Rackspace has launched its Cloud Infrastructure in Europe. "After strong growth in 2010, Rackspace is off to a solid start in 2011," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. 

The company’s new pay-as-you-go cloud offerings based in the UK include Rackspace Cloud Files, running on OpenStack Object Storage, and Cloud Servers, based on the Xen hypervisor. The new cloud platform joins the dedicated hosting platform already offered in EMEA.

It’s worth noting that this week, Rackspace also announced that the open source OpenStack project founded by Rackspace and NASA now has 40 cloud partners. 

"Our US-based Rackspace cloud has already been hugely successful, with over 100,000 customers globally now taking advantage of our hosted cloud services," said President and CEO Lanham Napier. "Due to storage regulations set out under European law, many UK companies are restricted from using cloud. Our UK offering allows companies to avoid offshore data issues and weighty upfront capital investments which helps them become more strategically agile from a business perspective. We’re delighted to launch our UK cloud today and we already have over 500 customers in beta."

"Some industry analysts have stated that by 2012, 20% of organisations will no longer own an in- house IT infrastructure," Napier pointed out. "Cloud computing enables this evolution in a cost- effective way; if customers on the cloud no longer need resources, they stop using them and almost immediately stop paying for them. This will be critical to companies still fighting to cut costs from their budgets, and will allow them tocontrol spending more tightly than ever before."

"It is as a result of direct feedback from our existing and prospective customer base in Europe that we have brought the Rackspace cloud to Europe and built it out in our UK data centre," he added. "The Rackspace European cloud brings with it reduced latency for those customers and helps eradicate concerns over currency fluctuations and European data legislation compliance."

Rackspace is also delivering on its acquisition of Cloudkick (announced last month), and has fully integrated the Cloudkick panel into the UK cloud offering so users can manage both US and UK cloud servers from one panel, the representative says.