IBM recently announced the opening of a new cloud data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, its second cloud data center in Brazil and its third in Latin America.
Big Blue said this move is in response to the rapid growth of cloud adoption in Latin America, which is expected to grow more than 26 percent by 2018.
IBM’s new SoftLayer data center in Sao Paolo has capacity for 9,000 total servers and a power rating of 2.8 megawatts and offers the full range of SoftLayer infrastructure services, including bare metal and virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking.
This data center will support its growing customer base in the region that already includes hundreds of customers in Brazil such as Audio Monitor, Unicamp, Finep, Pague Menos Drugstore, WTW Media Group, Seeker, among others. This is part of an overall $1.2 billion expansion of SoftLayer data centers globally that IBM announced last year.
Located in Jundiaí, Sao Paulo, the new facility gives local companies access to a broad array of services for building in-country cloud solutions, while global users can leverage faster network speeds to improve performance and reach end users even faster, IBM said.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s cloud computing market is expected to more than double in the next two years. According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, Brazil’s cloud computing market, worth $474.8 million in 2014, is estimated to reach $1.11 billion in 2017. While cost reduction remains a major driver for cloud adoption, 45 percent of Brazilian IT executives responding to a 2014 Frost & Sullivan survey said the cloud supports business innovation, and another 45 percent said the cloud provides greater flexibility for their organization to explore new business opportunities.
By providing Brazilian customers with a local on-ramp to IBM Cloud resources, IBM increases flexibility for storing and computing data within the country. The new data center joins two other IBM Cloud data centers in Latin America: one located in Hortolandia, Sao Paulo and Queretaro, Mexico, along with a network of data centers around the globe, providing users with the performance and disaster recovery solutions needed to ensure business continuity in case of accidents.
IBM said its cloud investment in the area is paying off, as companies such as Seekr, a Brazilian social media monitoring startup launched in 2010, has moved its platform to IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure.
“It is apparent to us partners that IBM is increasingly investing in SoftLayer,” said Mauricio Brentano, CTO of Seekr, in a statement. “More than performance and quality, one of the great advantages of IBM is the service, promptness and assistance in defining the best solution for our needs—extremely difficult to find in other cloud computing solutions.”
IBM officials noted that from the new location, the connections with IBM Cloud services in Latin America will be reduced to just milliseconds.
The new data center also can host OpenStack-based solutions including those from Blue Box, a recent IBM acquisition. This helps extend the reach of any OpenStack environment, enabling customers to connect to infrastructure and managed services that support architectures including AIX on Power Systems. This gives customers more flexibility and choice when it comes to open standards and hybrid cloud deployments.
IBM operates more than 41 cloud data centers in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe. IBM has more than doubled SoftLayer’s overall data center capacity since it invested $1.2 billion back in 2014 for a massive global datacenter expansion.