The Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service company UpCloud has finally launched in the U.S., well over a year behind schedule. However, the firm says this is because it has only just finalized its new high-performance storage backend, MaxIOPS.

MaxIOPS, [company]UpCloud[/company] claims, results in big overall savings over rival IaaS offerings from [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services, [company]Google[/company] Cloud Platform and [company]Microsoft[/company] Azure, due to performance of up to 400,000 input/output operations per second – “comparable to the mperformance of 8 enterprise-grade SSDs,” UpCloud founder and CTO Joel Pihlajamaa said in a statement.

It was launched on Tuesday at the Slush Festival in Helsinki, where the opening of UpCloud’s Chicago data center was also announced. This was supposed to open in mid-2013, but CEO Antti Vilpponen told me on Monday that UpCloud “didn’t want to make the investment into the U.S. with just a standard set of features and functionalities.” The planned Singapore data center…