VMware launches German data centre focused on data sovereignty
Wed 15 Oct 2014
As Switzerland is to banking, it seems increasingly that Germany will be to inviolable data storage. In 2015 virtualisation tech giant VMware will bring a new German data centre online, the latest company to join the growing trend for German data centres that protect their contents from falling into the purview of other countries.
Germany is a locus for the issue of data sovereignty in this period, with Amazon and Microsoft pondering investing new data centres in a region which has become understandably paranoid about intrusions from outside intelligence powers such as the NSA.
The new centre will employ vCloud technology (formerly known as vCloud Hybrid Cloud Service) to allow current VMware environments to interact with the public cloud. The services will be available in the first quarter of next year, and a beta program is available until then to U.S.-based clients.
VMware’s executive vice president and general manager of Cloud Services Business Unit Bill Fathers said: “Since introducing VMware vCloud Air a year ago, VMware has made significant strides to provide customers with a hybrid cloud platform they know and trust. As we continue to expand VMware vCloud Air into new markets, with more services than ever before, we are only just scratching the surface of what the service will become: the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for delivering innovation as a service from the data center to the desktop and mobile applications.”
According to the VMware-approved press release, 225 German senior IT administrators hold that the location of their cloud provider is a critical factor in choosing provisioning.
VMware runs vCloud Air centres in five locations in the United States, with two more in Japan and the United Kingdom, respectively.
In July Deutsche Telekom announced a ‘Fort Knox’ data centre to be built in Biere in Germany. CEO Timotheus Hoettges commented at the time: “even clients from the U.S. insist these days on having their information stored here.”
