Cloud Hosting Firm Linode Opens New Data Center in Frankfurt

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Cloud hosting provider Linode announced the launch of a new data center inFrankfurt, Germany on Monday, its eighth data center and first in continental Europe. The launch continues Linode’s global expansion.

The new data center doubles Linode’s capacity in Europe, which previously all came from its London location, and it offers a number of regional advantages. As a financial and digital hub, Frankfurt is a natural choice for Linode’s expansion.

Over a third of Europe’s Internet traffic travels through Frankfurt, which is home to the largest Internet exchange in the world by traffic, DE-CIX, and the company expects its services to benefit from abundant peering opportunities, according to a blog post. The new presence also allows domestic German customers to host data with Linode in compliance with the country’s federal data protection act, or Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG), which are among the world’s strictest local data storage requirements.

“There is a growing demand for hosting infrastructure across Europe,” said Linode CEO Christopher S. Aker. “There is an exciting startup and technology development scene in Germany and throughout Europe. We are pleased to expand our simple and powerful cloud services to developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses in the region.”

Like the company’s London location, Linode is using colocation and data center services from TelecityGroup for its Frankfurt presence. Linode Frankfurt is KVM only, as Linode began offering generally available upgrades from Xen in its other data centers in June. Xen has been dogged by security issues lately, causing numerous headaches for service providers. Container hypervisor LXD was shown to run denser machines with lower latency than KVM in benchmarking by Canonical in May, but LXD does not support Windows, as KVM does, so for now KVM continues to be a popular hypervisor suitable for most end-users.

In a statement, COO Thomas Asaro touted Linode’s superior performance to Amazon and Google clouds in uptime, processing power, bandwidth, throughput, and customer service benchmarks, while Aker said the company continues to assess global demand in considering its next expansion. It opened a data center in Singapore earlier this year.

Linode announced in July that it will relocate its head office to Philadelphia and conduct a large hiring round to accommodate its expansion.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-hosting-firm-linode-opens-new-data-center-in-frankfurt