Rackspace Expands European Reach With German Data Centre

Managed cloud provider Rackspace has announced it is building its first ever data centre in continental Europe, with the Frankfurt facility expected to open its doors in mid 2017.

It comes after the firm said it was experiencing ‘strong demand’ for managed private clouds and hosting environments in the (DACH) region which is made up of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Frankfurt Data Centre

The decision to build a data centre in Germany in order to service these DACH customers was also taken because of the strict rules governing data sovereignty and personal data in the region.

Indeed, data sovereignty is an increasingly important issue. LinkedIn for example is currently being blocked in Russia because Russian customer data is being stored in overseas in foreign data centres.

To this end Rackspace has determined that Germany is a suitable market for expansion, and it has teamed up with one of its long-standing partners to build out the infrastructure of the new facility. The new data centre will be designed to serve customers who seek managed private clouds and hosting environments, with a focus on fully managed VMware environments.

In addition to the German data centre, Rackspace also appointed Alex Fuerst as the leader of Rackspace operations in the DACH region.

A regional team has also been hired to help deliver managed private clouds and hosting environments, as well as managed cloud services for customers seeking help with the complexity and cost of managing AWS and Azure.

Rackspace of course works with a number of public cloud vendors, including Microsoft and AWS, and the firm was a co-founder of the OpenStack cloud movement, along with NASA.

“I am excited to be able to bring this new Rackspace data centre online to serve our fast-expanding German customer base,” said Fuerst. “This data centre will strengthen our multi-cloud capabilities on the European continent and pave the way for us to achieve our goal of becoming the leading managed cloud provider in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, which is already our third largest international market.”

“With the opening of our data centre in Germany, we can provide the highest level of availability, security, performance and management, and also help our customers address data protection requirements by providing them with multi-cloud deployment options,” added Fuerst.

“As the demand for managed services increases in the German-speaking region, companies of all sizes in all verticals are embracing multi-cloud approaches to IT, so that each of their workloads runs on the platform where it can achieve the best performance and cost efficiency.”

Group Takeover

The Frankfurt data centre will mean that Rackspace now operates 12 data centres worldwide, located at sites such as London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Dallas, Chicago and Ashburn (near Washington DC).

It has certainly been a busy period for the firm. In August Rackspace revealed it was going private, after private equity firm Apollo Global Management agreed a $4.3 billion (£3.26bn) deal to take control of the cloud hosting firm.

Rumours had persisted about Rackspace for a while now, ever since it announced its intent to study strategic alternatives two years ago.

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