarter, the cloud services will be comparable to the ones Rackspace currently offers in the US, but will be delivered from Rackspace’s two data centres in the UK.
With these two cloud projects, Rackspace expects to be one of the first of the major cloud players to offer public cloud infrastructure in the UK.
Amazon has been offering UK customers its EC2 cloud service, which is also also based on Xen virtual machines, for the past couple years.
The public cloud infrastructure is based on the Xen hypervisor. Customers can choose to deploy it on either Linux or Windows, paying to access the service by the hour.
The Enterprise private cloud solution will be designed to support Hybrid Hosting solutions that combine the best features of cloud computing and managed hosting.
Rackspace decided to offer cloud infrastructures in the UK after seeing growing demand from UK and European customers for local access to these services.
The company wanted to ensure it was fully prepared to offer the cloud infrastructure in the UK before launching, says Pat Matthews, VP and GM for cloud at Rackspace.
“The cloud is still relatively new,” says Matthews. “We really wanted to make sure that we have a scalable platform and architecture before we deployed it across the entire world. We have a pretty strong committment to Fanatical Support, so it’s just been very important for us to make sure we get it right before we go everywhere.”
