eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
IBM announced that its SoftLayer unit has opened a second cloud data center in the Netherlands, located in Almere, just outside Amsterdam.
The Almere data center is securely connected by a private network to all SoftLayer data centers around the world. IBM Cloud operates SoftLayer facilities in North and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe, including data centers in the greater London area, Paris, Frankfurt and an existing data center in Amsterdam.
“This new facility demonstrates the demand and success IBM Cloud is having at delivering high-value services right to the doorstep of our clients,” James Comfort, IBM’s general manager of cloud services, said in a statement. “We’re reaching customers in a way that takes all the guess work out of moving to the cloud. They can build and scale applications, run the toughest big data workloads, have the level of security they need, all in country and connected to a truly global platform.”
One customer already leveraging these advantages is KPN, a Dutch IT and telecommunications services provider. As part of an existing partnership with IBM, KPN sells cloud services built on SoftLayer infrastructure. The company plans to deliver value-added cloud services to more than 1 million small, midsize, large, and corporate businesses across the Netherlands via the new SoftLayer facility.
“We are committed to offer services allowing our customers to stay on the leading edge of innovative developments,” Louis Rustenhoven, director of marketing and sales for KPN Business Market, said in a statement. “With our partnership with SoftLayer, our end users will be able to take advantage of cloud services that not only meet their in-country data residency requirements, but will also offer a choice between three IaaS options: bare-metal servers, single-tenant and multi-tenant virtual machines, for most optimized performance, security, scalability and manageability.”
Last month, IBM announced the opening of a second cloud center in Australia, this one in Sydney. As part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its cloud services, the new facility joins the first facility in Melbourne in meeting the growing customer demand for scalable cloud solutions with global reach in Australia.
Since launching its first Australian cloud center late last year, IBM Cloud has added hundreds of new customers and experienced a boom across other SoftLayer facilities in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.
Building on this success, the new Sydney facility makes it easy for Australian customers, or those looking for an Australian location, to tap into IBM’s enterprise-grade offerings. It broadens data redundancy options within Australia and APAC while providing secure, scalable, and customizable infrastructure solutions for both enterprise and born-on-the-Web businesses.
New Zealand-based independent video game development studio Grinding Gear Games hosts the online action RPG “Path of Exile” in five IBM Cloud centers worldwide. For Grinding Gear Games, the broadening of the SoftLayer global network means eliminating latency and providing a reliable and enjoyable experience for end users.
“Extremely fast provisioning times and the ability to automate such provisioning allow us to treat SoftLayer’s bare-metal servers like virtual servers so that we can scale up rapidly when player numbers increase,” Chris Wilson, managing director of Grinding Gear Games, said in a statement. “SoftLayer’s free and reliable back-end connection between data centers is critical to the stable operation of our game service. As IBM Cloud expands its SoftLayer services to more countries globally, we’ll also be expanding the breadth of ‘Path of Exile,’ simply by hosting servers in each new data center.”
IBM Opens New Netherlands Cloud Data Center
The Sydney cloud center offers the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare-metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. It was built using SoftLayer’s standardized pod design and has the capacity for thousands of physical servers.
In January, IBM opened its first Mexico cloud center in Querétaro, near Mexico City. The new facility strengthens IBM Cloud’s presence in Latin America by offering data residency within the region, even more redundancy in the Americas. With industry experts predicting that Latin America will see more than 25 percent growth in the cloud-computing business within the next three years, the Mexico cloud center gives IBM an anchor in the local cloud market.
The Mexico center will support the region’s growth by providing a local cloud center for location-sensitive data and workloads closer to Mexican and Latin American customers and end users. It also broadens data redundancy options within the Americas by enabling backups that can be replicated and seamlessly integrated in any of SoftLayer’s cloud centers via its leading private network, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.
“The Mexico cloud center brings IBM Cloud’s complete portfolio to the doorsteps of local customers, who can run workloads and applications in the cloud while taking advantage of in-country data and compute services, security, high-speed connections and 24/7 support,” said Salvador Martinez Vidal, general manager of IBM Mexico.
Also in January, IBM opened its first SoftLayer cloud data center in Germany. Located in Frankfurt, the facility provides customers with a local cloud center to help them meet Germany and Europe’s strict security and data privacy regulations, improving application performance by lowering latency for local customers.
The Frankfurt facility is part of SoftLayer’s unique global network, differentiated by its network-within-a-network architecture, and offers 10G-bps connections to SoftLayer services, with only 7 milliseconds of latency from SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility and less than 330 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world.
It also complements existing European IBM Cloud facilities in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and broadens redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world by enabling backups that can be replicated and integrated in any other SoftLayer cloud data center, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.
SoftLayer’s global customer base has grown rapidly since IBM acquired the company in the summer of 2013. IBM has opened 13 new SoftLayer data centers around the world over the last 10 months, with additional locations launching by the end of this year. With each new facility, IBM Cloud builds a local team on the ground. IBM Cloud aims to triple SoftLayer technical and commercial staff in the Amsterdam area by the end of the year.