Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems has partnered with Cisco to offer Intercloud functionality in its largest data center, located near the city of Magdeburg.

Cisco’s Intercloud was introduced in January as a global network of clouds which enables customers to easily shift their workloads between private and public infrastructure, as well as transfer them across data centers and country borders.

Made in Germany
Under the terms of the partnership, Deutsche Telekom will deploy Intercloud nodes and Intercloud Fabric – a software-based, hypervisor-agnostic cloud interconnect technology - within its data centers in Germany.

The roll-out will start with the Magdeburg facility. This data center operates on what T-Systems calls a ‘TwinCore’ model, with a second data center located in a nearby town of Biere. In the event of a critical failure any ‘twin’ can immediately take over the responsibilities of the other, so operations can continue without any disruption.

Together, the two campuses form Germany’s largest data center, with 430,000 sq ft of server space. In the nearest future, they will start offering sovereign, OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service powered by Cisco that meet the country’s notoriously tough data protection rules.

“The cloud is global. However, if you want a strong foothold in the European market you need to be strong in Germany. We will help Cisco to implement its cloud strategy in Germany and the rest of Europe,” said Reinhard Clemens, board member of Deutsche Telekom and CEO of T-Systems.

“Based on Cisco’s Intercloud platform we will be able to offer simple and cost-effective cloud services in compliance with our strict data protection regulations in Germany and Europe.”

T-Systems is one of more than 30 new Intercloud members announced on Monday, who are expected to collectively grow the network by another 250 data centers.

Cisco also said it plans to invest US$1 billion into customer and partner Intercloud projects over the next two years.