IBM has announced that SoftLayer, an IBM Company, will open a data center in London this month. It will be the latest of 15 new data centers that IBM plans to open as part of a $1.2 billion dollar global investment to strengthen and extend its cloud services in Europe and around the world.
The new facility will provide customers and their end users with SoftLayer services that meet in-country data residency requirements. It will also complement the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data center and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012, to provide European customers redundancy options within the region.
"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," said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO. "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."
One such customer is MobFox, the largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform in Europe. "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," said Julian Zehetmayr, MobFox CEO. "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."
SoftLayer services will provide solutions ideal for businesses based in London and surrounding areas. The region is a key cloud market, with customers using cloud to deploy web-centric workloads or to transform their existing operations. One third of the world's largest companies are headquartered in London and a majority of the world's largest financial institutions have operations there. Additionally, London has one of the world's largest communities for technology startups, incubators, and entrepreneurs.
The London data center will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via the company's leading private network with all SoftLayer data centers and network PoPs around the world. With these services deployed on demand, and with full remote access and control, customers will be enabled to create their ideal cloud environment —whether it be public, private, dedicated, and/or hybrid.
SoftLayer will start taking orders for the London data center in July with a special offer of up to $500.00 USD off new orders in the data center, for a limited time. More details about the discount and updates on the opening of SoftLayer's new London data center are available at www.softlayer.com/London.
This article was originally posted “IBM to Open New SoftLayer Data Center In London” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
