IBM opens first Japanese SoftLayer data centre in Tokyo
Mon 5 Jan 2015
IBM has opened the doors of its first SoftLayer cloud data centre in Tokyo, answering growing Japanese demand for local data storage.
According to IBM, its cloud business grew 600% over 2014 and the company now counts over 1000 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers in Japan. The new facility is able to accommodate thousands of servers, and offers the full range of SoftLayer services such as bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking.
IBM has said that the data centre provides 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, and offers less than 50 milliseconds of latency from the cloud data centre in Hong Kong, as well as less than 270 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer sites around the globe.
This latest SoftLayer addition forms part of IBM’s major $1.2bn data centre investment plan, following openings in Paris, Melbourne, and Hong Kong. IBM hopes that this spree will allow for increased redundancy and appease privacy and sovereignty concerns in local markets.
The new facility will benefit local businesses, as well as providing support for global customers wanting to reach locally-based users. “IBM Cloud’s global expansion of SoftLayer cloud data centres, including the new facility in Tokyo, is good for our business,” said Hiroyuki Mashita, managing director and vice president of PioneerVC Corporation.
“We are based in Japan and have clients located all over the world who use our real-time collaboration solution, which relies on SoftLayer’s robust bare metal and virtual cloud servers, services, and worldwide network to provide a low-latency connection. We plan to move some of our clients’ accounts and domestic data into the new cloud data centre in Tokyo.”
“Since we established a Singapore cloud data centre in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM SoftLayer.
“Our new cloud data centre in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world,” he added.
