Toshiba’s Cloud & Solutions Division has opened its first cloud computing data center for Europe in the Grand Lyon district, France.

Toshiba is already heavily involved in the district, heading up one of Europe’s largest eco-renovation projects – the Lyon Smart Community project, there, which includes input from a number of private sector partners.

Part of becoming a Smart City for Lyon means meeting environmental, community and technological challenges to bring about efficiencies in communication and energy use.

Toshiba is designing the energy planning system for the project and hosting Tier 3+ cloud servers and applications for the project.

The data center will also be used to provide cloud services to other regions and internal cloud functions for Toshiba.

It and has been funded as part of a much broader global cloud initiative, according to Toshiba managing director for cloud solutions in France Philippe Hartmanshenn.

“Developing this first data center in Rhone-Alpes highlights the importance of the Grand Lyon project for Toshiba and embodies the group's investment in the development of its Cloud offering,” Hartmanshenn said.

“This allows us to move both internal and external client resources and services offsite to our high-security servers - located in France. We also plan to use the data center to develop and integrate business solutions for our clients from every sector."

The cloud and solutions division of Toshiba provides services for both public sector and private companies.

Cloud projects being carried out so far by the company include the rollout of thin clients, data backup and wider virtualization initiatives.