Etix Everywhere, a global data centre provider and operator, EVO, an energy supply company for electricity, natural gas and heat, and Data Center Group (DCG), a data center design, planning and certification office, have teamed up to build a 15 MVA facility in Offenbach, part of the Frankfurt Rhein-Main urban area. The first building represents an investment of 120 million euros, with the joint-venture planning to open the first phase of the data centre by Q3 2019.
Becoming the second largest data centre cluster in Europe, Frankfurt has to cope with continued increase of capacity and energy demand. On the other side of the river Main, Etix Everywhere, EVO and DCG have secured enough power for large-scale expansions to develop a massive campus of data centres.
The first phase of the project will provide 15 MVA of colocation capacity, developed onto a greenfield site of 7,800 sqm in Offenbach. At full capacity, the 18,000 sqm building will host more than 3,000 racks through 8,000 sqm of IT rooms.
“This project is a strategic joint venture between Etix Everywhere, DCG and EVO” explained Robert Stoffers, head of energy services for EVO. “Our combined expertise will allow us to deliver a high-quality infrastructure to meet the booming demand for IT capacity in Frankfurt due to the exponential growth of IoT, Big Data, Blockchain…”
The joint-venture is already in advanced negotiations with four potential customers.“This data centre will offer unique expansion capabilities, at only a few hundred metres off the main IT hub of Frankfurt. Our clients will benefit from an ideal location with excellent connectivity” stated Marc Fröse, country manager Germany of Etix Everywhere.”The emergence of new tech trends makes us rethink the organisation & localisation of data centres, in order to cover all the needs.”
The data centre has been designed to host different types of customers, from large cloud service providers to enterprise customers.
“It was essential to come up with a scalable technical solution providing a maximum flexibility.” said Ralf Siefen, managing director of Data Center Group. “No matter what our clients’ needs are, our data centre design will be flexible enough to meet their requirements.”
The data centre will be EN 50600 certified, a new European standard for data centres. Among the proposed options to customers, the data centre will be a multi-tiering facility offering different redundancy levels within the same building. Customers will be able to choose their IT room based on the certifications they want to have.
Due to Frankfurt’s climate, the data centre will be able to maximise the usage of indirect free-cooling. Combining this with the ‘2N distributed’ technical architecture, the data centre will benefit from a design PUE of 1.2.
Frankfurt is currently the leader of connectivity in Germany and in Europe, in particular thanks to the presence of peering points, including the German Internet Exchange named ‘DE-CIX’. The data centre is indeed located at less than 1 km from this strategic peering point
More than 20 international and national telco carriers are immediately available on site ensuring optimum connectivity services to customers for whom latency is key to operate real-time applications.
The colocation data centre will complement Etix Everywere’s global network of edge data centres already in operations.
