Big news today from NTT Com who is announcing that they are acquiring e-shelter, one of Germany’s largest data center operators, NTT will pay more than $840 million in cash for control of Germany’s e-shelter, which manages nearly 90,000 square meters of data center space in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the companies announced Monday.
Germany is a particularly interesting case study since both its legislative framework, and its domestic culture mean there is a strong requirement for data to be locally stored. We’ve already seen the major public cloud vendors forced to accelerate the roll-out of German data centers, these vendors initially believed, somewhat arrogantly, that simply having a European data center would suffice – the fact is that some European countries, in particular Germany, need far more specificity than that to keep them happy.
Companies like e-shelter provide power and cooling services in high-tech warehouses where other companies can set up compute gear. It saves them the cost of building and managing their own data centers.
