Rackspace Plans UK Cloud Services

Texan hosting company Rackspace is planning to launch cloud services in the UK, before the end of 2010, based in a new data centre near Slough.

Rackspace expects to be one of the first of the major cloud players to place public cloud infrastructure in the UK, and the company has always predicted that cloud services will grow quickly regardless of the recession. The company reports rapid growth in cloud services in the US, and expects Europe to follow suit once services are available which meet demands for local data storage.

“Users want to combine dedicated servers with cloud”

Rackspace’s cloud offering competes strongly with Amazon’s EC2 offering, because it allows users to combine dedicated hosted servers with a virtualised service, Rackspace chairman Graham Weston told eWEEK Europe at the launch in London.

“Dedicated servers are more reliable than a virtualised service, and for some users PCI compliance requires them not to use virtualised servers,” said Weston.

Users prefer to use cloud and hosting services in their own country, to meet regulations where their data can be stored, said Weston, and because they also need certainty about the pricing, during times when exchange rates can vary: “Pricing should be stable, and in sterling, so there is not a currency risk.”

There is still a reluctance to use cloud services for real-time line of business applications, he admitted, but there is plenty of business in archiving and testing, and a clear direction towards putting more critical applications in the cloud as it proves itself.

Ninety percent of Rackspace’s business is still in hosting, with only ten percent in the cloud, but the cloud business more than doubled during 2009, and analyst group Gartner has predicted that as much as 20 percent of organisations will no longer own their IT assets by 2012.

Rackspace’s cloud services will be hosted in a data centre in Slough, which “operates to Uptime Tier III standards”, said Weston. The centre has a quoted PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.5, and uses free air cooling – giving it a lower PUE in winter, climbing to around 1.7 in the summer.

Last year Rackspace started pushing hosted solutions as a green alternative, with a Carbon Calculator designed to help smaller businesses calculate how much their carbon footprint could be reduced by moving to a hostedservice.