Dell, FedEx, Switch Team Up to Build Nationwide Cloud Service
- Partnership offers alternative to major public-cloud providers
- Technology ‘hubs’ will be set up at existing FedEx facilities
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Dell Technologies Inc., FedEx Corp. and Switch Inc. are building a U.S. network of data centers, offering businesses an alternative to maintaining their own server farms or using major cloud providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The network’s technology hubs will be based in FedEx facilities, feature Dell hardware and connect to existing Switch computing centers, the companies said Thursday in a statement. The service will differ from the Amazon Web Services public cloud, in which information from various clients lives side-by-side in large centralized buildings. Instead, the partners will have locations throughout the country that are closer to clients for greater computing speed. And customers will use the service to host their private clouds, which is more akin to storing applications and data behind a corporate firewall.