OVH sets up its 21st datacenter, in Germany

For the location of its first datacenter 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 datacenter. 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 datacenter 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 datacenters.

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 datacenter 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 datacenter 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 datacenter 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 datacenter 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 datacenters 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 datacenters 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 datacenters in 11 countries, across 4 continents, all interconnected through its own network, with a current capacity of 7.5 Tbps.