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The OVH data center in Gravelines, France

OVH Kicks Off Three-Data Center Attack on UK Cloud Market

Brexit no deterrent for French cloud firm’s global expansion push

French hosting and cloud provider OVH is stepping into the UK market, starting with a data center in the London suburbs, which it said will be the first of three it’s planning to launch in the country.

The Roubaix-based company – which in 2010 made headlines beyond the hosting industry bubble for agreeing to host Wikileaks, after Amazon had caved in to US government pressure and dropped the site – is now in the middle of a global expansion push, fueled partially by a €250 million funding round closed last year.

Today’s announcement follows the launch of data centers in Australia, Singapore, and Poland a few months ago. The company recently announced plans to step into the US market, with a site in Northern Virginia, and Germany, with a site in Frankfurt.

By the time it’s done, OVH plans to have data centers in 11 countries and expects to have spent €1.5 billion and five years to build them.

At 43,000 square feet, its first site in the UK will be a mid-size data center, which it expects to bring online by the end of May. OVH also plans to launch a second site on the outskirts of London and a third, remote site to act as a disaster-recovery facility.

The company designs its own hardware and operates its own private metro network, called vRack, in each multi-site region it deploys. Its cloud is built on OpenStack.

It also comes up with unusual designs for its data centers, such as its cube-shaped facility in Roubaix and its Strasbourg data center, built almost exclusively out of containers.

OVH’s strategy for competing with Amazon and Microsoft? Hybrid cloud.

TAGS: Europe OVH
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