*WAITING FOR BRIEFING REQUEST IBM company SoftLayer has opened a second cloud data center in the Netherlands, located in Almere, outside of Amsterdam.
The new facility doubles SoftLayer’s capacity in the region and enhances backup and recovery options. Having two locations provides in-country options such as redundant storage and geographically isolated services.
Behind the competitive cloud industry is a lot of data center spend on the part of providers. Amazon reported AWS financials for the first time, as well as the capital-intensive nature of keeping up with user growth. Microsoft and Google are also spending billions on data centers.
Part of IBM's big cloud investments was the acquisition of SoftLayer in the summer of 2013. It followed up with pledging an initial $1.2 billion investment in cloud infrastructure in support of 15 new data centers.
IBM has opened 13 SoftLayer data centers in the last 10 months--data centers in Montreal and Australia are recent additions--and is planning more this year.IBM Cloud builds a local team on the ground with each new facility.
The second Netherlands data center is securely connected to the rest of the global SoftLayer data center footprint. In Europe, SoftLayer operates data centers in the greater London area, Paris, and Frankfurt, in addition to two 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,” said James Comfort, IBM General Manager of Cloud Services. “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."
Dutch IT and telecommunications service provider KPN is an existing customer that sells IBM cloud services built on SoftLayer infrastructure. The second Netherlands data center will allow it to expand its value added services.
“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,” said Louis Rustenhoven, director Marketing & Sales KPN Business Market.
