IBM has announced the opening of its first cloud hosting data center with SoftLayer in Japan, located in Tokyo. This announcement comes on the heels of recent IBM SoftLayer cloud data center launches in Melbourne and Paris and represents the next step in IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint.
The Tokyo cloud data center has capacity for thousands of physical servers and offers the full range of IBM SoftLayer cloud hosting infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via SoftLayer’s private network with all IBM SoftLayer cloud data centers and network points of presence (POPs) around the world.
With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers of the Tokyo data center can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments to deliver their services.
The data center facility in Tokyo complements other IBM SoftLayer resources located in cities within the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Melbourne and broadens data redundancy options and geographic diversity within IBM’s growing number of cloud data centers worldwide.
Data Residency
The move by IBM SoftLayer also addresses the industry’s growing concerns about data residency and privacy by offering a local Japanese facility to compute and store sensitive data that needs to remain in country.
“Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world.”
