German discount supermarket chain data centers?
Why not?
Germany’s richest man takes on Big Tech – Supermarket billionaire Dieter Schwarz is investing billions in his cloud company, Schwarz Digits, to rival Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
When Bernd Wagner walks through his new company’s headquarters, he can barely contain his enthusiasm. He starts rattling off figures like “seven times as much steel as was used to build the Eiffel Tower” or “cables stretching all the way to Naples…”
I mean float. At least not across the German border, they don’t.
Germans being pathalogically hypersensitive whenever it comes to data protection issues, whether they be actual issues or not, Deutsche Telekom has cleverly exploited these wildly popular fears during this year’s CeBIT technology fair by suggesting to “the 3.6 million prosperous German small and medium sized firms who have not yet taken the leap to storing their data using cloud computing” that their “German cloud” can offer them the safety and security that those leaky and toxic foreign clouds could never offer them – even if those foreign clouds wanted to offer them safety and security in the first place which, of course, they don’t.
Telekom’s cloud – some 30 datacenters spread across Germany – is, well, spread across Germany, so nothing can ever possibly go wrong, one Telekom spokesman tells us. “And we are not playing on peoples’ fears, either” another spokesman added. “It’s just that when servers are situated outside of Germany there is a risk that companies will use your data for commercial purposes or, worse, they will be spied on by the secret services.”
Let’s all sing together: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away…
This will be “a cloud computer model for the German market and in the German language.” Made for Germans. By Germans. In Germany.
Observing Hermann 