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Frankfurt/Main, June 13, 2023. Streaming giants, cloud providers, online retailers, and internet service providers – they have all established themselves in Frankfurt. This may be partly due to the attractiveness of the Hessian banking metropolis, but primarily because it hosts the largest number of data centers in Germany thanks to DE-CIX Frankfurt. The city also holds its own in international comparison: this is where the most extensive data exchange between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) takes place. “This attracts more and more companies. As a result, additional data centers are being built and data density continues to increase due to network effects,” explains Jerome Evans, founder and managing director of firstcolo GmbH, based in Frankfurt.
Since 2006, firstcolo has utilized a data center location in Frankfurt am Main due to the high number of internet carriers – despite being based in Munich at the time. “This is where Europe’s most relevant platform of various network operators is located – this hub is DE-CIX Frankfurt. At this location, we have the best possible connection to it,” says Evans.
With the well-known big players in the data center industry focusing on so-called colocation offerings, and the multitude of value-add data centers, data volume is also growing steadily. A vast amount of data not only needs to be stored but also shared with customers and partners worldwide. These include:
The rapidly growing flood of data now generates a data throughput of more than ten terabits per second.1 “For most people, this number is difficult to comprehend: ten terabits per second can be compared to the data volume of 2.2 million HD-quality videos – started at the same time – or 2.2 billion written A4 pages per second. No other hub in the world handles the transfer of such a data volume per second, not in Tokyo and not in New York,” describes Jerome Evans.
With firstcolo, Evans offers state-of-the-art data center services and managed services in Frankfurt am Main as well as at several European redundancy locations. “From our own experience, we know that outside of Frankfurt it is difficult to implement data center offerings with multi-terabit connectivity,” he explains. “Many locations are on the right track but cannot yet handle the bandwidth requirements of today.” Therefore, many companies have established themselves in Frankfurt to leverage the excellent conditions – even if only virtually in a data center.
Despite all the speed, experts do not see data traffic at its maximum yet. Technologies such as artificial intelligence or 5G will further increase traffic in the future. “In addition, even more companies will settle in Frankfurt, which must move closer to customers due to strong network effects and ever-increasing data density,” Evans anticipates. “That’s why we will need even more capacity and are continuously investing in the expansion of our own locations.”
Large, globally operating players in particular benefit from the Frankfurt location. Its conditions enable rapid scaling, both vertically and horizontally. “Streaming providers, for example, have a major advantage here. For corporate customers, the following also applies: the closer they are to Frankfurt, the better – meaning lower – the latency, i.e., the delay in communication speed between the server and the user of a service,” argues the expert.
The fight against cybercrime also benefits from the large bandwidth. “Volume attacks such as DDoS attacks target the infrastructure and limit the ability to communicate with the outside world. When bandwidth is particularly high, such outages can be compensated for much more effectively,” says Evans.
Recent developments show that the responsibilities of IT departments have changed in recent years. They now encompass not only internal technical functions but also important strategic components. This perception is also shared at the management level. A majority of executives see IT not only as a support function but increasingly as a significant strategic element. For this reason, IT should no longer just ensure a high-performance infrastructure but also contribute to success through innovative ideas, business models, and processes.
Companies are now required to ensure a cost-effective and agile IT infrastructure as the foundation of their business activities, as growth is difficult to predict in times of economic downturn. Therefore, companies must build systems that can adapt to changing demand rather than committing to expenses they cannot control. This principle applies to a range of costs – from cloud computing to marketing and sales expenses.
