Germany's biggest datacentre opens its doors, targeting the security-conscious
Deutsche Telekom has opened what it claims will be the biggest datacentre in Germany.
The facility, located in the town of Biere in the Saxony-Anhalt region, was officially opened last week and will be used by Deutsche Telekom's IT services unit T-Systems. According to the telco, T-Systems has around 2,000 cloud deals with 600 enterprise customers.
The Biere facility is the twin of another nearby T-Systems datacentre, located 20km away in the city of Madgeburg, with the two sites each acting as a backup for the other. Between them, the pair of facilities employs around 900 staff.
Once work on the twin-core facility reaches completion, it's expected to be the largest datacentre in the country. The twin-core facility currently covers a total of 5,400 square metres and can house 30,000 servers. When subsequent build-out phases are completed, the two centres together will reach a total of 40,000 square metres.
The datacentre is powered entirely by renewable energy and has a PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.3.
According to Deutsche Telekom, the site was built to cater to a "steep increase in demand for secure cloud services based in Germany". However, construction of the Biere facility, overseen by M+W Group and Züblin, began in October 2012 — pre-dating the NSA revelations from Edward Snowden, thought to have sparked further interest among businesses for keeping information within European borders.
Late last year, the company made noises about wanting to take steps to keep domestic internet traffic within Germany's borders, though the practicality of such a move has been questioned. It also introduced an email service branded 'Made in Germany', where messages are encrypted and handled exclusively by German servers, in response to news of the PRISM programme in the US.