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Managed hosting company Rackspace is to open a German data center in the middle of next year.
The company said the new Frankfurt data center — its first in continental Europe — will provide customers with a new option for managed IT infrastructure in the face of strict personal data protection laws across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The facility is designed to serve customers seeking managed private clouds and hosting environments, with a focus on fully managed VMware environments, the company said.
With the addition of the Frankfurt data centre, which is due to be fully operational in mid-2017, Rackspace will operate 12 data centres worldwide, including in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Dallas, Chicago and Ashburn (near Washington, D.C.).
There is something of a trend for building European data centers at the moment. Earlier this week IBM said it was tripling its UK data center capacity, while Microsoft has recently announced new installations in Germany and France.
This is partly due to increasing demand for cloud services in general as enterprise spending on cloud services increases. However, it’s also being driven by customers who are keen to keep their data within their own countries or regions, even if it’s hosted by a third party.
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