The facility is designed to serve customers who seek managed private clouds and hosting environments, with a focus on fully managed VMware environments.
Rackspace will be working with one of its long-standing partners to build out the infrastructure of the new operation, which is expected to be fully operational in mid-2017.
To address increasing customer demand for managed cloud services, the plan to open the new facility in Frankfurt follows the recent appointment of Alex Fuerst as the leader of Rackspace operations in the DACH region. Alex has hired an in-region team focused on delivering managed private clouds and hosting environments, as well as managed cloud services for customers seeking help with the complexity and cost of managing AWS and Azure. Globally, Rackspace engineers have more than 500 AWS certifications and proven experience with architecting, deploying, operating and optimising both AWS and Azure customer environments. With this team of managed cloud specialists, Rackspace is poised to serve customers in the region with its expertise and broad portfolio of services for multi-cloud environments.
"I am excited to be able to bring this new Rackspace data centre online to serve our fast-expanding German customer base," said Fuerst, who joined Rackspace in September 2016 after working in IT leadership roles in the DACH region. "We're experiencing strong demand from DACH-centric customers, as well as U.S. and EMEA-based multinationals who are looking for managed private clouds and hosting environments, along with managed cloud services and expertise for AWS and Azure in continental Europe. This data centre will strengthen our multi-cloud capabilities on the European continent and pave the way for us to achieve our goal of becoming the leading managed cloud provider in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, which is already our third largest international market."
"With the opening of our data centre in Germany, we can provide the highest level of availability, security, performance and management, and also help our customers address data protection requirements by providing them with multi-cloud deployment options. As the demand for managed services increases in the German-speaking region, companies of all sizes in all verticals are embracing multi-cloud approaches to IT, so that each of their workloads runs on the platform where it can achieve the best performance and cost efficiency," Fuerst continued. "More and more of those companies are turning to Rackspace expertise and support for their critical IT services and data."
With the addition of the data centre in Frankfurt, Rackspace will operate 12 data centres worldwide, including in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Dallas, Chicago and Ashburn (near Washington, D.C.).
