The end of the year was rich in announcement for the French cloud company OVH. The company formalized the development of a datacenter in Limburg, about 100 kilometers from Frankfurt, and the acquisition of a building to build another one near London. In just one year, the company located in Roubaix will expand its global presence to 27 datacenters worldwide.

OVH founder and current CTO Octave Klaba

Last October during its annual event, OVH clearly unveiled its ambitions for expansion at European and global level with the planned opening of 10 new datacenters in nine new Countries including England and the United States within a year. The company created by Octave Klaba in 1999 will grow from 17 to 27 datacenters internationally. Three of the new sites were already operational in October in Sidney, Warsaw and Singapore. And just before Christmas, OVH made two other announcements for Europe: the acquisition of a building in Germany and the choice of the London suburbs for the first of its three datacenters planned in the United Kingdom.

Germany will becomme OVH’s base for Nothern Europe
Three data centers are also planned in Germany. The first will cover 4000 m² with a total capacity of 45,000 servers and will be operational next april in Limburg. This city in the Hesse region is very close to Frankfurt, that is to say “less than a millisecond” of this PoP (point of presence). This will allow OVH to connect this new datacenter to the fiber network it deploys around the world by providing its customers with a direct connection to Brussels, Strasbourg and Zurich, and then to Paris, Amsterdam, London and Milan. The building retained is a former industrial site close to a power distribution substation. By extending its coverage in Germany, the cloud host allow its European customers to keep their data on the continent, with the great advantage that OVH is not subject to the Patriot Act, unlike its American competitors.

Discovery offers to test the UK market
In England, the location chosen for its datacenter allows it to be within half a millisecond of the London PoP. The French group explains that the building it acquired – just a few days ago – has a direct connection to Gravelines in the north of France, Amsterdam, Montreal and New York, through its fiber network deployed at World level.
On its UK site, the host plans to install 40,000 servers on 4,000 m2. The datacenter is supposed to be ready by the end of May 2017, first through “Discovery” test offers available in very limited quantities and then with the entire catalog of products. The French company owns the entire building which was previously owned by a telecommunications operator, which explains this ability to open quickly. The site will be interconnected to the OVH PoP in London “via a double fiber path,” and the electrical capacity of the site could be strengthened if necessary, given the proximity of two substations. The other two datacenters planned in the region will provide a back-up solution. The second site will also be located on the suburbs of London, while the third site will be located a little further of the other two in order to be able to set up a recovery site. The three datacenters will be linked by the private network vRtack set up by OVH to facilitate its multi-site infrastructure deployments.

The Gravelines site is one of the biggest European datacenters with over 20000 m² and a capacity comprised between 350000 and 500000 servers

A 1.5 billion euros investment over 5 years
In October the French group raised 250 million euros from two US investors, KKR and Towerbrook. It has planned to invest 1.5 billion euros over five years to expand its locations in Europe and North America. In early December, a new burst of disclosures by Edward Snowden, the NSA subcontractor, revealed that Octave Klava, the company’s founder and current CTO, had been included in a list of people identified as targets of surveillance by the British intelligence services. OVH is the 3rd largest web hosting company in the world with 1,500 employees.