Frankfurt am Main is among the top locations in Europe
Frankfurt, November 2021. Streaming giants, cloud providers, online shops or internet providers – they have all settled in Frankfurt. This may be due to the attractiveness of the Hessian banking metropolis, but above all because it is home to the most data centers in Germany due 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, more data centers are being created and the 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 been using a data center location in Frankfurt am Main due to the high number of internet carriers – despite being located in Munich at the time. “This is where the most relevant platform of various network operators in Europe is located – this hub is the DE-CIX. In Frankfurt, we have the best possible connection to it,” says Evans.
Data hub with massive growth
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, the data volume is also growing steadily. A large amount of data not only needs to be stored, but also shared with customers and partners around the world. These include:
- Regular company data,
- Data from big data applications,
- Machine learning data,
- Deep learning data,
- IoT data,
- Video-on-demand data,
- E-commerce data.
Meanwhile, the rapidly growing flood of data is causing a data throughput of more than ten terabits per second.1 “For most people, this number is difficult to grasp: 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. At no other hub in the world does such an amount of data transfer take place per second, not in Tokyo and not in New York,” Jerome Evans describes the situation.
With firstcolo, Evans offers state-of-the-art data center services and managed services in Frankfurt am Main as well as in several European redundancy locations. “From our own experience, we know that it is difficult to implement data center offerings with multiple terabit connections outside of Frankfurt,” he explains. “Many locations are on the right track, but cannot yet handle the bandwidth requirements of today.” Therefore, many companies have settled in Frankfurt to take advantage of the excellent conditions – even if only virtually in a data center.
DE-CIX Frankfurt is a location advantage
Despite all the speed, experts do not yet see data traffic at its maximum. Technologies such as artificial intelligence or 5G will further increase traffic in the future. “In addition, even more companies are settling in Frankfurt, which need to move closer to customers due to strong network effects and ever-increasing data density,” Evans looks ahead. “That’s why we will need even more capacity and are successively investing in the expansion of our own locations.”
Large, globally active players in particular benefit from the Frankfurt location. Due to its conditions, it enables rapid scaling, both vertically and horizontally. “Streaming providers, for example, have a big advantage here. For corporate customers, it also applies: The closer they are to Frankfurt, the better, i.e., lower, is the latency – that is, 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 high bandwidth. ‘Volume attacks such as DDoS attacks target the infrastructure and limit the ability to communicate with the outside world. When the bandwidth is particularly high, such outages can be compensated for much better,’ says Evans.
IT strategies are becoming more important
Recent developments show that the areas of responsibility 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 large proportion of executives see IT not just 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.
In the future, businesses will be required to ensure a cost-efficient and agile IT infrastructure as the basis for 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 influence. This principle applies to a range of costs – from cloud computing to marketing and sales expenses.
