OVH sets up its 21st datacenter, in Germany

OVH has announced that it is setting up in Germany, where the cloud expert has just acquired a facility. It is the group’s first data centre in this country, and two more are planned over time. With a capacity of about 45,000 servers, this first German data centre will be located less than 1 millisecond from Frankfurt. It will benefit, via this PoP, from a direct connection with Brussels, Strasbourg, and Zurich, and then Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Milan. This data centre is expected to be operational in April 2017.

For the location of its first data centre in Germany, OVH chose Limburg, a city situated less than 100 km from Frankfurt, in the region of Hesse. The building, a former industrial site, is located only a few dozen meters from an electric substation—a real boon as energy is the raw material for a data centre. Its proximity to the PoP in Frankfurt—less than one millisecond—was also a determining factor in choosing this site, as it means the future German data centre can connect to the fiber network that OVH has deployed worldwide. The recently acquired facility will benefit from OVH’s expertise, since the company is used to adapting existing sites in order to deploy its data centres.

As elsewhere, the demand for digital infrastructures is growing strongly in Germany, and this trend will certainly continue in the coming years. “We are confident that, in 2017, the demand for digital infrastructures will exceed the current supply,” explains Béla Waldhauser, leader of the Datacenter Expert Group at ECO – Association of the Internet Industry.

“Both our customers and prospects are increasingly asking for a data centre located in Germany. There are many reasons for this: Germany’s economic situation is good. Furthermore, the country has strict rules on confidentiality and a highly reliable electricity grid. Thus, the opening of this first data centre is a major step in the expansion strategy of OVH, the only global cloud provider that is not American, and therefore not subject to the Patriot Act,” says Peter Hoehn, director of OVH’s German subsidiary.

A data centre with a capacity of 45,000 servers

The European cloud leader plans to initially recruit about six technicians. This figure will increase as the activity expands. Eventually, this first data centre will be able to house up to 45,000 servers, in an area of 4,000 m². OVH has had a presence in Germany since 2006 and the Saarbrucken-based team sees to all the customers in the so-called D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). In Germany, OVH’s customers include many SMEs and large international companies—such as Villeroy & Boch, one of the most renowned multinational companies in Germany, which now relies on OVH’s cloud infrastructure.

An ambitious expansion plan

After announcing the opening of three data centres in Australia, Singapore and Poland last October, OVH had continued to invest in Europe. In order to fund its global expansion project, the cloud expert completed, in 2016, a capital increase of €250 million with two investment funds, KKR and TowerBrook. The company also announced a €1.5 billion investment plan over 5 years. Enough to finance the construction of several additional data centres by the end of 2017 in the United States, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands.
At the end of its deployment plan, OVH will offer its 1 million customers a choice of data centres in 11 countries, across 4 continents, all interconnected through its own network, with a current capacity of 7.5 Tbps.

Contact details:
Amy Stevens or Baptiste Fesselet
Email: ovh@sixdegreespr.com
Phone: +44 (0)118 900 0860