Alibaba cloud arm to launch Singapore data centre and headquarters
Wed 19 Aug 2015
After last month’s announcement of a $1bn dollar investment in cloud computing, Chinese e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba plans to launch a new data centre and headquarters in Singapore this September to serve its cloud customers in Southeast Asia.
Headed by its cloud computing branch Aliyun, Alibaba will look to expand into global markets over the next three years, setting up shop in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and Europe. The company said it hopes to “overtake Amazon [Web Services] in four years, whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale.”
The new Singapore site will be the second foreign facility Aliyun opens this year, and its seventh overall. Its first overseas centre launched in Silicon Valley in March. As of June the firm was delivering cloud services to 1.8mn customers.
Aliyun today announced: “When it opens next month, the centre will be networked with the company’s existing centres in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley.” The data centre will also be accompanied by a new overseas headquarters for Aliyun operations.
Although the new facility is not due to open its doors until September, Aliyun is already offering customers the opportunity to reserve “elastic” cloud services, processing power, storage and network bandwidth which can be scaled up and down depending on user demand.
Other Aliyun services will be made available after the official launch will include relational database services, server load balancing, open cache and storage solutions, and a NoSQL database service. The platform will also offer a security solution called Yundun which will provide DDoS protection, host intrusion prevention and vulnerability detection among other measures.
Aliyun, established in 2009, operates the cloud network behind Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce group, which runs an extensive range of online and mobile retail businesses. It has now extended its reach providing a suite of cloud services designed for sellers and third-party businesses who operate across Alibaba platforms.
