Information - gold of the XXI century, or the new "Fort Knox" for the data in the open spaces of Germany

T-System, a subsidiary of IT giant Deutsche Telekome, presented a large data center in Bayer, Germany. The peculiarity of this project is that, according to the project management, all data placed on the site will be over-protected from unauthorized access to them.

After the scandalous exposure of information gathering activities from the communication structure of the United States, the NSA service, disclosed by its employee Edward Snowden, the problem of locating and safely moving information has become very acute for many data center customers.



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The storm of indignation, which rose after Snowden's revelations, hurt many countries of the world, Germany was no exception. After the stolen documents leaked to the press, the public received direct evidence that NSA employees were engaged in targeted collection of personal data of respectable citizens. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not escape this fate, her phone, it turned out, had been tapped for a long time.

Damage done

The result of the undermined confidence in providers, who place their facilities in the USA, became their real financial losses. It is for these reasons that at the end of June, an authorized member of the German government announced that further cooperation with Verizon would be terminated on the basis of suspicions of assisting US intelligence agencies.

At such a difficult time for competitors, the leader in the German communications market, Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiary T-System decided to take advantage of the opportunities to promote their services, which they openly stated.

“We are investing in the economy of Germany as a country that is one of the world's centers of IT business, and where information security standards are highly valued,” said Deutsche Telecom CEO Tim Hötges. "Our customers now have the opportunity to place their data in a data center comparable to Fort Knox, which is under the control of the provider, which you can fully trust."



The assurances of Tim Hötges are, of course, impressive, but in this context it will be useful to recall the report of the German edition Der Spiegel for August 2013, which makes this whole story not as cloudless as it may seem at first glance. After the journal analyzed the part of the materials declassified by Snowden, it became apparent that the German foreign intelligence agency BND actively cooperated with the US intelligence, passing on metadata collected from German telecommunications networks.

Datacenter twins, completely duplicate data

In addition to the new IT site erected in Bayer, T-Systems built another complete analogue of the first in neighboring Magdeburg, thereby obtaining two twin data centers. According to the project, the two data centers will work as a single structure, duplicating the placed data in two places at the same time, which obviously will make this data more secure and accessible to the end user.



At the moment, two data centers together have all the capabilities to host about 30,000 servers, according to a company press release. The capacity of data centers is located in buildings with a total area of ​​5,500 square meters, while the original project laid the possibility of expanding the area of ​​the complexes more than 7 times, to an impressive 40,000 square meters.

Also, the advanced German provider in pursuit of power has not forgotten about the environmental component. The complex in Bayer received a "Gold Certificate" from the American Environmental Council, which conducts an analysis of building designs for environmental friendliness.