IBM has announced the opening of its newest SoftLayer Cloud Center in Drummondville, just outside of Montréal, Québec, Canada. At the same time, the vendor has opened a SoftLayer cloud center in Sydney, Australia. The new cloud facilities are part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud hosting services portfolio.
The new cloud center in the Montréal area in Canada is IBM’s second cloud center in the country, which follows the recent opening of the Toronto facility in August 2014. The new facility in Sydney, Australia joins Melbourne in meeting the growing customer demand for scalable cloud solutions with global reach in Australia. Since launching its first Australian cloud center in Melbourne late last year, IBM has added hundreds of new customers and experienced a boom across other SoftLayer facilities in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo.
The strategic expansion by IBM SoftLayer in Canada would allow Québec-based organizations to achieve a new level of application performance and responsiveness – by providing customers with a local facility for low-latency connections as well as the ability for in-country data redundancy in both Montréal and Toronto. The new cloud center in Sydney would broaden data redundancy options within Australia and APAC.
“As the second-largest city in Canada, Montréal is a vital center of commerce and technology,” said Marc Jones, SoftLayer’s CTO. “Canada is an important market for IBM Cloud services and this new facility will provide regional customers with the security, resiliency, and scalability for placing demanding workloads in the cloud.”
The new cloud centers are offering the full range of IBM SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. . These services can be deployed on-demand with full remote access and control through a customer Web portal or API, allowing customers to create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
