OVHcloud will soon debut a tape-storage-as-a-service developed in partnership with IBM and France-based software vendor Atempo to meet European data sovereignty and localization requirements.

Initial rollout of the platform will stay close to home for the French cloud provider which has dedicated four new facilities located several hundred miles apart in France for disaster recovery purposes, with plans to push the service out worldwide in the coming months. 

The joint effort on behalf of OVHcloud, IBM, and Atempo targets public and private organizations that require long-term preservation of sensitive data at a time when enterprises in all industries are waking up to a massive explosion of data without the infrastructure to store it. Historically, backups are infrequent and all but the most important data is put on the digital back shelf. The backups generally are done using low cost and low functionality approaches, often using tape as longevity is its strength. 

OVHcloud tape-as-service is based on IBM's 3592 proprietary format, the most recent generation of which has a capacity per tape of 20TB (60TB compressed) and can last up to 30 years. The company isn’t sharing pricing details yet, but with S3-compatibility, the new platform will compete against rival Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive. 

In addition to using IBM’s tape technology, the cloud storage service will use Atempo's technology platform, Miria, an enterprise data backup, archive, and migration software suite, to orchestrate data. This is the latest joint effort from the two European-based companies after they struck a strategic partnership early last year to establish a sovereign cloud service.

And because it can be difficult to locate a system of record — or where whole sets of data live — when it’s distributed across multiple locations, which often fragments the data, OVHcloud will also use erasure coding 9+3 technology to create redundancy for data protection.

While the French cloud provider’s plans to take on the big three hyperscalers in the U.S. ultimately fizzled out, OVHcloud is still at war with the cloud giants, but this time the fight is on home turf. According to a new report from Synergy Research Group, AWS, Microsoft, and Google are continuing to blot out European service providers as the platform of choice for European cloud services.

The report found that while the European cloud market has more than tripled over the past three years, European service providers have seen their market share plunge from 26% in 2017, to less than 16% at the end of the third quarter of 2020. The vast majority of that market (66%) is now controlled by AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

Among those European service providers, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom had the largest stake at just 2%. That was just ahead of OVHCloud and Orange.

European operators have attempted to turn the tide against those U.S.-based hyperscalers, with the recently launched Gaia-X initiative. That initiative was announced last June as a way to tackle cloud and data sovereignty challenges of Europe’s geo-political structure. It’s targeted at linking current, decentralized, country-specific cloud operations under a centralized management system.

“Their efforts are laudable but the trouble is that this is a bit like King Canute attempting to stop an incoming tide,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, wrote in the report, citing the vast scale advantage the hyperscalers possess. He noted that the big three U.S. cloud providers have 67 hyperscale data centers in Europe and more than 150 additional local points of presence (PoP), with U.S.-based tier-two cloud providers holding another 36 “major data centers.” U.S-based cloud providers have collectively invested nearly $15 billion in capex in Europe during the past year, marking a 20% year-over-year increase.

“European firms are facing a huge challenge if they want to break out of their niche-like positions – the revenue growth opportunities are massive but so too is the funding and willpower required to tap into those opportunities,” Dinsdale wrote.