As we’ve been reporting: IBM is launching an all-out assault on the datacenter world. They were the largest company to hold back in building and investing in data centers, and many industry insiders were scratching their heads as to why IBM waiting so long to enter the data center race.
SoftLayer’s Datacenter Design du Jour Soon to Open in London
One can speculate that it was the integration and cost of obtaining SoftLayer that gave the company the dark horse role, but one thing is now for certain: IBM is in the cloud and it’s in the cloud big time: from Hong Kong to the Amazon Basin: and now IBM announced that SoftLayer will open a London data center.
Not only will the data center continue to expand its ever-growing cloud services it will meet in-country data residency requirements, while piggy-backing on IBM London Point of Presence’s service already in place and compliment SoftLayer’s Amsterdam data center, providing redundancy options to the whole of London and parts of Europe.
The latest jewel in the IBM / SoftLayer crown will be a part of the company’s effort to expand world-wide with 15 moredatacenters, and be a part of the $1.2 billion dollar global investment to globally strengthen and extend its cloud services, and have 15,000 servers at the ready for client use.
According to Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer: “We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we’re excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers. The work these businesses are doing—the solutions and services that they are building in the cloud—is inspiring. Organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications.”
And Crosby is correct, the area is ripe with data center needs, MobFox (Europe’s largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform in Europe, is very much on board, Julian Zehetmayr, MobFox CEO, had the following to say about the need for data storage in London: “MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years. We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds. London is a key location for company like ours, operating in digital advertising space and serving global clients. We are very excited about the option of deploying SoftLayer servers directly here.”
Current SoftLayer DataCenters on Datacenters.com
The datacenter is expected to open at the end of July, and being in London – the city with some of the largest amounts of start-ups, entrepreneurs and general tech savvy companies, the SoftLayer data center is one welcome addition.
For more information on the data center click here or visit datacenters,com for all things tech and datacenter related.
