There's gold in them thar hills! Rackspace latest firm to join Frankfurt data centre rush

VMware-friendly facility

Rackspace has chosen Germany as home for its first data centre in mainland Europe.

The managed cloud provider, which is to become an AWS and Microsoft Azure support partner, will jointly build and open a centre in Frankfurt next year.

Rackspace is the latest to set up shop in Frankfurt, Germany's centre for finance and fifth largest city.

Alibaba Cloud, the AWS-like offshoot of Jack Ma's Chinese net commerce giant, said this week it would open its first European data centre in Frankfurt using a co-location facility run by Vodafone.

Alibaba has had facilities in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US. Microsoft opened two German data centres in September, one of which is also in Frankfurt.

Amazon also opened a "region" in Frankfurt two years ago – "region" being AWS jargon for a computing group made up of different data centres.

Rackspace provides cloud support services for both firms but its first German facility will, it seems, serve the needs of private clouds.

The facility will support fully managed VMware clouds to support growth in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria – Rackspace's third largest international market.

Frankfurt is Rackspace's 12th data centre worldwide, with facilities already in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, and cities in the US.

Announcing the news, Rackspace said it's experiencing strong demand from German, Swiss, and Austrian markets, plus US and EMEA multinational interest in private cloud, hosting, and managed cloud for both AWS and Azure in Europe.

The new facility will also help customers meet strict data protection laws in Germany, Rackspace said. ®