3-AZ in Germany, coming soon.
OVHcloud announced it at the European Summit on Digital Sovereignty.
With the event held in Berlin, the timing was appropriate. The announcement largely eclipsed the unveiling of 3-AZ in another country: Italy. This architecture featuring three Availability Zones has indeed been deployed in the Milan cloud region (eu-south-mil). For now, only the IaaS portion is live. DBaaS and managed Kubernetes are expected to follow “very soon,” according to the Public Cloud roadmap.
The 3-AZ is also available in Paris (eu-west-par region), since April 2024.
A base established in the Frankfurt region
In Germany, OVHcloud opened its first data center in 2017, northwest of Frankfurt, in the town of Limburg an der Lahn (Hesse). The building had previously been a printing works. A direct connection to Brussels, Strasbourg and Prague had been established.
The complex was expanded twice, in 2018 and 2021, increasing the computational surface to around 2,500 m2. Since then, another data center – 6,000 m2 – has been built in the same city. The first stone was laid in 2022. That year, the headquarters moved to Cologne (North Rhine-Westphalia). It had remained established in Saarbrücken (Saar) since the creation, in 2006, of the German subsidiary – whose first CEO was Henryk Klaba, Octave’s brother.
Datacenter in Kehl, trusted cloud with T-Systems… Projects that did not come to fruition
OVH had a data center project in Kehl, the border town to France. It was mentioned in 2013 at the inauguration of its second container-based data center in Strasbourg (SBG4, which would be marginally affected by the 2021 fire). The plan was to host up to 10,000 servers. The idea never materialized.
Other projects in Germany did not come to fruition, such as the 2020 collaboration announced with T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. The promise was to develop, by 2021, a trusted cloud based on OpenStack, aligned with Gaia-X principles. The French government, through Bruno Le Maire and Cédric O, welcomed this development.
T-Systems today has its own OpenStack offering (Open Telekom Cloud), without any apparent technological or commercial links to OVHcloud.
From the national police to social security, flagship contracts for OVHcloud
In its announcement of 3-AZ in Germany, OVHcloud mentions four clients: Commerz Real, ITSC, the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (literally the Federal Employment Agency) and the Bundespolizei (the national police).
The contract with Commerz Real was announced this year. The asset management company, which specializes in real estate investments and renewable energy, will host “a significant portion” of its infrastructure with OVHcloud.
The national police has, for its part, decided to host its new training program at OVHcloud, centered on a video-conferencing solution developed by a German company. The contract, also announced this year, runs for five years.
The deal with the Federal Employment Agency was signed in 2024. Two other German social-security bodies joined the contract, which covers a multicloud platform managed by Computacenter. AWS, Google and Microsoft are in the loop, alongside two German providers (IONOS, StackIT), one Polish (CloudFerro)… and OVHcloud. The project spans four years, with a €100 million investment.
As for ITSC (IT services provider), it had organized in 2023 a public procurement process that OVHcloud won. It involved migrating to the cloud the processing, backup and storage of health data for around forty corporate health insurance funds.
The same year, OVHcloud won a contract in a procurement process run by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center). It involved hosting the infrastructure for a project led by the center: COOPERANTS (Collaborative Processes and Services for Aeronautics and Space). Its aim is to build, in line with Gaia-X principles, a European data space for the aerospace industry.
