IBM’s Frankfurt Data Centre Opens

IBM’s Frankfurt data centre is now officially all systems go as the SoftLayer site opens its doors to its first customers.

The SoftLayer data centre is part of IBM’s recently announced $1.2bn investment into cloud, and the German building will help the firm meet the country’s strict data privacy regulations, as well as lowering latency for nearby users.

Strongest policies

“Data privacy regulations in the European Union (EU) are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer.

“While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data

storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”

The centre in Frankfurt uses SoftLayer’s ‘pod design’, which allows for thousands of physical servers and offer a wide range of cloud infrastructure services.

The site is one of a raft of new data centres opening around Europe, including locations such as Amsterdam, London, and Paris. Together, they broaden IBM’s redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world.

Germany has seen a spout of recent data centre openings, with firms catering to the EU’s data regulations. In October 2014, Amazon Web Services opened new data centres in the city.

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