Siemens IT Solutions and Services – the IT outsourcing business of the large European engineering conglomerate – has launched a new data center in Huizingen, Belgium, near Brussels, most of which the company will use to provide IT infrastructure as a service, using both private- and public-cloud delivery models. Clients will be able to either use their own, segregated systems for cloud-based elastic resource provisioning or use a public-cloud infrastructure, shared with other users.

The company’s use of the expression “hybrid cloud” in reference to the data center suggests that clients can use a combination of both private and public clouds. Siemens will also provide traditional IT outsourcing services in the new facility.

Siemens will offer IT services based on both cloud and traditional delivery models at the new data center

The services include compute, storage and network resources. Siemens offers four classes of shared storage in the public cloud, which differ from each other based on their back-up capacity and accessibility. The cloud offerings support Windows, Unix and Linux systems.

The facility takes advantage of outside air to cool the IT equipment inside. The economizer’s capacity is controlled automatically, based on outside air temperature.

The organization runs about 21,000 servers in data centers around the world. The company has both large data centers that provide services on a global scale and smaller facilities that serve businesses locally.