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In March 2010, IBM announced that it would begin investing big time in selling and building cloud computing systems in China.
On Jan. 24, the huge American IT company made good on at least part of the promise by announcing that it will partner with Chinese Range Technology Development and the Hebei provincial bureau of industry and information to build the largest, most advanced cloud-enabled data storage center in China.
Construction on the new 330,000-square-foot enterprise-level cloud computing center in Langfang, Hebei Province, will begin in several weeks. When it is completed in 2016, it will become the largest cloud storage industry base in Asia, IBM said.
Zhou Chaonan, chairman of Range Technology, said at a news conference that the cooperation “will help the center to possess the ability to provide optimized information service outsourcing, business procedure outsourcing and disaster recovery service ability, and squeeze into global leaders in cloud storage and mobile device management.”
IBM Vice President Steven Sams told conference attendees that the data center has long been the core of IBM’s enterprise systems.
A recent IDC report indicated that the size of the data center service market in China-which was about $667.1 million in 2009-is expected to grow to more than $1.9 billion by 2016.
Last year, IBM set up an energy and public utility solution center in Beijing.
IBM already has a network of 10 such cloud-enabled data centers on six continents, connected in a grid, that comprises the company’s own enterprise cloud system. It uses the system internally and also markets the computing power as a service to various customers.