Cloudant cements UK expansion

Cloudant has worked with Rackspace® Hosting, the open cloud company, to offer locally-hosted solutions in the UK and to provide customers with a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution served from Rackspace’s UK data centre. This local availability will help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing a database on-site, while also helping customers in their compliance and business continuity requirements.

Cloudant joined the Rackspace Cloud Tools programme in December 2012, making its NoSQL DBaaS available for web and mobile applications across The Rackspace Open Cloud™, with straightforward developer access and purchasing options from Rackspace’s online Cloud Tools Marketplace.

Today’s announcement builds on the initial relationship, making Cloudant’s DBaaS available to customers and developers wanting to host some or all of their data locally in the UK by making full use of the new Rackspace data centre in Slough, Buckinghamshire.

“Expanding our relationship with Rackspace represents an important part of the growth strategy for Cloudant as we underpin our strategic expansion into the UK,” said Simon Metson, director of UK engineering at Cloudant. “We will use Rackspace open cloud infrastructure as a base delivery platform to explore further relationships throughout Europe, a region that has a growing need for big data and big mobile database capabilities.”

Customers will be able to choose between database services delivered via Cloudant’s multi-tenant infrastructure or via dedicated infrastructure, allowing organisations to satisfy larger-scale performance needs or data compliance requirements that preclude the use of multi-tenant environments. Cloudant’s DBaaS will be available via the Cloud Tools Marketplace and through the Cloudant EMEA sales force.

The Cloudant DBaaS is a collection of database clusters that are hosted and scaled across multiple Rackspace data centres worldwide. With a CouchDB-compatible, RESTful JSON API, an incremental MapReduce engine, and built-in full-text search based on Apache Lucene, Cloudant delivers low-latency, highly-available data layer performance and pushes dynamic data distribution closer to the network edge. Developers using The Rackspace Open Cloud can easily select Cloudant as an application data layer that scales up or down on-demand as needed using a simple management interface.

“Most developers I talk to are not DBAs. They do not want to spend time managing and scaling databases. They would much rather focus on building web and mobile applications, and Cloudant provides these developers with the world’s first globally distributed DBaaS for loading, storing, analysing, and distributing application data,” said Jim Battenberg, cloud and partner evangelist at Rackspace. “We look forward to deepening the relationship between Cloudant and the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace to give customers easy access to tools that can help them manage the growing ocean of data and to provide them with an open cloud experience.”